-
The North Kharga Oasis Survey: Explorations in Egypt’s Western Desert
Corinna Rossi and Salima Ikram
-
Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles
Tahia Khaled Gamal Abdel Nasser
In memoirs, Arab writers have invoked solitude in moments of deep public involvement. Focusing on Taha Hussein, Sonallah Ibrahim, Assia Djebar, Latifa al-Zayyat, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Edward Said, Haifa Zangana, and Radwa Ashour, this book reads a range of autobiographical forms, sources, and affinities with other literatures.
Taking a comparative approach, Nasser shows the local sources of contemporary Arab autobiography, adaptations of a global genre, and cultural exchange. She also examines different aspects of the contemporary autobiography as it has evolved in the Arab world during the past half-century, focusing on the particularity of the genre written in different languages but pertaining to one overarching Arab culture. Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, she examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.
-
Alterity and Criticism: Tracing Time in Modern Literature
William Donald Melaney
How does the theme of the other–-as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme—allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with the role of time in the construction of the self.
-
Bildungsroman
William Donald Melaney
Bildungsroman can be read as a semi-narrative account of an artist who attempts to produce work that appears intermittently, opening up insights into the human condition and the current state of life as lived not only by the artist but by others as well. As a narrative, this collection of poems commemorates the death of the King, the cessation of war and the benefits of the human imagination. The title of the book evokes the Modernist practice of challenging the conventional division between poetry and prose. The speaker is not always the writer but usually derives insights from the writer’s life. The poems have been arranged in groups that roughly follow the dates of composition, with the first two groups going back three decades and the final group having been written during the past ten years.
-
Organizing the Unorganized Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon
Farah Kobaissy
This study examines the process of unionizing domestic workers in Lebanon, highlighting the potentialities as well as the obstacles confronting it, and looks at the multiple power relations involved through axes of class, gender, race, and nationality. The author situates this struggle within the larger scene of the labor union ‘movement’ in the country, and discusses the contribution of women’s rights organizations in rendering visible cases of abuse against migrant domestic workers. She argues that the ‘death’ of class politics has made women’s rights organizations address migrant domestic worker issues as a separate labor category, further contributing to their production as an ‘exception’ under neoliberalism.
-
Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity
Ramy Aly
This is the first ethnographic exploration of gender, race and class amongst British born or raised Arabs in London. It takes a critical look at the idea of 'Arab-ness' and the ways in which their ethnicities are created and expressed in the city.
Looking at everyday spaces, encounters and discourses, the book explores the lives of young people and the ways in which they achieve 'Arab-ness'. It uncovers stories of growing up in London, the social codes at Shisha cafes and the sexual politics and ethnic self-portraits which are present in British-Arab men and women.
Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Becoming Arab in London reveals the need to move away from the notion of identity and towards a performative reading of race, gender and class. What emerges is an innovative contribution to the study of diaspora and difference in contemporary Britain.'Provides amazingly rich insights into the lives and experiences of young British Arabs ... makes a very meaningful contribution to our understandings of 'multicultural London' - Caroline Nagel, University of South Carolina
'Richly ethnographic ... full of insightful examinations of the inner lives and outer practices of the young people it documents and reveals much about the contemporary conditions of Arab youth in London' - Nicole Berger, CritCom
-
The Church in the Square: Negotiations of Religion and Revolution at an Evangelical Church in Cairo
Anna Jeannine Dowell
In the wake of the 25 January 2011 popular uprisings, youth and leaders from the Kasr el Dobara Evangelical Church, the largest Protestant congregation in the Middle East, situated just behind Tahrir Square embarked on new, unpredictable political projects. This ethnography seeks to elucidate the ways that youth and leaders utilized religious imagery and discourse and relational networks in order to carve out a place in the Egyptian public sphere regarding public religion, national belonging, and the ideal citizen.
-
Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the making
Graham Harman
An in-depth study of the emerging French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux Freshly called to a professorship at the Sorbonne, and described as the fastest-rising French philosopher since Derrida, Meillassoux's star has continued to rise. This expanded edition of the only book on Meillassoux remains the best introduction to one of Europe's most promising thinkers. In this expanded edition of his landmark 2011 work on Meillassoux, Graham Harman assesses Meillassoux's publications in English so far, covering new materials not available to the Anglophone reader at the time of the first edition. Along with Meillassoux's startling book on Mallarm's poem 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,' Harman discusses several new English articles by Meillassoux, including his controversial April 2012 Berlin lecture and its critique of 'subjectalism'. It also includes an insightful interview with Meillassoux and first-time translations of excerpts from L'Inexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence), his famous but still unpublished major book.
-
The Story of Anas al-Wujūd: Nineteenth-century verse recensions of an Arabian Nights tale in Egyptian colloquial Arabic
Mark Muehlhaeusler
This book presents seven parallel versions of a story from the Arabian Nights. The texts are an important source for the study of vernacular Arabic, and for the history and development of popular literature in Egypt around the turn of the nineteenth century. Text in Arabic, with an introduction and preliminary notes in English.
-
Egyptian Hip-Hop: Expressions from the Underground
Ellen R. Weis
This ethnographic study of the Egyptian underground hip-hop scene examines the artists who collectively molded the scene and analyzes their practices and explores how these artists have interacted with and responded to political and social upheaval and change. It reveals how rappers approached and reformulated the genre in times of revolution and stasis to reveal how rap acts as a multi-layered form of expression. More specifically, it examines the location of the art form within the broader history of oppositional cultural expression in Egypt, outlining the artists’ oppositions to various hegemonic structures and critically deconstructing them to reveal that they often reflect dominant ideology.
-
Language and identity in modern Egypt
Reem Bassiouney
© Reem Bassiouney, 2014. Examines language and identity in modern Egypt using theories from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. How is language used in Egyptian public discourse to illuminate the collective identity of Egyptians? How does this identity relate to language form and content? Reem Bassiouney explores these questions by drawing on sources including newspaper articles, caricatures, blogs, patriotic songs, films, school textbooks, TV talk-shows, poetry and novels As well as furthering our understanding of the relationship between identity and language, this book yields insights about the intricate ways in which media and public discourse help shape and outline identity through linguistic processes. Key Features • Offers an in-depth study of identity in modern Egyptian public discourse • Focuses on nationalist discourse before, during and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011 • Based on a broad, and representative selection of data • Helps us to decode and understand the messages put forward by the competing factions in Egyptian politics.
-
Chronicles of Majnun Layla and selected poems
Ferial J. Ghazoul Professor
Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems brings together in one volume Haddad’s seminal work and a considerable selection of poems from his oeuvre, stretching over forty years. The central poem, Chronicles of Majnun Layla, recasts the seventh-century myth into a contemporary, postmodern narrative that revels in the foibles of oral transmission, weaving a small side cast of characters into the fabric of the poem. Haddad portrays Layla as a daring woman aware of her own needs and desires and not afraid to articulate them. The author succeeds in reviving this classical work of Arabian love while liberating it from its puritanical dimension and tribal overtones. The selected poems reveal Haddad’s playful yet profound meditations. A powerful lyric poet, Haddad juxtaposes classical and modern symbols, and mixes the old with the new, the sensual with the sacred, and the common with the extraordinary. Ghazoul and Verlenden’s masterful translation remains faithful to the cultural and historical context in which the original poetry was produced while also reflecting the uniqueness of the poet’s style and his poetics.
-
Femininity and Dance in Egypt: Embodiment and Meaning in al-Raqs al-Baladi
Noha Roushdy
Considering the paradoxical position of al-raqs al-baladi or “belly dance” in Egyptian social life, as both a vibrant and a contested cultural form, this issue of Cairo Papers in Social Science considers the impact of wider socio-cultural and political forces on the marginalization of professional performers, on the one hand, and in defining the parameters for non-professional performances on the other hand. Through interviews with professional and non-professional female dancers in Egypt, it explores the relationship between al-raqs al-baladi and the dynamic cultural repertoire that produces notions of femininity and normative personhood in Egypt. As a dance that Egyptians learn in childhood, it exposes the cardinal relationship between culture and body movement. The study received the Magda al-Nowaihi Award for best graduate work on gender studies in 2010
-
Nasser My Husband
Tahia Gamal Abdel Nasser and Tahia Khaled Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser, architect of Egypt’s 1952 Revolution, president of the country from 1956 to 1970, hero to millions across the Arab world since the Suez Crisis, was also a family man, a devoted husband and father who kept his private life largely private. In 1973, three years after his early passing at the age of 52, his wife Tahia wrote a memoir of her beloved husband for her family. The family then waited almost forty years, through the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, both unsympathetic to the memory of Nasser, before publishing Tahia’s book in Arabic for the first time in 2011. Now this unique insight into the life of one of the giants of the twentieth century is finally available in English. Accompanied by more than one hundred photographs from the family archive, many never before published, this historic book tells the story of Gamal and Tahia’s life together from their marriage in 1944, through the Revolution and Gamal’s career on the world stage, revealing an unknown and intimate picture of the man behind the president.
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
