Commitment and Beyond

358 Pages·2017·4.92 MB·English

by  Friederike Pannewick

friederike pannewick / georges khalil
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reichert
195788-Pannewick-LitKon41.indd 1 22.09.15 09:44
195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 1 21.09.15 09:34
literaturen im kontext arabisch – persisch – türkisch
literatures in context arabic – persian – turkish

Vol. 41: Commitment and Beyond.
Reflections on/of the Political
in Arabic Literature since the 1940s
Series Editors
Verena Klemm (Universität Leipzig, Germany)
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (American University of Beirut, Lebanon)
Friederike Pannewick (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany)
Barbara Winckler (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany)
Advisory Board
Hülya Adak (Sabanci University, Turkey)
Roger Allen (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Sinan Antoon (New York University, USA)
Tarek El-Ariss (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Angelika Neuwirth (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Bilal Orfali (American University of Beirut, Lebanon)
Sunil Sharma (Boston University, USA)
Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2015
195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 2 21.09.15 09:34
Commitment and Beyond
Reflections on/of the Political
in Arabic Literature since the 1940s
Edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil
together with Yvonne Albers
Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2015
195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 3 21.09.15 09:34
Die Publikation wurde aus Mitteln
der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) unterstützt.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation
in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten
sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.
© 2015 Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden
ISBN: 978-3-95490-040-4
eISBN: 978-3-95490-613-0
www.reichert-verlag.de
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt.
Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urhebergesetzes ist ohne
Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar.
Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen,
Mikroverfilmungen und die Speicherung
und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.
Printed in Germany
195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 4 21.09.15 09:34
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................7
Yvonne Albers, Georges Khalil, Friederike Pannewick
Introduction: Tracks and Traces of Literary Commitment—
On Iltizām as an Ongoing Intellectual Project.......................................................................9
Part 1 Of Poetics and Politics: Revolution and Literary Commitment
Randa Aboubakr
The Egyptian Colloquial Poet as Popular Intellectual:
A Differentiated Manifestation of Commitment....................................................29
Atef Botros
Rewriting Resistance:
The Revival of Poetry of Dissent in Egypt after January 2011
(Surūr, Najm and Dunqul).....................................................................................45
Dina Heshmat
Egyptian Narratives of the 2011 Revolution:
Diary as a Medium of Reconciliation with the Political........................................63
Part 2 Roots of a Discourse: Historical Concepts of Literary Commitment
Elias Khoury
Beyond Commitment.............................................................................................79
Yoav Di-Capua
The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the “Fall of the Udabāʾ”.......................89
Rachid Ouaissa
On the Trail of Frantz Fanon...............................................................................105
Part 3 Refiguring Iltizām: Literary Commitment after 1967
Stephan Guth
Between Commitment and Marginalization:
The ‘Generation of the Sixties’ in the Sadat Era..................................................125
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi
The Arabic Novel between Aesthetic Concerns and the Causes of Man:
Commitment in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif......................143
Zeina G. Halabi
The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i:
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and the Fashioning of Political Commitment......................157
Refqa Abu-Remaileh
The Afterlives of Iltizām:
Emile Habibi through a Kanafaniesque Lens of Resistance Literature...............171
6 Table of Contents
Michael Allan
You, The Sacrificial Reader:
Poetics and Pronouns in Mahmoud Darwish’s “al-Qurbān”................................185
Leslie Tramontini
Molding the Clay:
Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb’s Concept of Colloquial Poetry as
Art of Resistance.................................................................................................201
Sinan Antoon
Sargūn Būluṣ’s Commitment...............................................................................213
Friederike Pannewick
From the Politicization of Theater to Individual Humanism:
Towards a New Concept of Engagement in the Theater of
Saadallah Wannous..............................................................................................221
Part 4 Commitment or Dissent? Contemporary Perspectives
Tarek El-Ariss
Fiction of Scandal................................................................................................237
Christian Junge
On Affect and Emotion as Dissent:
The Kifāya Rhetoric in Pre-Revolutionary Egyptian Literature..........................253
Charlotte Pardey
A Body of Dissenting Images:
Kamāl al-Riyāḥī’s Novel Al-Ghurillā Read as an Example of
Engaged Literature from Tunisia.........................................................................273
Stephan Milich
Narrating, Metaphorizing or Performing the Unforgettable?
The Politics of Trauma in Contemporary Arabic Literature................................285
Felix Lang
Redeemed from Politics:
Notions of Literary Legitimacy in the Lebanese Literary Field..........................303
Yvonne Albers
The Empty Chair:
On the Politics of Spectatorial Situatedness in the
Performances of Rabih Mroué.............................................................................317
Hanan Toukan
Whatever Happened to Iltizām?
Words in Arab Art after the Cold War..................................................................333
Notes on the Contributors..................................................................................................351
Acknowledgments
This volume is the outcome of an ongoing interest pursued by the Center for Near and Middle
Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and Europe in the Middle
East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME), a research program at the Berlin-based Forum
Transregionale Studien,1 namely to investigate the interplay between aesthetical practices and
politics in the Middle East. It draws in part on a conference entitled “Commitment and Dis-
sent in Arabic Literature since the 1950s” convened at the CNMS in June 2013 and organized
jointly by the research group Figures of Thought | Turning Points: Cultural Practices and So-
cial Change in the Arab World at the CNMS and EUME.2 The conference was a follow-up to
a EUME summer academy devoted to the theme “Aesthetics and Politics: Counter-Narratives,
New Publics, and the Role of Dissent in the Arab World” that was held in September 2012 at
the American University in Cairo,3 in cooperation with its Center for Translation Studies, the
Department of English Literature at Cairo University, and the CNMS.
Under the title “Aesthetics and Politics” the 2012 Cairo Summer Academy addressed the
role of dissent, new publics and counter-narratives. “Aesthetics and Politics” and “Culture and
Politics” were also the themes of the regular EUME Berliner Seminar in the winter term of
2012/13 and the summer term of 2013. Seminar sessions included presentations by EUME
fellows such as Tarek El-Ariss on “Fiction of Scandal: Literature, New Media and Revolu-
tionary Politics in the Arab World” or round-tables on “Culture, Class, Youth, Performativity
and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in the Arab World,” where a group of scholars
from the CNMS in Marburg presented their work to colleagues in Berlin. All of the contribu-
tors to this volume have been associated with these academies or involved in these events and
debates. Many have been fellows of EUME or are part of the CNMS-based research group
Turning Points.
The present volume is a part of this growing network based on common interests and
shared commitment, not only to scholarship as such but to actively fostering greater inclu-
siveness, more freedom, and what the late Edward Said described as democratic humanism.
We thus owe a heartfelt thankyou to all those without whom these encounters could not have
taken place: Samia Mehrez and Randa Aboubakr, who hosted the Summer School in Cairo;
the members of its steering committee, Samah Selim, Ayman El-Desouky, Elias Khoury,
Michael Allan, and Rachid Ouaissa; the Summer school’s organizational team, Manuela
Campos and Barbara Bishay (both EUME), and the organizational team of the Marburg
workshop, Yvonne Albers, Charlotte Pardey, and Ali Sonay (all CNMS).
The editors would also like to thank all institutions that have supported EUME and the
CNMS over the past years, the Forum Transregionale Studien, the Land of Berlin, the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation, the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and German
Research Foundation (DFG). We are grateful to the DFG (DFG-Leibniz-Prize) for granting
the generous financial support that has enabled the publication of this volume.
Our sincerest gratitude goes to all those directly involved in the realization of this volume.
First, we wish to express our gratitude to the contributors for their patience and perse-
verance during a two-year editorial process and their willingness to share their important
work and thus support this publication project.
8 Acknowledgments
In particular, the editors wish to thank Michael Allan who has taken the time to read and
comment critically on some chapters. His insights have helped shape and further sharpen
quite a few of the arguments in these chapters.
We would also like to express our deep gratitude to the editorial assistants Ricarda
Macco, Jessica Metz and Amina Nolte, whose meticulous work lies at the heart of this un-
dertaking. This book would be much the poorer without their unstinting dedication and at-
tentive diligence, which extended to even the smallest details of the style editing process.
A special thank goes to Abdellatif Aghsain and Hafid Zghouli who, despite a pressing
deadline, nevertheless took on the task of checking the Arabic of the complete manuscript.
We are also indebted to Paul Bowman, who reviewed the chapters, and our typesetter
Thomas Breier for their professionalism and perseverance over the last two years.
We have also greatly valued the kind support provided by the Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag
as well as the attractive presentation of the volume, so too Sigrun Kotb’s reliable assistance.
This book would not have been possible without Yvonne Albers, who has patiently and effi-
ciently supervised the entire editing process and communicated throughout the whole produc-
tion period with the authors. The co-editors would like to extend their sincere thanks and
gratitude to her. She was not only a source of inspiration creatively and intellectually but her
versatility and work ethic, qualities crucial for such a long-term project, were humbling.
* * *
The transliteration of Arabic names has been adapted according to the IJMES transliteration
system. However, some common names and notions have been left in their commonly used
spelling without further indication.

1 http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/about-us/profile.html; www.forum-transregionale-studien.de
2 The conference was funded by the Land of Berlin and the German Research Foundation (DFG). http://www.
eume-berlin.de/en/events/workshops/workshops-since-2006/commitment-and-dissent.html; https://www.uni-
marburg.de/cnms/forschung/denkfiguren-wendepunkte/aktivitaeten/konferenzen-workshops/conference-
commitment-dissent
3 http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/events/summer-academies/eume-summer-academies/2012-aesthetics-and-politics.
html
Introduction:
Tracks and Traces of Literary Commitment—
On Iltizām as an Ongoing Intellectual Project
Yvonne Albers, Georges Khalil, Friederike Pannewick
If one day the people will to live
Then destiny must reply;
The darkness must disappear,
And bonds must break.1

These are the lines of the poem “The Will to Live” (“Irādat al-ḥayāh”) written in 1933 by the
Tunisian poet Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī (1909‒1934) to which the rallying chant of the popu-
lar uprisings in the Arab world in 2011 responded: “The people want the fall of the re-
gime/system” (“Al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām”). Regimes indeed fell and history is evolving.
The euphoria sparked by the fall of authoritarian rulers in Tunisia and Egypt that year has
now evaporated. Current developments in many countries of the region seem to be heading
in different directions, towards greater fragmentation, sectarianism, and violence, witnessing
a resurgence of the paradigms of the old order, such as the outworn dichotomy of authoritari-
anism versus religious extremism. While the temptation of authoritarianism may be strong
now, and prove to be so in the years ahead, aspirations for a new era of democracy, human
dignity and social justice in the Middle East and North Africa persist. The popular uprisings
and ongoing struggles in the region are profoundly changing the political landscape. The
category of society and the political itself have resurfaced, once more attracting public atten-
tion. The struggle for a new order challenges those traditional paradigms employed to under-
stand the politics and culture in and about the region, burgeoning a new set of questions.
‘Revolution,’ as both a theoretical concept and a concrete practice, has facilitated the
emergence of innovative modes of critique and allowed the reconfiguring of individual sub-
jectivities and communal solidarities. ‘Revolution’ as a process is related to, shaped by, and
expressed in new aesthetic and political practices as well as new channels of communication.
Similar to other precedents evident in transitional moments in history, the imminent question
of literature’s contributory role in times of social change and upheaval is once again being
subjected to reevaluation, both by writers themselves as well as in scholarly debate. At the
heart of this endeavor lies the question as to the impact of literature on social reality and,