Download Sabry Hafez, Qatar University and The School of Oriental and

Literature Symposium
Aesthetics, New Directions and Innovations
in Literature and Culture
February 21-22, 2010
Organized by the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar University and cosponsored by Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service in Qatar
The bi-annual Literature Symposium organized by the Department of English Literature and
Linguistics at Qatar University, Mapping the New: Aesthetics, New Directions and Innovations in
Literature and Culture. The keynote speakers include Professor David Damrosch, Harvard
University and Professor Sabry Hafez, SAOS and Qatar University.
The Symposium is aimed to attract scholars both from the Middle East and from the global
community. The Symposium is focused around the idea of novelty and interdisciplinary
approaches to ‘The New’ – in literature, theory, culture, law and related fields.
This Symposium will explore the state of literature and culture in this transitional moment.
Across two days scholars will explore related themes, concepts and practices of ‘The New’ in a
series of related and inter-connected conversations, speeches and panels. The current global
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crisis has resulted in financial stagnation and dwindling production as the specter of recession
haunts the international economy. Yet ironically this economic crisis is matched by exuberance
in the artistic and literary fields of production, which overflow with new experiments and
innovations.
Both art and literature have been explicating and heralding many of capitalism’s difficulties and
ailments, long before the market data confirmed a collapse. Literature, literary criticism and
literary theory, have long been involved in ideological and aesthetic repudiation of hegemonic
social forms that were embraced as orthodoxy only two or three decades ago. The politics of
unbridled market-capitalism so recently discredited as unsustainable at the very least have long
been rejected by writers and critics, who sought new discourses and visions, long before the G8
or the hastily formed G20 searched for one.
This symposium aims to bring together scholars from the region and the wider Arab world with
international scholars to study the new literature of the Arab world and elsewhere. The ‘new’
does not merely transform traditional genres; the internet has given rise to a proliferation of
new discourses which urgently require theoretical inquiry. This other space or the other of
literature has produced new writings and hybrid genres situated between the virtual and the
material, the novel and the blog; between national languages and global ones. We seek to
elucidate the features of this new literature, to investigate its directions, and chart its poetics
and aesthetics. Our main question is: does the ‘new’ imply a more fundamental break than the
periodic alterations determined by the ongoing imperative of stylistic innovation
I. Program:
Sunday, 21st February
8.00 am
Welcome and opening remarks:
Moneera Al- Ghadeer (Qatar University)
8.15 am
Session 1: Hacking the Canon: The Virtual in Literature
Chair: Rebecca Barr (Qatar University)
Hacking the Canon: Arabic Writing in the Virtual Age
Tarek El-Ariss (The University of Texas at Austin)
Globalization and e-Arabic in the “new literary work”
Anissa Daoudi (University of Durham)
The "New" in Arabic Films
Nezar Andary (Zayed University)
9.45 am
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Coffee
10.00 am
Session 2: Contemporary Poetry Between Tradition and Experimentation
Chair: Abdulaziz Al Mutawa (Qatar University)
Mapping the "New" in Contemporary North American Poetry: D.A. Powell,
Tracie Morris, and M. Norbese Philip
Lisa Sewell (Villanova University)
Cultural Reading and Orphism in Muhammad ‘Abd-al Hayy’s Poetry
Teirab AshShareef (American University of Sharjah)
11.15 am
Keynote Address:
David Damrosch (Harvard University)
Making It New: Global Modernisms, 1900-2050
Introduced by Moneera Al-Ghadeer
12.15 pm
Lunch
1.15 pm
Session 3: Translational and Migrant Identities
Chair: Moneera Al- Ghadeer (Qatar University)
Diaspora Identities and Identity as Translation
Timothy Weiss (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Imperial Narcissism and post 9/11 NYC
Huma Ibrahim (Qatar University)
Arab American Literature in the U.S after 9/11
Alia Yunis (Zayed University)
2.45 pm
Novel Reading: Leila Aboulela and Alia Yunis
Introduced by Sabry Hafez
3:45 pm
Bus Departs to Al-Zuhoor
7:00 pm
Depart Al-Zuhoor to Al-Sharq Village
7:30 pm
Dinner at Al-Sharq Village
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Monday, 22nd February
8:00 am
Session 4: Narratives of the New
Chair: Amira El Zein (Georgetown University School of Foreign Service)
In the Beginning There Was Oil; Or, There Goes the Neighborhood
Fares Alsuwaidi (Harvard University)
Mapping the New in Khoury’s Representation of Beirut
Sabah Ghandour (University of Balamand)
Feminism and Postmodernism in Gulf Women’s Literature: an inquiry into
Fawziyya S. al-Sālim’s Novels
Ishaq Tijani (American University of Sharjah)
9.30 am
Coffee
9.45 am
Session 5: The New Spectacle in Theater
Chair: Amira Sonbol (Georgetown University School of Foreign Service)
Dramatist Valere Novarina: Writing (French) Texts for Actors of the Impossible
Roger Daniel Bensky (Georgetown University School of Foreign Service)
Rising Up from the Underground: New Directions in Yemeni Theatre
Katherine Hennessey (The Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies)
11.00 am
Keynote address:
Sabry Hafez (Qatar University and The School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London)
The New Poetics of the Closed Horizon: The Transformation of the City and
the Novel in Egypt since 1990
Introduced By Sara Al-Mohannadi
12.00 noon
Lunch
1.00 pm
Poetry Reading: Lisa Sewell
Introduced by Moneera Al-Ghadeer
2:00 pm
Optional: Visit to Museum of Islamic Art---Bus Departs to Al-Zuhoor
6:30 pm
Depart Al- Zuhoor to Souq Waqif and Isfahan Gardens restaurant
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7:00 pm
Tour of Souq Waqif
8:00 pm
Dinner at Isfahan Gardens restaurant
10:30 pm
Bus departs to Al-Zuhoor
II. Abstracts:
Session 1: Hacking the Canon: The Virtual in Literature
Tarek El-Ariss, PhD,The University of Texas at Austin
Hacking the Canon: Arabic Writing in the Virtual Age
In the age of the Internet, satellite TV, and the circulation of goods beyond national and
linguistic barriers, the cultural and textual spectrum of Arabic literature is witnessing an
unprecedented expansion. Emerging from liminal spaces at the intersection of the material and
the virtual, the novel and the blog, and Arabic and English, new Arabic writings today require a
thoroughly comparative examination and theorization. While modernist works from the 1950s
and 1960s such as Son’allah Ibrahim’s That Smell could not be read without the investigation of
the existentialist intertext and Camus’s The Stranger especially, works by young Egyptian, Saudi,
and other Arab authors could not be read either without the investigation of references to
classical and modern Arabic literature, Hollywood films and TV series, popular blogs and
internet sites, and such global literary hits as The Alchemist and The Da Vinci Code.
Engaging with yet moving beyond postcolonial debates on hybridity and syncretism that either
celebrate these new writings or relegate them to globalization’s neocolonial dynamics, I
examine representations of technological and cultural anxiety, and the constant negotiation of
linguistic boundaries at work in these new texts. Specifically, I examine the ways in which these
anxieties shape the works’ incorporation and manipulation of the Arabic literary canon, from
the pre-Islamic odes, to the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idriss. Starting with an
overview of these new writings, I focus on works by Saudi authors Rajaa Alsanea and Seba alHerz, and the Egyptian author Ahmed Alaidy and examine the ways in which they manipulate
and redefine the Arabic literary canon. While Alsanea displaces the genre of the novel,
fantasizing its origin in technology as a series of transcribed emails, Seba al-Herz (which is the
author’s penname) appropriates the structure of anonymity from the Arabian Nights and stages
the body as a site of writing for the Arabic literary genres of storytelling and poetry. In Being
Abbas Al-Abd, Ahmed Alaidy introduces the concept of “hacking,” appropriated from technolanguage, in order to describe an infiltration and permanent contamination of the genre of the
novel, effecting thereby a radical critique of the project of Arabic literary modernity.
Elaborating on critical studies by Moneera Al-Ghadeer, Sabry Hafez, Wail Hassan, Muhsin alMusawi, and others, I argue that any theoretical approach that will do justice to these new
texts ought to investigate the ways in which these works stage their own theoretical
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articulations at the level of genre, language, and cultural context. Furthermore, comparative
readings of this new literature ought to incorporate not only the recognizable instances of
Western literature and culture, but also the relation to classical and modern Arabic literature
on the one hand, and the encounter with technology, on the other, both considered defining
frameworks for understanding these new writings.
Anissa Daoudi, University of Durham
Globalization and e-Arabic in the “new literary work”
The rapid growth of the internet has resulted in a global growth of computer-mediated
communication (CMC), leading to changes in how language is being used (e.g., Crystal, 2004;
Danet & Herring, 2007). This change is present in our daily use of language and has now made
its way into literature, making the debate on whether or not colloquial can be included to
maintain the naturalness and realism of the discourse an old fashioned argument The internet
has made what once was considered as “unconceivable” possible. This is a new phenomenon
that started to spread over the Arab world, appearing in very conservative and moderate Arab
countries alike, including Saudi Arabia, where a few publications appeared such as Rajaa
Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh. The language used in the text is a mixture of Modern Standard Arabic,
Saudi dialect, Lebanese dialect, Arabic-English and e-Arabic. The latter, is the language that
mixes, borrows and adapts, uses numbers, Roman letters, Arabic script characters, emoticons
and words from other languages. Other publications e.g. Ruz bi laban li shakhsain ‫رز بلبن‬
‫( لشخصين‬2008) and Ayza atgawiz‫( عايزة أتجوز‬2008) employ language from blogs and emails.
Furthermore, the latest novel by Ahlam Mosteghanemi Nessyane Com ‫ نسيان‬is another
example where e-Arabic is used. This paper will discuss the “new literature” and will
comparatively analyze the above- mentioned novels, focusing on the use of e-Arabic by these
writers.
Nezar Andary, Zayed University
The “New” in Arabic Films
Three Gulf Film Festivals, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai displayed what can be categorized as
new Arabic films. My presentation argues that in Arab films, and in those from other Third
World regions, a different type of resistance cinema is emerging. I will focus on Palestinian
Cinema and show that certain directors such as Elia Suleiman or Raed Andoni attempt to
interiorize resistance and to avoid ghettoization both aesthetical and political. How do these
films represent the recent developments? Do they connect to recent novels or current
intellectual trends? I argued elsewhere that most Arab cinematic production was about
mourning and almost cathartic, while in this paper I want to explore the innovative creative
methods adapted by directors and writers. These filmmakers operate syncretically on their
influences in a manner closer to the appropriation of shots, tones, moments, framings, and
isolated characters than to the transfer of complete aesthetic systems. Nevertheless, there is a
solitary and bitter resistance; for example, in the Moroccan film, “The Man Who Sold the World
“or the Tunisian film, “Buried Secrets,” there is a different aesthetic of allegory. Between these
developing aesthetics of the interior in Palestinian film and new allegories, my paper will
analyze possible new ways of exploring contemporary Arab films.
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Session 2: Contemporary Poetry Between Tradition and Experimentation
Lisa Sewell, Villanova University
Mapping the “New” in Contemporary North American Poetry: D.A. Powell, Tracie Morris, and
M. Norbese Philip
During the first decade of the 21st century, American and Canadian poets have begun to
develop aesthetic strategies that question and address the ostensible division in the field of
contemporary poetry between the avant-garde and the mainstream. On one side of the divide,
Language Writing foregrounds the material, referential and reflexive aspects of language and
promotes a collaborative notion of reading, purging the poem of origin, narrative voice and
affect, and calling “upon the reader to be actively involved in the process of constituting [the
text’s] meaning” (Bernstein 233). On the other, the syntactically regularized, univocal “lyric”
poetry of the mainstream is considered naive to its own ideological position, and treats
language as a transparent medium for expression.
In this presentation, I will limit my remarks to the work of three North American poets—DA
Powell, Tracie Morris and M. Norbese Philip—I will demonstrate the ways that the line between
tradition and experimentation is no longer easy to draw. All of these poets are interested in the
de-centered subject, the materiality of language, and the social and linguistic possibilities of
formal experimentation, but are also firmly committed to the lyric and to the idea that popular
culture, theory and politics all have a place in lyric poetry. Briefly presenting examples from
their work, I will show that this newly emergent American poetry is not merely stylistically
innovative, but articulates and enacts a resistant poetics, engaging what Levinas has called
“radical alterity” that challenges the binary of “the one” and “the other,” and gestures toward
what “can never be adequately thought” (Wyschogrod). Formally and thematically, these
writers draw on multiple and contradictory traditions to develop their own unique and resistant
aesthetics, disrupting hierarchies of the written over the spoken (Tracie Morris), crossing the
boundaries that determine sexuality and gender (DA Powell), and those between silence and
speech, self and other, colonizer and colonized (M. Norbese Philip).
Teirab AshShareef, American University of Sharjah
A New Sudanese Culturalist Poetics: Orphism in the Poetry of Jam‘at al-Ghaba wa-al-Sahra’
(The Jungle and the Desert Group)
A group of three young Sudanese poets in the 1960’s responded to the cultural stimulus of
ethnic multiplicity in their homeland by envisioning a new culturalist poetics of Sudanese
identity. The group named themselves “Jama‘at al-Ghaba wa-al-Sahra’” (The Jungle and the
Desert Group). In their culturalist poetics of identity, these poets interpreted Sudanese culture
as a hybrid culture which is an amalgam of three components: Arab, Islamic and African. The
poet Muhammad ‘Abdul-Hayy was a leading member of the group and this paper analyzes his
long poem, Hayat wa-Mawt al-Shaykh Isma‘il Sahib al-Rabbabah (The Life and Death of alShaykh Isma‘il, the Fiddler) in the context of the New poetics of the Jungle and the Desert
Group.
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The paper merges two critical theories: first, the Phenomenological Criticism of the Geneva
School, especially that of Georges Poulet, and second, “Culturalist Criticism,” which is
essentially my own. Using Poulet’s theory, ‘Abdul-Hayy’s poetry is viewed as an expression of
an individual consciousness representing a unique vision which is epistemologically different
from that of another poet. Using the second interpretive strategy, “Culturalist Criticism,” I push
Phenomenological Criticism further to probe into the poet’s consciousness in order to discover
the patterns of the creative engagement of his poetic vision with his culture as manifested in
the text.
To broaden the scope of “the new” in the poetry of this group further, the paper proposes two
more arguments. First, by envisioning a cultural pluralist poetics of inclusion that engulfs the
Sudanese margin, the African component, this Sudanese group of poets may be a precursor of
Postmodernism at a time when Modernism in general, and Arabic Modernism in particular,
with its monist vision, was at its peak. Second, the use of this group’s concept of hybridity
predates the rise of Post-colonial literature, especially if we bear in mind that these poets were
writing only seven or eight years after the independence of the Sudan in 1956.
Keynote Address 1
David Damrosch, Harvard University
Making It New: Global Modernisms, 1900-2050
A full map of modernism would reveal that it was never a purely Western European and North
American phenomenon, as an opening look at an important early Egyptian manifesto will show.
Nor has modernism been merely a matter of attitudes toward the past, or toward language and
literary style, crucial though these aspects are. Modernisms around the globe have developed
in close connection with modernity at large, and particularly with the technological advances
that produce new media, which simultaneously threaten the extinction of literature and offer it
the possibility of new life. Both promise and threat can be illustrated through a look at the state
of Middle Eastern literature in 2050, a time when all the evidence shows reading – when done
at all – losing its independent integrity and becoming absorbed within the realms of the visual
and the aural. From this perspective, we can see crucial bridging activities by such
contemporary artists as the Serbian experimentalist Milorad Pavić, the Turkish novelist
and now museum-builder Orhan Pamuk, the Palestinian installation artist Emily Jacir, and the
Lebanese-Canadian hip-hop artist K-Maro, who collectively are creating new modes of
envisioning our past and future modernities alike.
Session 3: Translational and Migrant Identities
Timothy Weiss, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Diaspora Identities and Identity as Translation
With reference to the post-World War Two dismantling of European empires, the global
phenomenon of immigration in the second half of the twentieth century, and new reflections
on diaspora identities that began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper will consider the
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concept of identity in relation to translation. The term translational identity is proposed to
describe the interaction or process by which an individual learns new languages, adapts to new
cultures, negotiates his/her sense of personhood, and, in short, finds a way in today’s
increasingly multicultural and multilingual societies. All communicative entities and identities
are translational in that they undergo continual adjustment and accrue new aspects through
discursive interactions, which necessarily involve processes of interpretation and re-expression.
For the immigrant, these processes come into the foreground. The construction of identity in a
new culture, society or place involves a movement across resistances, against the grain, so to
speak; even so, it is only through acts of translation of one’s identity that an individual can
move from one language/culture (call it the native language/culture) to another
language/culture (the new or the foreign location). The paper will consider the notion of
translational identity in comparison and contrast with other prominent descriptions of diaspora
identities such as “living in-between,” hybridity, new ethnicities, and other expressions of
cultural diversity and difference.
Huma Ibrahim, Qatar University
Imperial Narcissism and post 9/11 NYC
Since Jean Paul Sartre wrote the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth during the
beginning of the decline of the “golden age” of French imperialism, and since the US is in a
similar position today it may be instructive to look more closely at his critique. He gives several
clues about the narcissistic temperament endemic within an imperial culture. The process of
imperialism/colonialism gave rise to this narcissism gradually. Sartre expounds on a generation
of "native" collaborators and the French imperial assumption that Africa and some “useful”
Africans could be allowed to function as “echoes” of Europeans and European high culture. The
conception of the raison d' etre of the formulation of the colonial's echo and its role in the
colonial system was fairly complex. The echo was a native who collaborated with the colonial
for gains that compromised his position with his countrymen and the agenda of resistance
against colonialism. (The echo was of great relevance to colonials because by definition, an
echo was not important as a physical entity but rather in its function. An echo resided in the
realm of the nonhuman and it functioned only as amplification and imitation of the new
masters. It represented human voices but remained ghostly. The echo's entire existence was
resident only in a sound wave! An echo would be the most self authenticating instrument
developed by colonialism for it popularized and systematically perpetuated imperial agendas
and ideologies. Thus what the echo did in a colony was denigrate itself and its own people,
while magnifying the position and role of its generator, the colonial. At “home,” in the
metropolis, there was a homogeneity and nationalistic fervor in these echoes. These echoes
did not constitute the majority in the colonial territories. However, similar sorts of confusion
about the question of national loyalty can be seen in the America of today in regard to its
minorities. I will explore the role of minorities in the US since they are being explicitly asked to
pander to imperial narcissism as it was exhibited in NYC after September 11. What is of crucial
importance to the discussion is that minorities in the US are asked to take sides against their
own or their parents’ country of origin since that is what imperial narcissism compels peripheral
cultures to do.
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Alia Yunis, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi
Arab American Literature in the U.S after 9/11
This paper discusses the concerns and questions which Arab American writers face today in
writing and publishing their works. Arab American literature has existed for as long as Arabs
have in America, which is to say for decades. Looking at previous publications in the past few
years, I will give an overview of the history and concerns of Arab American literature, a new and
growing literary category which in reality a field that has a history the predates 9-11 by more
than 60 years. However, there is no denying that post-9/11 writing demonstrates a new Arab
American literature that cannot be written out of context of current perceptions of Islam and
Arabs. I will also touch on how the misconceptions, misinformation and lack of knowledge of
Islam, Arabs, and the Middle East affect the creative process.
Session 4: Narratives of the New
Fares Alsuwaidi, Harvard University
In the Beginning There Was Oil; Or, There Goes the Neighborhood
This paper problematizes the idea of “the new as radical break” within the context of the GCC
through a contrapuntal ideology critique of the work of Abd al-Rahman Munif and the Emirati
cartoon series Freej and Sha‘biyat al-Cartoon.
It argues that a narrative of the new—“in the beginning there was oil,” in this case—loses its
explanatory power when all further developments are subsumed under its primary proposition,
making any critical engagement with it—creative or otherwise—appear at best marginal, at
worst reactionary, and in any case to be accommodated in the ambiguous and contradictory
interstices of “tradition” and “modernity.”
No less a writer than Abd al-Rahman Munif, whose Cities of Salt, though quite prescient of the
kind of change that would ensue in the Gulf, subscribed to such a narrative, as evinced in an
interview collected in Democracy now, democracy always. And yet, it is precisely through the
novel, as site of a subjective unfolding stunted by overwhelming change and extinguished
agency in the face of—for lack of a better word—“development,” that a critique of “radical
novelty” can be elaborated and extrapolated to comment meaningfully upon a virtual explosion
of new creative media and discourses in the Gulf, of which the two Emirati cartoon series are
emblematic for their sheer ubiquity and arguably problematic success.
Sabah Ghandour , Associate Professor, University of Balamand, Lebanon
Mapping the New in Khoury’s Representation of Beirut
I will investigate the new developments in approaching the city as a physical entity and as a
mode of representation in literature. I will focus specifically on Beirut in the works of the
Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, in particular, his novel Yalo. The first part of my paper addresses
the various depictions of the city in Khoury’s novels. It moves from Gates of the City with
its abstract and symbolic function to more complex yet pragmatic representation where
destruction and devastation permeate the space of Little Mountain and The Journey of Little
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Gandhi.
In mapping out the new in Khoury’s work, we notice that the city in his later production
emerges as a character in its own right. Beirut turns into a character in motion as the narrator
in Gandhi tells us, “You stay where you are and Beirut travels… and the world circle[s] around
us. Everything around us has changed and we have changed.” This intricate relationship
between the city and its inhabitants is further exemplified in Yalo where we observe the city in
all its developments, changes, diversity, and cynicism. Beirut becomes charged with many
significations designating various times and spaces. Forced by the authorities to write down his
confessions, Yalo partially narrates the history of the city and its displaced minorities.
Ishaq Tijani, American University of Sharjah
Feminism and Postmodernism in Gulf Women’s Literature: an inquiry into Fawziyya S. alSālim’s Novels”
In terms of reading feminist and postmodernist theories and ideologies in literature in 21 st
century Arabian Gulf society, the Kuwaiti woman writer Fawziyya Shuwaysh al-Sālim (b. 1949) is
becoming a leading figure. Four of her novels will be the focus of this presentation. On the one
hand, I want to investigate how the author has employed ‘irony’ as a feminist narrative strategy
through which she does not just reproduce the masculinist literary discourse, but demonstrably
works hard to subvert the Arabian patriarchal social order. This feature is evident in her first
two novels, al-Shams madhbūh#a wa-l-layl mah#būs (1997) and al-Nuwākhidha (1998), both
representing the ‘invisible’/‘feminine’ phase of feminism. Whereas the narrative strategies
employed in these novels are apparently conventional and their major women characters are
overtly stereotypical, some of the women’s actions serve to undermine patriarchal authority.
With their publication in 2000 and 2003, respectively, both Muzūn and
, on
the other hand, signal the inception of a new trend of postmodernist—‘visible’, radical and
‘deconstructionist’—feminism in Kuwaiti/Gulf women’s cultural productions. Stylistically
innovative, these two texts freely utilize present-day linguistic vulgarism and postmodernist
narrative strategies in order to explore certain feminist discourses. This paper concludes by
showing how al-Sālim arguably engages the hegemonic Western feminist discourse—on issues
such as love and sexuality, femininity and immanence, abortion, mothering, and
‘clitoridectomy’— while at the same time she provides an ‘Islamic-feminist’ alternative
conceptualizations.
Session 5: The New Spectacle in Film and Theater
Roger Daniel Bensky, Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar
Dramatist Valere Novarina: Writing (French) Texts For Actors Of The Impossible
As suggested in the invitational message to this conference on Mapping The New in Literature
and Culture, an avant-garde brigade of writers and artists in all expressive genres have
anticipated the disintegration of dominant modes of thought, language and cultural norms
which one may observe today, mainly (but not exclusively) in Western capitalistic societies.
However, what is often most curious is to see how certain proponents of radically
insurrectional art forms are being promoted by the official agencies of these societies which, in
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all logic, should wish to discourage and neutralize them. This is eminently the case with French
dramatist and painter Valere Novarina.
In parallel fashion to the immediate post WW 11 trajectories of so-called Absurdists Samuel
Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, moving from shabby obscurity to fame and plenty both in France
and soon world-wide within a period of twenty-odd years, Valere Novarina, some forty years
later, has begun to ascend a similar path of official consecration, with works performed at both
the Comedie Francaise and the famous Festival d’Avignon, in anticipation of an imminent tour
of bilingual performances in the United States, which is the beginning of his dissemination
internationally.
However, whereas the so-called rebellion against normative speech in the worlds of Ionesco
and Beckett has long-since been tamed and defanged by audiences and academics, the
language of Novarina, inspired by the most visionary elements of Surrealism and especially by
the incendiary writings of Antonin Artaud, who rejected the very foundations of Western
civilization, involves such extraordinary inventions and distortions that it constitutes what can
only be called a constant kenotic deconstruction, ie. a total draining away or emptying-out of
meaning, whose stated purpose ( in rare moments of intellectual coherence ) is the desire to
see an actor walk on stage offering his own dead body at arm’s length to the savage ogre of
language before a befuddled and quasi-hallucinated audience. By actually performing some of
these texts as illustration of my commentaries, I will attempt to share this singular ontological
insurrection through the medium of theatric texts with Conference participants at Qatar
University.
Katherine Hennessey, The Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies
Rising Up from the Underground: New Directions in Yemeni Theatre
On October 17th, 2009, a theatre troupe from the city of Aden took to the stage in Yemen’s
capital city, Sana’a. They performed, in Arabic, an adaptation of a German musical originally
entitled Linie 1. The German play portrayed a young woman’s desperate search for her
boyfriend on the underground train lines in Berlin, while in the Arabic adaptation, Mak Nazl, a
girl from a Yemeni village travels to Aden to find the husband who has abandoned her after a
“tourist marriage.”
In each of these two plays, the protagonist’s passing encounters with a wide variety of other
characters, from sinister to sympathetic, lead her to a deeper understanding of her society and
her place within it. Yet here the similarities end. Linie 1 was composed and staged in a country
with a historic theatrical tradition, for audiences with a comfortable familiarity with the genre
of musical theatre. Mak Nazl, conversely, was performed in a country with virtually no
established theatrical tradition and which, in fact, has long viewed professional theatre with a
mixture of disdain and suspicion.
My presentation will therefore examine the many ways in which “Mak Nazl” represents a
groundbreaking development for Yemeni actors and Yemeni audiences alike. It will examine
the origins and pioneering evolution of this particular theatre group, Khaleej Aden, and the
unique socio-political space opened up by the play’s courageous criticism of Yemeni social
problems. Above all, I will focus upon these two interrelated questions: how does this
adaptation act as a fundamentally “new” text, with respect to its German prototype, and how
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does such a performance both represent and embody artistic innovation, within the framework
of a traditional culture that has proved more resistant to change than any other in the Arab
world?
Keynote Address 2
Sabry Hafez, Qatar University and The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London
The New Poetics of the Closed Horizon: The Transformation of the City and the Novel in Egypt
Since 1990
The Arabic novel has undergone major changes in the last two decades, not only in terms of
theme, setting, characterization and literary technique, but also in the range of authors, the
variety of represented outlooks, the social and cultural backgrounds of these writers and their
distinct understandings of reality and narrative. These changes constitute a radical departure
from the established norms and conventions of narrative discourse and present an alarming
insight into Arabic culture and psyche, even if they have yet to be subjected to detailed critical
scrutiny.
The aims of this paper are first to introduce the work of the new wave of young Arab novelists
who started publishing in the 1990s and have subsequently become widely known among Arab
literary circles as the 1990s generation. Secondly, to outline the context in which they emerged,
articulate their vision and consider the changes their cumulative work has introduced into
Arabic narrative discourse. Finally, we will identify whether these young writers represent an
epistemological or an aesthetic break with previous traditional narrative discourse, and if so,
locate this break within the socio-cultural context from which it emerged. Hence the paper also
deals with the social, economic and political dimensions of that context, as well as with the
geography of the city. The Urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, “the city and the urban
environment represent man’s most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt
to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But if the city is the world which
man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and
without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.”
The arrival of the new generation of writers on the cultural scene coincided with major changes
to the city of Cairo, and this change left its indelible mark on the novel of the 1990s. In this
respect, the paper studies the interaction between the urban changes that took place in Cairo
in the last four decades, the kind of ‘self’ that this change produced, and the transformation of
the new texts which emerged from this changing city.
III. Conference Participants (in alphabetical order)
Leila Aboulela is the Sudanese-born author of, The Translator, a New York Times Notable Book
of the Year and Minaret – both novels were long listed for the Orange Prize and IMPAC Dublin
Award. She was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "The
Museum" included in her collection of short stories Coloured Lights. BBC Radio has adapted her
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work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays including The Mystic Life and the
historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. Leila’s work has been translated into 12 languages.
Fares Alsuwaidi is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is
currently at work on his dissertation, titled "The Arabic Desert Novel and the Reconfiguration of
Novelistic Space."
Nezar Andary is an Assistant Professor of Film and Literature at Zayed University. His
dissertation focused on the rewriting of Arab history in film and literature. Currently, he is
curating the Anasy documentary festival and working on publishing articles on the playwright
Saadallah Wannus and the Moroccan writer, Bin Salim Hamiesh.
Teirab AshShareef is on the faculty of Arabic and Translation Studies at the American University
of Sharjah, UAE. Before coming to the AUS, he taught at the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, the American University of Cairo, University of California, Santa Barbara and
Georgia State University in Atlanta. He has a Ph. D. in Arabic Literature, with a double minor in
English Literature and Comparative Literature, from Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr.
AshShareef’s research interests are: the Arabic modernist lyric, Arabic poetry and Poetics (both
classical and modern), Arabic folk/oral poetry, comparative poetics, critical theory and history,
Arab-Islamic thought/cultural criticism (both classical and modern) and Islam and modernity.
He has published chapters in books and articles in scholarly journals such as International
Journal of Middle East Studies, Oral Tradition, and Literature East and West. He has also given
numerous presentations at the conferences of the Middle East Studies Association of North
America on the above topics. He has a forthcoming book on Sudanese folk poetry entitled, Bani
Halba Folk Poetry: The Poetics of Ethno-cultural Identity.” His major research and translation
projects are: a book on Adunis (‘Ali Ahmad Sa‘id) entitled, Critical Culturalism: The Poetics of
Adunis, a translation of Adunis’ volume of poetry al-Masrah wa-al-Maraya (The Stage and the
Mirrors) into English, and a translation of The Sonnets of William Shakespeare into Arabic.
Roger Bensky has spent four decades writing about and giving papers on theatric activity. He
gained his Doctorat de l’Universite de Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle and has Diplomas from the
Universite du Theatre des Nations in Paris. He taught at the Department of Foreign Languages,
University of Kentucky in Lexington and has been at the Department of French (currently Full
Professor) of Georgetown University in Washington DC since 1966.He has been assigned to
SFS/Q since August 2009. Among his theatrical credits are being creator and director of an
Intercultural Festival of Performing Arts in fifteen languages for the Bicentennial of Georgetown
University and artistic director of the world premiere of an original play by Ivorian writer
Amadou Kone. Professor Bensky has authored four books, written in French and published in
France. He has been a Featured Participant in three memorable colloquia at world-famous
Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La Salle in Normandy, France
David Damrosch was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
until 2009, where he taught since receiving his degree from Yale in 1980. In 2009 he became
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the chair of The Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past
president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and directed the 2009 ACLA
annual meeting, held at Harvard. He has written widely on world literature from antiquity to
the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth
of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What Is
World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of
Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2008) He is the general editor of the sixvolume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World
Literature (2009), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook In Comparative Literature: From
The European Enlightenment To The Global Present (2009). Current research projects include a
cultural history of the conquest of Mexico and its colonial aftermath, and a book on the role of
global scripts in the formation of national literatures.
Anissa Daoudi is Research Associate at Durham University, School of Modern Languages and
Cultures. She is currently working on a project on the impacts of globalization on Arabic
language in general and on Arabic dialects in particular. She is analyzing a 15 million word
corpus from Arabic websites (both in the Modern Arabic and the Vernacular) looking for
Information Technology related words, collocations and metaphors. Prior to that she worked
on a PhD project researching the strategies Arab learners of English use to decode and encode
idioms with particular reference to bilingual dictionaries (Arabic-English-Arabic). The project is
being published as a monograph by Peter Lang Publishers (2010). She is also currently working
on a second monograph on Arab culture under the pressure of globalization. She has published
papers in numerous international journals and contributed chapters to books.
Tarek El-Ariss (PhD, Cornell 2004) is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies in the Department of
Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches and publishes on
contemporary Arabic literature, film, and media; Arabic popular culture and new literary
genres; and Arabic travel writing. His current book project examines literary representations of
the Arab encounter with the West in the modern age.
Sabah Ghandour is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the
Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Balamand, Lebanon. Dr.
Ghandour graduated with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at
Los Angeles (UCLA). She taught for many years in the United States at Rhodes College and the
University of Pennsylvania before she moved to Lebanon. She has published several academic
works including chapters and articles in edited books and professional journals on
contemporary Arabic and comparative literature, and the Lebanese novel.
Sabry Hafez is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of English
Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University. He is an eminent academic and literary critic with
an impressive publication record in Arabic (20 books) and English (13 books). His most recent
book, The Quest for Identities, was selected by Choice Magazine, the journal of the American
Libraries Association, as an outstanding academic title for 2009. Before joining Qatar University
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in 2009, Professor Hafez had a long academic career that took him to America: Harvard
University, UCLA, and Europe: Oxford University, Edinburgh University, Stockholm University,
and the University of London, where he has been Professor of Comparative Literature for the
last 15 years. In addition Professor Hafez is the editor of the on-line Arabic monthly, Al-Kalimah,
a journal for contemporary Arabic culture and thought. Apart from his numerous scholarly
publications, he has been invited as keynote speaker to many international conferences, won
several research grants, and supervised 30 doctoral students who obtained their PhDs from the
University of London.
Katherine Hennessey’s Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame was on the subject of Ancient
Greek Tragedy and Irish Epic in Contemporary Irish Theatre. She has been the recipient of
numerous fellowships, including two Fulbright grants; a Beinecke grant for graduate study; a
Presidential Fellowship from Notre Dame; a Tobin Fellowship from Notre Dame’s Nanovic
Institute; and a Mellon Fellowship to study Italian Paleography at the Getty Research Center in
Los Angeles. She was Assistant Professor in the English Department of Bethlehem University on
the West Bank, and during her time in the Holy Land she was also professor of Italian at the
Pontifical Institute of Notre Dame in East Jerusalem. Dr. Hennessey joined the Yemen College of
Middle Eastern Studies in Sana’a in the fall of 2009, as Visiting Professor in the program in
Contemporary Middle Eastern Studies where she developed a new course on the literature of
the Middle East, designed especially for foreign students studying Arabic at the College.
Huma Ibrahim is a postcolonial literature and theory specialist. She began her work on the
prominent South African woman writer, Bessie Head and published her own seminal work,
Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile, followed by her edited collection, Emerging
Perspectives on Bessie Head. Her book, The Epistemology of Colonial/Postcolonial Violence:
September 11, 2001, is in press right now. She is working on two other books dear to her
concerns about women, The Other Body: Sexuality Silence Spectacle and Punjabi Weave. She is
currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Qatar
University.
Lisa Sewell was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, New York and Tufts
Universities. She is the author of two books of poems: The Way Out (Alice James Books 1998)
and Name Withheld (Four Way Books 2006), and a chapbook, Long Corridor (Seven Kitchens
Press 2009) which won the 2008 Keystone Chapbook contest. She is also co-editor, with Claudia
Rankine, of two collections of essays: American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics
(Wesleyan 2007) and American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Between Lyric and Language,
vol. 2, which is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She has received grants and
awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown and held residencies at the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Fundacion Valparaiso and
The Tyrone Guthrie Center. Recent work is currently appearing or forthcoming in American
Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, New Letters, Tampa Review, Laurel Review, The
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Journal and Colorado Review. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing and
American literature in the English department at Villanova University.
Olatunbosun Ishaq Tijani is Assistant Professor at the Department of Arabic and Translation
Studies, American University of Sharjah, UAE. He holds BA and MA degrees in Arabic language
and literature (University of Ibadan, Nigeria), and a PhD in modern Arabic literature (University
of Edinburgh, UK, 2005). He is the author of Male Domination, Female Revolt: Race, Class, and
Gender in Kuwaiti Women’s Fiction (Brill, 2009) and several articles in refereed journals,
including the Journal of Arabic Literature (JAL). His research interests include classical and
modern Arabic literature, Gulf women’s literature, and the Arabic literature of Sub-Saharan
Africa.
Timothy Weiss is a Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. His books include Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia (University of
Toronto Press, 2004), English and Globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland
China (co-edited with Kwok-kan Tam; Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2004), and On the
Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). In the USA
he has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maine. He
has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia, West Africa (1975-’77), and a Senior Fulbright
Scholar in Tunisia (1988-’89) and Algeria and Morocco (1993-’94).
Alia Yunis' debut novel, The Night Counter (Random House, 2009), was selected as a top
summer read by The Chicago Tribune and Boston Phoenix and has garnered rave reviews from
the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and several other publications. Born in Chicago, Alia has
worked as a journalist and filmmaker in several countries and her work has appeared on the
Oxygen Channel and in the Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Aramco, as well as several
anthologies. She grew up in the US and the Middle East, graduating from high school in Athens,
Greece. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of
Minnesota and American University in Washington, DC, and she is a PEN Emerging Voices
Fellow. She currently teaches film and television in the College of Communications at Zayed
University in Abu Dhabi and maintains a blog on www.aliayunis.com.
IV. Conference Organization Committee
Moneera Al-Ghadeer (Chair)
Sabry Hafez
Amira Sonbol (Georgetown University School of Foreign Service)
Huma Ibrahim
Rebecca Barr
Abdulaziz Al-Mutawa
Iglal Ahmed
Helen Carmichael
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