When Maḥfūẓ wrote about the 1967 defeat: (Re)reading Taḥt al-miẓalla (1969) and al-Ḥubb taḥt al-maṭar (1973, 2023)

The 1967 defeat remains one of the most dreadful moments in modern Arab history. Rapid and violent, it shook the foundations of the political order and dismantled the myth of Nasser and his anti-colonial project. This crisis had lasting consequences...

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Prison nostalgia and the collapse of emancipatory futures: Women‘s writings from the Egyptian prison of al-Qanāṭir al-Ḫayriyya

During the 1960s and 1970s, many intellectuals and ordinary citizens in Egypt were imprisoned and detained for political reasons. Many of them wrote about their experiences, creating a corpus of prison memoirs known by the Arabic name of adab al-suğū...

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Poetics of commitment: Raḍwā ʿĀšūr reads Ġassān Kanafānī’s fiction in al-Ṭarīq ilā al-ḫayma al-uḫrā (‘The way to the other tent,’ 1981) and al-Ṭanṭūriyya (‘The woman from Tantoura,’ 2010)

This article aims discusses how Raḍwā ʿĀšūr (1946-2014), an Egyptian academic, novelist and activist, critically analyzed and subsequently intertextually engaged with the fiction of Palestinian author Ġassān  Kanafānī in two works: the essay al-...

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The politics of imagining the West in the Egyptian novel: Resignifications of the European woman trope from the 1960s to the Arab Spring

This article is a study in the poetics and politics of imagining the West in modern Arabic literature. It focuses on the deployment of the European woman trope in four Egyptian novels published between 1959 and 2012 and describes the re-enactment and...

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Understanding political violence in culture: Critical reflections on trauma theory and contemporary Arabic literature

This article deals with the question of adequate approaches to the study of trauma representations in contemporary Arabic literature.  After a critique and further development of trauma theories and concepts that are still frequently used today...

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Experimenting with Ṭabaqāt and Muʿğam: A history of modern Egypt through the biographies of ordinary citizens in Ḥadīṯ al-ṣabāḥ wa-l-masāʾ by Nağīb Maḥfūẓ

Inspired by the search for an authentic literature, several Arab writers have experimented with their literary tradition after the cultural turn that followed 1967. Among them, the Egyptian novelist Nağīb Maḥfūẓ (1911-2006), who, determined to find a...

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Telling the real: Literary reportage in contemporary Arabic literature

The objective of this paper is to delineate the recent evolution and innovations of literary reportage in contemporary Arabic literature, a genre of considerable significance for a number of reasons, primarily due to its capacity to engender a novel...

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Tensions of discourse in Muḏakkirāt miṯliyya by Fāṭima al-Zahrā’ Amzkār: A sensational example of gendered representation through fictional autobiography

Fāṭima al-Zahrā’ Amzkār’s debut novel, Muḏakkirāt miṯliyya (‘Memoirs of a Lesbian,’ 2022), caused a scandal in Morocco when it was banned from Rabat’s 2022 International Book Fair. This article first examines the expectations generated by the novel’s...

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Comment écrire la dévastation ? Documenter, filtrer et réélaborer le réel dans Bawwābāt arḍ al-ʻadam et al-Maššā’a de Samar Yazbik

The upheavals that have shaken Syria since 2011 have profoundly impacted the evolution of the literary sphere. This is particularly evident when examining the transformation of the relationship between fiction and reality in the novelistic production...

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Narrating trauma in women‘s literature: Exploring South Sudan and Darfur in Arwāḥ Iddū (‘Edo’s Souls’) by Istīlā Qāytānū and ‘Tears of the desert’ by Ḥalīmah Bašīr

This article examines the lived experiences of women in South Sudan and Darfur, the coping mechanisms they developed in response to wartime trauma, and the ways these experiences are both shaped by and reflected in the traumatic literature authored b...

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Arab writers: writing amid crises

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