In late-ninth-century China, poetry and meditation became equated — not just metaphorically, but as two equally valid means of achieving stillness and insight. This article discusses how several strands in literary and Buddhist discourses fed into an assertion about such a unity by the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 (864–937?). One strand was the aesthet…[Read more]

2020 New England Graphic Medicine Conference
Call for Papers
MARCH 26-28, 2020
[Deadline: January 10, 2020]

Graphic Medicine is a genre, a field, a tool, a community, and a cause. It is large enough to accommodate all health and medical experiences, from that of the doctor to that of the patient – from that of a microbe to that of a p…[Read more]

Abstract
This paper argues that Ah!lam Mustaghanami’s novel Dhakirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh)
enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the
Arabic language. !e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once
translated into French as Mémoires de la chai…[Read more]

In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Free- dom, with its main offices in Paris, lhe CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and funded a worldwide network of literary journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits and other…[Read more]

Chapter 21 of The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 296-310.

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

Late 19th-century Beirut and Cairo were capitals of Arabic literary production and press
activity. A period, oft deemed a nahḍah, that witnessed the advent of the novel form or
riwāyah in Arabic, this was also the moment of intensified French and British imperial
involvement in the region, and the concomitant industrialization of Beirut’s silk…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

Abstract.
In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFren…[Read more]

Abstract
This paper argues that Ahlām Mustaghānamī’s novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair , is p…[Read more]

Published in Cairo in 1892, the first issue of Jurji Zaydan’s Arabic journal al-Hilal contained a history of the Arabic press, including a list of the journals published in Beirut in the 1870s and 1880s, when Zaydan was a young waiter and finally a Syrian Protestant College medical student and leader of the 1882 protest. Listed too are the Arabi…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Theorizations of the female subject in Arabic literary criticism have long charted debates within Western feminism. This chapter invites a reading of Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra that would attend rather to the quiet narrative aporia surrounding a reticent Zahra, the challenge her will to be “look[ed] at [as] a woman in…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Serialized over the course of 1905 in the Arabic journal al-Muqtaṭaf, Ya‘qūb Ṣarrūf’s novel Fatāt Mişr [The Girl of Egypt] was avidly read by contemporary subscribers and then soon forgotten by Arabic’s reading public. Ṣarrūf came to despise Fatāt Mişr and all of his novels, finding that the market for the genre in Arabic fell far sh…[Read more]

ABSTRACT This paper reads narrative published in the journals of 1870s Beirut in the context of an emerging bourgeois readership and argues that the significance of this archive to modern Arabic fiction has been neglected by critics. Taking the intensification of the silk trade with France following the civil war of 1860 as a point of historical…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Cultural cold war played out in Arabic from the late 1950s into the early 1970s in the
conference halls, hotel lobbies, cafes, bars, magazine offices, publishing houses, kiosks,
and streets of Beirut and Cairo. Berlin, Paris, Tashkent, Khartoum, London, Baghdad1,
and Tunis all have their place in this built landscape of cultural cold…[Read more]