The Egyptian Surrealist Art et Liberté group was recuperated in two exhibitions beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2018. The larger exhibition by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath emphasizes the group’s internationalism and the complexity of its engagement with various forms of Surrealism, including André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s 1938 manif…[Read more]

This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[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]

Three faculty members from UMass Boston’s English Department—a team responsible for the department’s M.A. course on the Teaching of Literature and for the training of novice teachers of literature—examine the complex process of reading texts that they teach as if they are encountering them as their students do, for the first time. Accepting the p…[Read more]

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]