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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 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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 5 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. 6 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. 7 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 8 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. 9 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 10 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 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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 15 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 16 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 17