{"title":"The city in Arabic literature: classical and modern perspectives","authors":"Brahim El Guabli","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2020.1747740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2020.1747740","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"16 1","pages":"149 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88925570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The poetry of Arab women from the pre-Islamic age to Andalusia","authors":"M. Al-Mallah","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2020.1855807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2020.1855807","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"68 1","pages":"152 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77192276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Steampunk without steam: The Book of Devices as Neo-Ottoman experimentation","authors":"Emrah Peksoy","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.1873521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.1873521","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Turkish author Ihsan Oktay Anar’s The Book of Devices (2017, Kitab-ı Hiyel) employs pseudo-steampunk characteristics in a pre-modern Ottoman context. The novel experiments with the possibility of steampunk’s expansion as a translated/adopted cultural element within the larger concept of world literature. I argue that The Book of Devices distorts the Anglo-American attitude of Neo-Victorianism as exemplified in steampunk. Anar’s (in)competence in depicting actual course of events in history, in portraying an imaginable technology that might work, and in forming a non-colonialist cultural background create a distorted example of an application of the steampunk genre in the Turkish setting. The book then comes to be an attempt to create a Neo-Ottoman mindset against Neo-Victorian expansion as reflected through steampunk. This way, though steampunk presents itself as “inhospitable” in that it resists outside intrusion from non-European experiments, Anar successfully merges it with modern Turkish literature to establish a local genre.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"56 1","pages":"83 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86791279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tony Kushner’s Homebody/ Kabul: A time of connection?","authors":"E. Hussein","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.1873520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.1873520","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study is of threefold. First, it investigates the way Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul was received when it first premiered a few months after the events of September 11. The timing is particularly important because considerable emphasis is often placed on the relevance of the play to the historical and political context as an important reason for the play’s success. Second, the study explores the way representative male and female Afghan characters are portrayed in the play, especially in comparison to their British counterparts. The discussion in this part shows how reviewers and critics considered the issue of characterization in Homebody/Kabul as another important measure for the play’s degree of success. Thirdly, the paper explores whether Homebody/Kabul did in fact succeed in offering an alternative perspective of the Afghan people and their culture that challenges the hegemonic, static, and considerably Orientalist discourse in the Western mainstream media.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"22 1","pages":"114 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75568513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Centering the black slave in Bahāʾ Ṭāhir’s Wāḥat al-ghurūb","authors":"Rania Mahmoud","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.1874141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.1874141","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper constructs the story of Niʿma, a Sudanese or Nubian slave in Bahāʾ Ṭāhir’s Wāḥat al-ghurūb (2006; Sunset Oasis 2009). Set in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt, the novel revisits the 1881–1882 Urābī Revolution and the subsequent British invasion. Through the male protagonist, Maḥmūd ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir and his relationship with Niʿma, his concubine, Wāḥat al-ghurūb re-evaluates Egypt’s nationalist rhetoric. Made to represent an essence of Egypt, Niʿma is denied her history and memory except as an exotic, jasmine-scented Scheherazade whose folktales captivate Maḥmūd, and whose sexuality satiates him. I argue that despite the absence of her voice Niʿma shows agency mainly through casting herself as an active storyteller and additionally through her decisions to stay with her masters after their bankruptcy, and later to leave the house when she realizes that Maḥmūd sees her as a commodity.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"38 1","pages":"100 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84528472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vernacular transactions: Aḥmad Shāmlū’s Persian translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry","authors":"Levi Thompson","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2020.1855809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2020.1855809","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1973, Iranian poet Aḥmad Shāmlū (d. 2000) published a collection of Persian translations of world poetry, Hamchūn kūchah-ī bī intihā (Like an Endless Alley). This collection includes the translation into Persian of fifty-three poems by Langston Hughes (d. 1967). In these translations, Shāmlū and his co-translator Ḥasan Fayyād make a point of juxtaposing standard written Persian with the spoken vernacular. For instance, in “Tarānih-yi ṣābkhūnih” (“Ballad of the Landlord,” 1940), they mirror Hughes' use of the vernacular “Don't you 'member I told you about it / Way last week?” by using spoken Persian rather than the standard written variety. Even the poem's title uses the vernacular “ṣābkhūnih” for “landlord” instead of the written “ṣāḥibkhānah.” This article addresses how Hughes's Persian translators' process of “bāzsāzī” rebuilding creates something new in the target language by carrying over Hughes's original vernacular instead of breaking it down.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"23 1","pages":"128 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88868702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghādat al-Ṣīn: the literary trace of Arab–China relations in the Nahda","authors":"Peiyu Yang","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2020.1862982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2020.1862982","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, Nahdawi writers increasingly turned their attention to China. This article explores the political and literary function representations of China served in Nahdawi discourse by examining Ṣāliḥ Jawdat’s 1889 Ghādat al-Ṣīn. By illustrating the triangular circuit of textual exchange through which Chinese cultural material entered Arab consciousness mediated by European translation, I demonstrate the political agency acquired by Nahdawi translators who modified and reappropriated the Orientalist strategies of power in European writing about China. Jawdat repurposes the European representation of Chinese men as incapable of self-rule, using these depictions of deficient East Asian masculinity to create a narrative space for female empowerment. What becomes apparent is that the key issues of the Nahda such as free marriage and women’s access to the public sphere took shape along axis of South-South relations.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"28 1","pages":"65 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81249326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Hope for Rain” by Ata Nahai","authors":"H. Heidari","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.1873504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.1873504","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"65 1","pages":"146 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76625515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pagan or Muslim? “Structures of feeling” and religious ambiguity in al-Khansāʾ","authors":"Marlé Hammond","doi":"10.1080/1475262x.2019.1697506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2019.1697506","url":null,"abstract":"The seventh-century poet al-Khansāʾ is perhaps the most renowned elegist in the Arabic poetic tradition. As a woman at the heart of the canon, she stands as a feminist icon. But her poetry and life...","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"71 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80306284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}