Alif Pub Date : 2022-06-15 DOI: 10.37010/alif.v1i1.709

Ii Ismail, Mawardi Nur

引用次数: 0

Redirecting Postcolonial Theory - إعادة توجيه نظرية ما بعد الكولونيالية: Arab-Islamic Reason, Deconstructionism, and the Possibility of Multiple Critique 重新定位后殖民理论- إعادة توجيه نظرية ما بعد الكولونيالية:阿拉伯-伊斯兰理性，解构主义和多重批判的可能性

Alif Pub Date : 2020-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/26924867

Y. Yacoubi

引用次数: 0

Areas of Concern: Area Studies and the New American Studies 关注领域:区域研究和新美国研究

Alif Pub Date : 2011-01-01 DOI: 10.1057/9780230349209_9

J. C. Rowe

引用次数: 4

Of the Place 地方的

Alif Pub Date : 2005-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv346th8.9

Hoda Guindi

{"title":"Of the Place","authors":"Hoda Guindi","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv346th8.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv346th8.9","url":null,"abstract":"In these testimonies recalling Edward Said--as a childhood friend (Hoda Guindi), an academic colleague (Michael Wood), an inspiring mentor (Andrew Rubin), a captivating role model (Ananya Jahanara Kabir), and a tender father (Najla Said)--different faces of his persona surface: the playful child in Cairo, the youthful professor in a panel, the concerned advisor at Columbia University, the activist inspiring his audience in Calcutta and Cambridge, and the loving and affectionate father in New York. These pithy statements by friends, close relatives, and admirers--belonging to four continents--speak intimately and astutely of Said's extraordinary presence. ********** I would like to stress at the outset that what I am going to say is drawn from--probably--collective memories because the Saids and the Guindis (Edward's and my families have been friends for over sixty years--and through three generations: grandparents, parents and children, i.e. Edward and his sisters and us--through all the vicissitudes of life. Even death has not, and cannot, sever the bonds of friendship. Elsewhere, (1) my sister has written a personal memoir of Edward's Out of Place and thus we share some of the same memories but have somewhat different interpretations! I take Out of Place as my point of departure and one particular sentence from the Preface: Along with language, it is geography--especially in the displaced form of departures, arrivals, farewells, exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging, and travel itself--that is at the core of my memories of those early years. (2) This struck an immediate chord in my memory; I suddenly realized that my first memory--perhaps \"fictionally historical\"--(as I was a mere tot!) of the relationship between the Saids and the Guindis, Edward and his two sisters and my sister and myself (there were further additions to both families later), were of departures and farewells, arrivals and welcomes. On this occasion, fortunately, the departure of the Saids at the time of El Alamein (1942) was followed, not long after, by an \"arrival\"--to us, a return. In the first paragraph of his first chapter, Edward writes of his \"overriding sensation ... of always being out of place.\" (3) Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, my early memories of Edward are grounded on and rooted in places--for even that first departure is indelibly associated with a particular place--the lift and stairwell--in a particular building in a particular district of Cairo: Zamalek. The Saids and the Guindis were friends and neighbors--we lived, respectively, on the fifth and second floors of the building-which meant that there was a continual toing and froing between flats. Whilst our parents visited each other decorously in the flats, we, with Edward as the ringleader, ran up and down the stairs with much clamor and clatter, much to the despair of our parents and the dismay of the other tenants. To my shame, now, the ancient (even then) and beautiful Art Deco lift was als","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"77 ","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72428510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 7

History and poetry 历史与诗歌

Alif Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/4047425

Walid Bitar

{"title":"History and poetry","authors":"Walid Bitar","doi":"10.2307/4047425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4047425","url":null,"abstract":"History is about research and analysis, it clarifies and classifies, whereas poetry describes the mess that historians try to clear up. In illustrating the difference between history and poetry, the author excavates the 'historical influence' in his own poetry: The lessons and insights acquired from such diverse sources as Fernando Pessoa's \"Autopsychography,\" Rilke's \"The Panther,\" Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, Wallace Stevens's \"A Clear Day and No Memories,\" and Swift's \"A Satirical Elegy.\" He surmises that an ahistorical attitude may capture an artist's position in time more effectively than a conscious attempt to be historical. The author discusses the genesis of his new collection, Bastardi Puri, in Beirut, concluding that the city itself, like his poetry, exhibits the protean and elusive nature of history. ********** An archaeologist locates a site to unearth, classify and date artifacts. He digs up an Osiris or an Anubis. \"Let sleeping dogs lie\" is not his motto; he decides for them. In my work, it's up to the dogs; in that respect, historical references are no different from contemporary ones. Some dresses worn at Versailles were puce, a colour chosen to camouflage fleas. When history is invisible as Bourbon fleas, poems double as puce. There's no exhibiting past and present like identifiable thoroughbreds. They're parts of one mongrel, and sometimes parts are hard to separate. History's parts may be miscast, rewritten, simplified, manipulated or ignored. For every responsible archaeologist there are countless seams, subterfuges and acts of vandalism. Historians try to clear up the mess; poets describe it. A historian researches and analyzes, but, as Plato observes, a poet cannot explain what he is doing when composing--he's beside himself, impelled by Muses. (1) At the absurd end of the spectrum, a blind Muse leads the blind. An archaeologist is clinical and methodical. A poet doesn't catalogue the truths searched for; they form as memorable lines, not as data to be remembered. In some inexhaustible poems, lines gradually overshadow one another, and the friction lights up a pharos that shouldn't be translated back into words. It's often retroactive guesswork, if not wishful thinking, for a person to quote historical poets and argue that they influence him or her in a particular way. I like Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, his ability to write as different authors in different styles that transcend any one personality. But if I try to use heteronyms, they turn into my divided and ruled satraps--the exercise is a dead end. For me, Pessoa's lesson lies elsewhere. In \"Autopsychography,\" he goes backstage to explore the theatre an audience misses if it misunderstands the nature of performance: The poet is a faker. He Fakes it so completely, He even fakes he's suffering The pain he's really feeling. And they who read his writing Fully feel while reading Not that pain of his that's double, But theirs, completely fictional. So on its","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"1 1","pages":"190-205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89918516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights 记忆、不平等与权力:巴勒斯坦与人权的普遍性

Alif Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/4047418

E. Said

{"title":"Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights","authors":"E. Said","doi":"10.2307/4047418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4047418","url":null,"abstract":"Stressing the role of collective memory in the survival of Palestinian people in the diaspora, Said argues for acknowledging the rights of the Palestinians as a people, since human rights are universal. No earthly or divine dispensation could excuse oppressing a people by pleading past victimhood. Against the reductive notion of clash of civilizations, Said espouses knowing the Other and recognizing the historical rights of Palestinians in their own country. Knowledge becomes in this quest, a tool of understanding and recognition. Said advocates replacing antagonism with reconciliation following the model of post-apartheid South Africa. For him, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict cannot be resolved by military means, but by democratic admission of equality and by inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. The Palestinian past cannot be erased and should not be dismissed if a genuine peace is sought. ********** This is a very fraught moment to be speaking about human rights and the Middle East, and the human rights of the Palestinian people in particular; but it does seem to be in some ways a symbolically useful time for the purposes of my lecture and what I have to say. I should also say immediately that I am not a political commentator; I am not a political scientist; I don't teach Middle Eastern studies or any of that, so I speak as one of us. The United States of America has already sent a hugely intimidating military forces to various Arab and non-Arab countries in the regions surrounding Iraq. The frankly imperial idea which my President [George W. Bush] can barely articulate is that they are there to disarm Iraq forcibly and also to change its dreadful regime. The rest of the international community, not least most of the Arab countries of the region as well as the other permanent members of the Security Council, have been expressing varying degrees of disquiet and occasionally urgent disapproval as is the case with France. Certainly it is the case that no one outside of Iraq has suggested any concern about Saddam Hussein and his government. It is the people of Iraq who stand to suffer the most and whose doubly and triply miserable fate is of the deepest interest to people all over the world. I am sorry to say that none of this has had the slightest effect on what is a granitic will on the part of a tiny number of members of George Bush's administration to go forward with plans for a war among whose stated imperial intentions is the unilateral wish to bring American style democracy to Iraq and the Arab world, redrawing maps, overturning governments and states and modes of life on a fantastically wide scale in the process. That all of this has very little in the final analysis to do with the enhancements of human rights and democracy, in a part of the world especially rife with their abuse, is patently obvious. Were Iraq to have been the world's largest exporter of oranges and apples, there would have been no concern over its purported possessio","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"29 1","pages":"15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76458731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 5

Egypt in Greco-Roman History and Fiction * 希腊罗马历史与虚构中的埃及*

Alif Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/4047419

Stephen A. Nimis

{"title":"Egypt in Greco-Roman History and Fiction *","authors":"Stephen A. Nimis","doi":"10.2307/4047419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4047419","url":null,"abstract":"more than a \"representation.\" In his 1971 survey of the subject, C. Froidefond characterized Greek views of Egypt as a \"mirage,\" an imaginative vision that had as much to do with who the Greeks were as it had with who the Egyptians were.1 Edward Said's 1978 landmark work on orientalism traced how that Egyptian mirage developed and endured over the years in response to Europe's own evolving identity, and his book made a strong case for what has become a key idea in cultural studies: Power follows knowledge, and the seemingly objective and scientific study of other cultures is often an accessory to the crimes committed by empires in the name of civilization.2 The enormous-and often nasty-controversy that swirled around the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, with its accusation of racism in the conduct of European historiography, particularly in the treatment of the relationship between Europe and Egypt, has dealt a devastating blow to the pose of objectivity in the conduct of scholarship.3 Despite this controversy, or perhaps because of it, the peculiar position of Egypt in the imaginations of the Greeks and Romans and its role in the classical world continue to be a subject of the greatest interest. I wish to contribute to this discussion by looking at the role Egypt plays in the so-called Greek romances, prose narratives of love and adventure that were composed during the Roman empire. I will begin by selectively sketching ideas about Egypt in Greek and Roman letters as a context for my remarks.4","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"62 1","pages":"34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74259245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 16

Musical Recall: Postmemory and the Punjabi Diaspora 音乐回忆:后记忆和旁遮普流散

Alif Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/4047424

A. Kabir

{"title":"Musical Recall: Postmemory and the Punjabi Diaspora","authors":"A. Kabir","doi":"10.2307/4047424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4047424","url":null,"abstract":"The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 has profoundly altered the geopolitics and demography of South Asia, generating also large-scale diasporic movements to Britain from the regions most deeply affected thereby, such as the Punjab. Deploying paradigms from Holocaust studies, the author connects diaspora with trauma to analyze the memory-work inscribed within contemporary music produced and enjoyed by British Punjabis in Britain. Arguing that such music expresses a 'neo-ethnic' Punjabi 'postmemory' that recalls pre-Partition Punjab, the author suggests that such 'musical recall' has a redemptive and commemorative potential inherent in its ability to bypass narratives of violence and nationalism, and articulate instead post- and transnational modes of identity formation and cultural belonging. ********** In British author Meera Syal's autobiographical novel Anita and Me, the narrative of a Punjabi girl growing up in an English village is interrupted at one point by memories of the Partition of India. One evening, the protagonist, Meena, overhears a musical soiree arranged by her parents and their friends turning into a heated emotional discussion: It was my Uncle Bhatnagar shouting.... \"But it was a damn massacre!\" he was spluttering, and then he talked in Punjabi of which I recognised a few words, \"Family ... money ... death\" and then, \"They talk about their world wars ... We lost a million people! And who thought up Partition? These 'gores' [white people], that's who!\" Then everyone launched in, the whispers squeezed through the gap in the door and I could make out familiar voices saying such terrible and alien things. \"My mother and I, the Hindus marched us through the streets ... our heads uncovered ...\" That must have been Auntie Mumtaz, one of our few Muslim friends. \"They wanted to do such things to us ...\" ... there was a long pause, I thought I heard someone sniff. \"All the time we were walking, mama and I, papa was lying dead, his head cut from his body. They found it later lying in the fallen jasmine blooms ...\" \"We all have these stories, bhainji [sister],\" Uncle Bhatnagar again, addressing her as sister. \"What was happening to you was also happening to us. None of us could stop it, Mad people everywhere.\" There was a murmur of consensus, subdued, fearful maybe because of all the old wounds being reopened. \"We were on the wrong side of the border also when the news came, none of us knew until that moment if we would be going or staying. My whole family, we walked from Syalcote across the border ... We maybe passed your family going the other way. The bodies piled high ... the trains pulling into stations full of dead families.... Hai Ram. What we have seen....\" (Syal 73) Sisters lost to mobs, Sikhs shearing their uncut hair in trains, men's heads chopped off as yanked-down trousers yielded evidence of circumcision--overhearing these stories, Meena realises that the past for her parents was no sentimental journey, but \"a murk","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"47 1","pages":"172-191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81008461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 24

The Uses of Interpretation in Hamlet 《哈姆雷特》中口译的运用

Alif Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/4047421

Leslie Croxford

{"title":"The Uses of Interpretation in Hamlet","authors":"Leslie Croxford","doi":"10.2307/4047421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4047421","url":null,"abstract":"Hamlet is the most problematic play ever written. Inconsistencies arise from the variousness of its medieval and Renaissance sources; from discrepancies between printed versions of Shakespeare's drama; and from a host of unresolved thematic and psychological problems, such as the famous question of why the Prince delays his revenge. Hence the endless interpreting of the play. Yet interpretation is not simply a matter for scholars and critics. The Prince and virtually every other main character indulges in it. Shakespeare, in giving interpretation this significance, bad to develop previous versions of the story. So when one considers the issue of interpretation in the play one is also examining a prime example of how texts undergo alteration from period to period. Specifically, there are two influences on the metamorphosis of Hamlet: the intellectual climate in which it was written and the nature of the sixteenth-century political world. Together, they put at Shakespeare's disposal transformations of his inherited versions that are highly revealing of his creative processes. Shakespeare gives important dramatic voice to a newly emergent form of Europe's early modern self. ********** T. S. Eliot called Hamlet \"the 'Mona Lisa' of literature.\" It is true. No other work has presented more uncertain meanings. Interpretation has thrived. Hamlet is quite simply \"the most problematic play ever written by Shakespeare or any other playwright.\" (1) Inconsistencies and difficulties derive from the dramatist's need to integrate his medieval and Renaissance sources. The various printed versions of the author's text have to be reconciled, but sometimes resist this. A host of deeper questions arise. Among the most celebrated are: what is the reason for the Prince's delay in revenging his father's murder; is his madness genuine or feigned; what is the true status of his feelings for Ophelia? Most of these questions do not admit of definitive solutions. Nor will there be a search here for possible answers to the second and third. For in the case of the thematic and psychological issues there is a seemingly impenetrable ambiguity. Ambiguity is, in fact, a striking characteristic of Shakespeare's work. Hence William Empson's continuous resort to him for examples in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Indeed he once wrote that a given sonnet, rather than having a single meaning, is more like a musical instrument on which the critic may play a variety of tunes. As it happens, Empson's image of the musical instrument is also used in Hamlet, by the Prince. It occurs on two occasions. Hamlet greets Horatio admiringly, saying what a well-balanced man he is. Those who combine passion and judgment harmoniously \"... are not a pipe for Fortune's finger/To sound what stop she please\" (III, ii, 70-71). (2) The image recurs soon after, once Claudius has burst out of the play within the play. Hamlet orders music. Then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive to ask the Prince to visit his mother","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"18 1","pages":"93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72656426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

A Wistful Lament for an Irrecoverable Loss 对无法挽回的损失的悲叹

Alif Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/4047417

D. Shoukri

{"title":"A Wistful Lament for an Irrecoverable Loss","authors":"D. Shoukri","doi":"10.2307/4047417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4047417","url":null,"abstract":"Reminiscing over the past while surrounded by ancient Egyptian temples in Luxor, the author of this testimonial essay reflects on the significance of the past in personal and collective consciousness. Drawing on her own experience, she views all search as inevitably linked to yearning for the irrecoverable first impression, la scene primitive. Her own specialization in medieval Latin literature did not conflict with her passion for modern literature. Modern texts captivate as they echo motifs from medieval, classical, and renaissance literatures. To truly appreciate the modern, one needs to recognize the richness of the past in it. ********** I write this in Luxor, an appropriate and agreeable place to seek out pasts, whether personal or historic; for, surely, all our searches are driven by the same nostalgia, a yearning for that irrecoverable first impression, that initial imprint staking out its territory of individual history in the collective consciousness. And the scene primitive for us who live in the present is primitive precisely in that it is an individualizing experience universally shared. Each of us seeks his beginnings because in our beginnings we hope to rejoin the grounds of our being, the ends beckoning to be reborn from which we spring, as though to recover a retrievable progenitor in lieu of the aimless and purposeless creator, powerless to repeat the singularity of his act in forming the one of its kind that each of us is. For always there is that in our beginnings which was underived from an end and which is irrecoverably lost in our end. Hence the immeasureable sadness of the individual death and hence the impetus to seek in the past for the long history of individual suffering reabsorbed into the universal consciousness, to comb the lived individual lives for whatever light they might shed on the individual journey, whatever spark might be shaken from past lives \"like shook foil,\" of understanding, or wisdom, or beauty. And here in Luxor is very close indeed to where our knowledge of individual lives and communities begins. I have been asked for a personal account of my own career with its shift of interest from the medieval to the modern and I find Luxor an appropriate place to jot down these thoughts and memories since it was to Egypt I came at the start of my teaching career where, in some ironic reversal I left the study of the past to examine the present. Upon reflection, it was perhaps more appropriate than might have appeared that in New York City, the matrix of modernity where I was born and lived, I should have sought out the past, and in Egypt, where civilization all began, I should have embraced the present and sought out the contemporary: \"In our beginnings are our ends; in our ends our beginnings.\" It is no wonder that a New Yorker should seek her bearings in the ancient world; there is nothing surprising in that she should scurry toward the contemporary having once ascertained the presence of the past. In all m","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"109 1","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79598334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

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