Relaunching the Arab Intellectual

One year after the 1967 June War, also known as al-naksa, the Syrian poet Adunis announced the launching of a new cultural journal: Mawaqif. The article discusses how that launch in 1968 became the point of culmination in the poet’s strategy to emancipate himself from the poetry journal Shiʿr after resigning from its editorial board in 1964. A close examination of Adunis’s public interventions before and right after 1967 and Mawaqif’s subsequent first issue will show how crisis narratives and the practice of periodical editing serve cultural actors as a strategy of intellectual self-fashioning to gain a distinct position in the cultural field of their time. Mawaqif would accordingly emerge not as a cultural product of the ‘crisis’ that the June War has allegedly constituted but as one of the cultural producers of this moment as a crisis.