Tarek El-Ariss
Dartmouth College, Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty Member
- Arabic Literature, New Media, Middle Eastern Studies, Digital Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, and 37 moreCritical Theory, Affect/Emotion, Digital Humanities, Arabic, Gender Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Affect (Cultural Theory), Comparative Literature, Philosophy Of Language, Affect Theory, Queer Theory, French Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Travel Writing, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Modern Arabic Literature, Visual Studies, Social Media, Media Studies, Posthumanism, Lebanon, Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka, Exile, Jahiliyya Poetry, Pre-Islamic Arabic Literature, Diaspora Studies, Human-Animal Studies, Monsters and Monster Theory, Exile Literature, Arabian/Persian Gulf Studies, Arabian Peninsula in Antiquity, History of Pre-Islamic Arabia, Hodà Barakat, Area Studies, and Globalizationedit
- Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the auth... moreTarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). His research focuses on contemporary Arabic literature, film, popular culture, and new media. He was a Guggenheim Fellow (2021/22).edit
In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire. Water on Fire tells a story of... more
In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire.
Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.
Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.
Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
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https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13293.html In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss... more
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13293.html
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models.
Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate.
Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal.
Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models.
Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate.
Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal.
Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.
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The Nahda (“awakening”) designates the project of Arab cultural and political modernity from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Arab models of nationalism and secularism, as well as Islamic revival, spring from Nahda... more
The Nahda (“awakening”) designates the project of Arab cultural and political modernity from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Arab models of nationalism and secularism, as well as Islamic revival, spring from Nahda thought and its attendant developments, such as linguistic reform; translation; the emergence of new literary genres, such as the novel; the creation of periodicals, journalism, and a new publishing industry; professional associations and salons; a new education system; and an overall Enlightenment ideal of knowledge. The Nahda ushered in innovative modes of reading and writing along with new social practices of knowledge transmission, transnational connections, and new political ideas. Collected in this anthology are texts by intellectuals, writers, members of the clergy, and political figures. The authors discuss authority, social norms, conventions and practices both secular and religious, gender roles, class, travel, and technology. Presented in the original Arabic and in English translation, the texts will be of interest to students of the Arabic language and culture, history, cultural studies, gender studies, and other disciplines.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Arabic Literature, Arabic Language and Linguistics, Enlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, and 11 moreModernity, Intellectual and cultural history, History of the Modern Middle East, Arab Culture, Islam and Modernity, Histories and theories of modernity, Nahda, Indigenous Modernity, Arabic Language and Literature, Nahda (Renaissance Arabe Du XIXe Siècle), and The Arabic Nahda
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation, translation, and cultural exchange to an engagement with a... more
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation, translation, and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. Trials of Arab Modernity traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth-century to the present. Tarek El-Ariss thus reframes Arab modernity [ḥadātha] as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events [aḥdāth] emerging in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse. This study challenges the prevalent conceptualizations of modernity, both those that treat it as a Western ideological project imposed by colonialism, and others that understand it as a universal narrative of progress and innovation. Instead, El-Ariss offers a close reading of the simultaneous performances and contestations—or trials—of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, this book reveals the unfolding of these trials as a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity, decentering yet also redefining and producing it. El-Ariss’s theoretical and comparative approach offers a new configuration of Arab modernity at the intersection of historical, cultural, and aesthetic frameworks. The first study of its kind to bridge the gap between Nahda or the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment, or Renaissance, and postcolonial and postmodern fiction, this work is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Islamic Studies, Intellectual History, and Anthropology.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Travel Writing, Arabic Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and 21 moreQueer Theory, Arabic, Cultural Theory, Gay And Lesbian Studies, Lebanon, Walter Benjamin, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Post-Colonialism, Modernity, Egypt, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Travel Literature, Affect/Emotion, Affect (Cultural Theory), Modern Arabic Literature, Sudan, Hacking, Affect, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), and Nahda (Renaissance Arabe Du XIXe Siècle)
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The World Humanities Report is a project of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), in collaboration with the International Council for Philosophy
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Originally delivered as the 2021 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 17 historicizes and situates theory in a global context, approaching it as an intellectual tradition that has produced powerful critiques of... more
Originally delivered as the 2021 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 17 historicizes and situates theory in a global context, approaching it as an intellectual tradition that has produced powerful critiques of normativity and decentered text, image, and genealogy. In this paper, Professor Tarek El-Ariss revisits his intellectual trajectory and scrutinizes his engagement with critical theory. Reflecting on his personal journey as a scholar, writer, and critic in this article, he delineates five stages of critical practice in his encounters with theory, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern studies. These five stages are: a critique of representation, occupy the canon, impasse and breakdown, cross-disciplinary sublime, and new writing genres. By offering a wide-ranging and insightful overview of the five-stage theoretical practice in this paper, Professor El-Ariss addresses some of the questions and ethical imperatives that we need to raise as an intellectual community today in order to develop new critical practices, writing genres, and forms of communication that operate at both local and global levels.
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What does scandal designate? Is it a narrative of moral outrage, a titillating spectacle of shame, or a violation that simultaneously unsettles and consolidates norms and traditions? Scandal as a phenomenon, event, and analytical category... more
What does scandal designate? Is it a narrative of moral outrage, a titillating spectacle of shame, or a violation that simultaneously unsettles and consolidates norms and traditions? Scandal as a phenomenon, event, and analytical category has been the focus of de bates and representations in works by Kant, Heidegger, Rousseau, Sade, and Mme de Sévigné, as well as in The Arabian Nights. These engagements with scandal in philosophy, literature, and media constitute a genealogy if not a tradition that emphasizes the relations between scandal and the body, gender, story-telling, visuality, marginality, and pow er. From the body of Aphrodite that frames scandal in the Greek mythological context to the body of Egyptian activist and nude blogger Alyaa Elmahdi, adulterous affairs and fantasies of debauchery particularly have been used as instruments to critique the rich and powerful but also to oppress women and sexual minorities. What becomes of scandal in the age of the Internet, apps, and social media? The article examines whether the digital is bringing about the demise of scandal as an affective scene that generates outrage and condemnation but also as a model of telling and representing tied to antiquated re portage genres, gossip scenes, and fictional models. Genealogy The word "scandal" comes from the Greek word skandalon, which means moral stumble and trap. 1 One of the most famous scandals in antiquity is the one generated by the adul terous relation between the god of war, Ares (Mars), and the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite (Venus) or Cypris, as she comes from the eastern part of the Greek world (the island of Cyprus). Homer tells us that when Ares stayed in Aphrodite's bed into dawn, Helios, the sun god, making his journey from east to west, saw the lovers in bed. Helios, best known as the gossiper among the gods as he sees everything, told Aphrodite's husband Hephaistos, thereby setting the scene of scandal on Mount Olympus. 2 Following Helios's "seeing" and "gossiping," Hephaistos, the blacksmith who works in the forge all night, laid a "trap" for the lovers: an invisible chain net that would fall and immobilize them when set. A revealer, a whistleblower, and artificer, Helios sets the stage for the scene of scandal.
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On growing up in Beirut during the War
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Can the exile ever return? And if so, how? This question has consumed literature from the times of Gilgamesh. Focusing on works by the Jāhilī poet al-Shanfarā (d. 70/525) and the contemporary Lebanese author Hudā Barakāt, this essay reads... more
Can the exile ever return? And if so, how? This question has consumed literature from the times of Gilgamesh. Focusing on works by the Jāhilī poet al-Shanfarā (d. 70/525) and the contemporary Lebanese author Hudā Barakāt, this essay reads the metamorphosis of the exile and the outcast as a critique of tribal identification. I argue that while the moment of exilic departure is confounded and erased, the return (al-ʿawdah) operates as a form of revenge (raiding, haunting, possessing) that emerges from experiences of tawaḥḥush (becoming wild, beastly) and tagharrub (estrangement, alienation). This vengeful return harnesses beastliness and alienation as both destructive and productive forces that dismantle communal rituals of inclusion and exclusion, death and burial, while opening up the human/beast relation to multiple social and political configurations. Drawing on classical and contemporary theoretical frameworks , I examine the function of cruelty in the exile's transformation and return, reading it as a survival mechanism and aesthetic device.
Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Arabic Literature, Arabic Poetry, Literature, Posthumanism, and 19 moreArabic, Poetry, Lebanon, Antonin Artaud, Literary Theory, Gilles Deleuze, Franz Kafka, Exile, Jahiliyya Poetry, Pre-Islamic Arabic Literature, Diaspora Studies, War and Literature, Human-Animal Studies, Monsters and Monster Theory, Exile Literature, Arabian/Persian Gulf Studies, Arabian Peninsula in Antiquity, History of Pre-Islamic Arabia, and Hodà Barakat
Research Interests: Queer Studies, Arabic Literature, Arabic Language and Linguistics, Queer Theory, Arabic, and 10 moreSexuality, Gender and Sexuality, Gay And Lesbian Studies, Michel Foucault, Egypt, History Of Madness And Psychiatry, Modern Arabic Literature, Madness and Literature, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), and Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Studies
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Conversation with Ahmed Naji + Hacking the Modern (Arabic)
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Technoutopias exhibition explores architecture's ability to animate the social imaginary and trigger the extinct civic self. The work critiques our alienation from nature and each other and strives to restore broken relationships. At a... more
Technoutopias exhibition explores architecture's ability to animate the social imaginary and trigger the extinct civic self. The work critiques our alienation from nature and each other and strives to restore broken relationships. At a moment of extreme cultural and ecological anxiety, we're retreating from engagement, shrinking our world to the handheld sphere of our devices. It's the intent of Technoutopias to challenge this retreat and investigate how architecture, thoughtfully shaped, offers a medium through which to find the right size for tech and an exemplary space for what it means to be a public and publicly-motivated human. Intimate, historically-inflected, openly discontented and bracingly optimistic, Technoutopias' pieces invite us to remember we are makers of and participants in the creations we experience as home. And that if we do not remember our better selves, we may not be able to house what's left of what's most important. Technoutopias shares a series of possibilities for who we want and may need to become. It steers us toward a new civic vocabulary and fresh chances to establish rituals building empathy, courage, and connection. Moving fluidly between spaces, with an ease mirroring the malleability of the spirit we need to develop, Technoutopias helps us rediscover and activate a public and truly public-spirited self.
(Technoutopias exhibition run from September 24 - November 17, 2019 in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery and Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, USA).
Essays:
Pedro Gadanho. The Return to Techné as Micro-Utopia.
Tarek El-Ariss. Portals of Life: Reflections on Zenovia Toloudi’s Technoutopias
(Technoutopias exhibition run from September 24 - November 17, 2019 in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery and Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, USA).
Essays:
Pedro Gadanho. The Return to Techné as Micro-Utopia.
Tarek El-Ariss. Portals of Life: Reflections on Zenovia Toloudi’s Technoutopias
Research Interests: Installation Art, Contemporary Art, Installation (Art), Utopian Studies, Surveillance Studies, and 11 moreEcology, Architectural Theory, Utopianism, Visual Arts, Public Space, Utopia, Immersive Environments, Utopia and Science Fiction, Arts and Humanities, Utopia/Distopia, and Radical and Utopian Architecture
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This chapter explores leaking as bodily function, tying it to fiction and author function. Engaging the theoretical framework of the leaking body from The Arabian Nights onwards, it examines how leaks became WikiLeaks, thereby questioning... more
This chapter explores leaking as bodily function, tying it to fiction and author function. Engaging the theoretical framework of the leaking body from The Arabian Nights onwards, it examines how leaks became WikiLeaks, thereby questioning their framing as an attempt to fix the empire or restore the violated subject of the liberal state whose rights and privacy have been suspended or tampered with. The chapter traces the transformation of the leaker into superstar traitor and hero, and the making of the leak as “true knowledge” or encyclopedic knowledge by adding “Wiki” to “Leaks.” It argues that as leakers occupy liminal states of juridical limbo such as embassies, airports, and solitary confinement, their bodies become marked and their subjectivity undone and reconstituted while simultaneously undoing and reconstituting the law that they purportedly violate.
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This article investigates the advent in the mid-2000s of Turkish TV Dramas dubbed in Arabic as an instance of historical, political, and erotic seduction.
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Can the exile ever return? And if so, how? This question has consumed literature from the times of Gilgamesh. Focusing on works by the Jāhilī poet al-Shanfarā (d. 70/525) and the contemporary Lebanese author Hudā Barakāt, this essay reads... more
Can the exile ever return? And if so, how? This question has consumed literature from the times of Gilgamesh. Focusing on works by the Jāhilī poet al-Shanfarā (d. 70/525) and the contemporary Lebanese author Hudā Barakāt, this essay reads the metamorphosis of the exile and the outcast as a critique of tribal identification. I argue that while the moment of exilic departure is confounded and erased, the return (al-ʿawdah) operates as a form of revenge (raiding, haunting, possessing) that emerges from experiences of tawaḥḥush (becoming wild, beastly) and tagharrub (estrangement, alienation). This vengeful return harnesses beastliness and alienation as both destructive and productive forces that dismantle communal rituals of inclusion and exclusion, death and burial, while opening up the human/beast relation to multiple social and political configurations. Drawing on classical and contemporary theoretical frameworks, I examine the function of cruelty in the exile’s transformation and r...
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With the proliferation of Arabic blogging, emailing, chatting, text messaging, and other forms of techno-writing, contemporary Arabic literature is under-going a series of structural and linguistic transformations. Specifically, the... more
With the proliferation of Arabic blogging, emailing, chatting, text messaging, and other forms of techno-writing, contemporary Arabic literature is under-going a series of structural and linguistic transformations. Specifically, the encounter with the virtual and the effects of globalization ...
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This essay examines the movement of Arab national and cultural revival known as nahdah (meaning renaissance or awakening) as a speech act and a performance involving a nuhūd (rising) and an uncertain practice of civilization (tamaddun)... more
This essay examines the movement of Arab national and cultural revival known as nahdah (meaning renaissance or awakening) as a speech act and a performance involving a nuhūd (rising) and an uncertain practice of civilization (tamaddun) that seek to bring about a culture of knowledge. Contesting its treatment as a homogeneous project of modernity that rose and fell and as a historical period with clear epistemic breaks, it argues that nahdah civilizational practices could not be reduced to notions of civilization associated with Orientalism as system of othering and cultural superiority. This approach frees up nahdah texts from the dominant narrative of rise and decline, and from their intertextual and ideological dependency on European modernity as a model to be borrowed or resisted.
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This article examines the association of homosexuality with madness in two contemporary novels, Hanan al-Shaykh's Innaha London ya ʿAzizi (Only in London) and Hamdi Abu Golayyel's (Julayyil) Lusus Mutaqaʿidun (Thieves in... more
This article examines the association of homosexuality with madness in two contemporary novels, Hanan al-Shaykh's Innaha London ya ʿAzizi (Only in London) and Hamdi Abu Golayyel's (Julayyil) Lusus Mutaqaʿidun (Thieves in Retirement). Through a comparative reading of the figure of Majnun, an impassioned lover and mad rebel, I argue that literary articulations of queer desire operate as embodied resistance to social and political normativity, both in the Arab world and in the diaspora. Discussing the aesthetic transformation of the contemporary novel and drawing on the Arab-Islamic literary and philosophical tradition, I critically engage Michel Foucault's reading of sexual and epistemological developments in light of current debates about Arab homosexuality. I show how discursive models of sexuality are situated in modernity's intertwinement with other structures of power and systems of belief, crossing cultural contexts and linguistic registers.
Research Interests: History, Queer Studies, Arabic Literature, Middle East Studies, Queer Theory, and 15 moreEmbodied Cognition, Gay And Lesbian Studies, Politics, Diaspora, Modernity, Michel Foucault, History Of Madness And Psychiatry, Islam, Multidisciplinary, Modern Arabic Literature, Homosexuality, Human Sexuality, Queer, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), and Reading Process
With the proliferation of Arabic blogging, emailing, chatting, text messaging, and other forms of techno-writing, contemporary Arabic literature is under-going a series of structural and linguistic transformations. Specifically, the... more
With the proliferation of Arabic blogging, emailing, chatting, text messaging, and other forms of techno-writing, contemporary Arabic literature is under-going a series of structural and linguistic transformations. Specifically, the encounter with the virtual and the effects of globalization ...
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What does scandal designate? Is it a narrative of moral outrage, a titillating spectacle of shame, or a violation that simultaneously unsettles and consolidates norms and traditions? Scandal as a phenomenon, event, and analytical category... more
What does scandal designate? Is it a narrative of moral outrage, a titillating spectacle of shame, or a violation that simultaneously unsettles and consolidates norms and traditions? Scandal as a phenomenon, event, and analytical category has been the focus of debates and representations in works by Kant, Heidegger, Rousseau, Sade, and Mme de Sévigné, as well as in The Arabian Nights. These engagements with scandal in philosophy, literature, and media constitute a genealogy if not a tradition that emphasizes the relations between scandal and the body, gender, story-telling, visuality, marginality, and power. From the body of Aphrodite that frames scandal in the Greek mythological context to the body of Egyptian activist and nude blogger Alyaa Elmahdi, adulterous affairs and fantasies of debauchery particularly have been used as instruments to critique the rich and powerful but also to oppress women and sexual minorities. What becomes of scandal in the age of the Internet, apps, and ...
Focusing on the Internet as a space of regression and harassment following the Arab uprisings, this chapter traces the violence perpetrated against Arab authors, activists, and intellectuals online to the emergence of fiction as... more
Focusing on the Internet as a space of regression and harassment following the Arab uprisings, this chapter traces the violence perpetrated against Arab authors, activists, and intellectuals online to the emergence of fiction as hyperreality principle. Investigating the relation between reading practices and knowledge production, and continuing the examination of the function of the author as leaking subject in the digital age, it focuses on the act of fragmenting the work itself through online campaigns and perverse literary performances. Specifically, it examines a hashtag campaign—in fact, a hashtag ghazwa (tribal raid)—launched on Twitter against a Saudi author, Badriah Albeshr [al-Beshr] (b. 1967), who was accused of apostasy for passages in her novel Hend and the Soldiers (2010).
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This chapter focuses on Saudi “tweeter” Mujtahidd, who has been leaking by “showing the inside” of the Saudi government and royal family since 2011. It explores how the leaking subject, the unknown Mujtahidd or Mujtahidd the “mystery,”... more
This chapter focuses on Saudi “tweeter” Mujtahidd, who has been leaking by “showing the inside” of the Saudi government and royal family since 2011. It explores how the leaking subject, the unknown Mujtahidd or Mujtahidd the “mystery,” constructs himself as an online character (avatar), author, and knower. Drawing on classical Arabic prose genres such as akhbār (anecdotes, news, lore), it reads the fiction of the leak in relation to the genres of serialized novels and TV series. It argues that the collapse between Twitter user and Twitter as such is at work in Mujtahidd's case as well. Mujtahidd fuses with Twitter, reproducing it as function of revelation, writing genre, and machine à scandale.
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This chapter analyzes the works of Rajaa Alsanea (b. 1981) and Khaled Alkhamissi (b. 1962) as the fiction of the leaking subject who wants to reveal it all, mimicking e-mails about the private life of individuals turned characters and... more
This chapter analyzes the works of Rajaa Alsanea (b. 1981) and Khaled Alkhamissi (b. 1962) as the fiction of the leaking subject who wants to reveal it all, mimicking e-mails about the private life of individuals turned characters and recording and circulating scenes of abuse and violation on the street through novelistic scenes. It argues that the author, who is traditionally understood as the function of discourse in Foucault or as the object of sacrifice in Barthes, emerges in this new fiction as the scandalous function of the leak that recodes the novel as medium. It explores how literature is reimagined and reaffirmed in instances of greed, exhibitionism, confrontation, and hacking that affectively grab and move readers, marking the emergence of a new literary culture and aesthetics tied to the bestseller and the pursuit of fame.
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In this concise and yet illuminating reading of "Journal de Paris à Prague" (Mémoires d'outre-tombe, iv - xxxvi), Jean Christophe Cavallin examines the dialectics of literary production at the intersection with social and... more
In this concise and yet illuminating reading of "Journal de Paris à Prague" (Mémoires d'outre-tombe, iv - xxxvi), Jean Christophe Cavallin examines the dialectics of literary production at the intersection with social and political transformations. With exceptional literary ...
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When we and several authors of the articles included here originally debated the idea of this special issue, our aim was to respond to what we perceived as a standstill that locks Middle Eastern queer studies into a premodern Eastern... more
When we and several authors of the articles included here originally debated the idea of this special issue, our aim was to respond to what we perceived as a standstill that locks Middle Eastern queer studies into a premodern Eastern versus modern Western-oriented division. While the East is studied as a repository of tradition with an identifiable sexual and amorous nomenclature, the West is often presented as a fixed hegemonic structure distinct from the East, regardless of the long traditions of cultural exchange and the specific forms of translation and dialogue that take shape when the identities and models of desire associated with the West travel or are performed outside it or at its periphery. This division has generated a set of binaries pertaining to the applicability of terms (gay, lesbian, homosexual) and theoretical frameworks (queer theory) to Middle Eastern literary and cultural contexts. It is our belief that critical engagements with queer Arab and Iranian sexualiti...
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On 28 January 2017, the field of Middle East studies lost one of its strongest and most vocal advocates—Barbara Harlow. Barbara led a heroic life: writing, resisting, drinking, and smoking, to the end! With the heart of a warrior, she... more
On 28 January 2017, the field of Middle East studies lost one of its strongest and most vocal advocates—Barbara Harlow. Barbara led a heroic life: writing, resisting, drinking, and smoking, to the end! With the heart of a warrior, she practiced muqāwama at every level and in every possible way. Her power of the “No” confronted structures of power, normativity of all kind, and fluff. She was solid, engaged, wise, and infinitely supportive of her students, colleagues, and causes. She was the first to arrive at every demonstration and the last to leave, making sure that the pro-bono lawyers were ready at police stations to work on releasing those arrested. Barbara was real, genuine, and fun to be around. She loved to hear the latest news—and gossip—from Cairo and Beirut as we sat at her kitchen table, sipping white wine and smoking. She read everything, from mystery novels set in Cairo or London to the most recent study on Arabic literature and culture. Browsing her library one finds g...