World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

· NOT_DEFINED date: WED 21, 5-7 pm

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: Chair: Sibel Irzik (Professor, Sabanci University, Turkey)

Paper presenter: Hessa Alghadeer (Assistant Professor of English Literature, College of Languages and Translation), « Shrouded Mystery: Gender and Cultural Representations of Saudi Women in The Unfurling”
There has been a growing interest in gender and cultural representations stimulating a great deal of scholarly investigation to date, however, several poetic texts by contemporary Middle Eastern Anglophone women writers, have received minor critical attention. Against a backdrop of extended history of misrepresentations of Middle Eastern women coexisting with complex interrelations with Islam, the paper delves into a diversity of poetic texts related to Nimah Ismail Nawwab's collection; The Unfurling (2004). Situated within a context of gender and cultural representations, the present research paper aims to demonstrate how far the newly emergent Saudi Anglophone poetess succeeds to dismantle the prevalent repertoire of subordinate representations of Saudi women in western discourse. To achieve this primary objective, I analyze four major prototypes of Nawwab's women characters: the revolutionary figure, the indomitable woman, the masked figure, and the political-activist. Eventually, the undertaken prototypes are meant to draw a realistic multifaceted portrayal of women in the Saudi community let alone promote inter-cultural understanding.

Paper presenter: Eliane Ursula Ettmueller (PhD Candidate in Islamic Studies, Cluster of Excellence of Heidelberg University), “The Early Rise of the Egyptian National Conscience in the Dichotomic Picturing of James Sanua’s Satire”
The Egyptian playwright, freemason, journalist and political activist James Sanua (1839-1912), was among the intellectuals who focused their publishing efforts, during the last three decades of the 19th century, on the building of a national conscience among their countrymen. It was Sanua’s aim, in accordance with the support and the teachings of Djamal ad-Din al-Afgha'ni and Muhammad Abduh, to establish a political public opinion in Egypt which might guide the country on its way to the conquest of complete freedom from foreign dominance and to the establishment of democratic rule. In order to reach the masses and lead them to the finding of their new identity, Sanua published satirical magazines for over 30 years. Before he smoothly transformed himself into his journalistic alter-ego, Abu Nazzara (the man with glasses), Sanua had become famous, at the beginning of the 1870s, for being the Egyptian Molière, the founder of the Egyptian theatre. His experience as a playwright and theater director made him become aware of the importance of pictorial material for the communication of his political message. He therefore brought a variety of literary genres with clearly visual features together in his journalistic publications -such as the travelogue, the play or sketch, the dialogue, the verses of colloquial poetry and the caricature. By the use of these genres he was sure to reach the mostly illiterate Egyptian masses who would gather in a coffee shop, listen his newspaper being read out, memorize the colloquial verses and discuss the caricature. Sanua, even by the means of his own visual metamorphosis form the Khawa'ga James Sanua to the Shaykh Abu Nazzara, portrayed the modelling of the citizen for an Egyptian nation. He displayed the confrontation of the country's enemy versus the public friend and enhanced the common support of the latter. This paper aims to disentangle the dichotomy construction which Sanua uses for the establishing of the Egyptian national identity and to approach his definition of the ahl al-balad (the Egyptian people).

Paper presenter: Randa Abou-bakr (Professor, Cairo University, Egypt), “Contemporary Arabic Prison Poetry and the Politics of Space”
Without going into details of what constitutes prison writing, or of the boundaries and generic markers of the term, this presentation investigates contemporary prison poetry written by political prisoners in various parts of the Arab world, such as Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Morocco, with the purpose of assessing how the space of prison influences the writing. Theories of space that have been formulated during the latter part of the twentieth century have emphasized the power inherent in the organisation of space, and hence the latter’s ability to influence action and social relations. By extending the analogy to prison writing/poetry, space can be seen to play a substantial role in shaping prisoners’ literary responses to the experience of incarceration. We have also learnt from contemporary space theories that space does not only produce/determine action, but is in itself also produced through social practices and relations. In the same way, imprisoned poets produce space, albeit through individual interaction with, and reflection on, the confined space of the prison and the prison cell. Prison poetry represents the prisoner’s manoeuvres round the hostile and claustrophobic space of incarceration, as well as the interaction between actual and imagined spaces. I will be making use of the larger framework of contemporary space theory, especially as developed by Edward Soja (1989), Henri Lefebvre (1991), Felix Guattari and Gilles Delueze (1988), and M. de Certeau (1984), while bearing in mind that such theoretical formulations are mainly focused on urban spaces, and are minimally concerned with confined spaces such as that of the prison. Therefore, I complement my theoretical framework by making use of studies of prison writing that have attempted to account for the element of space in prison. Particularly relevant are concepts such as prison as a hostile space (Elizabeth Eirwen Oswald, 2007), the translation of space (Ioan Davies, 1990), collective individuality (Patricia Liggins-Hills, 1980), and re-institutionalisation (Paul Gready, 1993). I consider strategies such as: the recreation of claustrophobia, the representation of violence and death, and the recreation of physical movement, the representation of human relations, the production of collectivity, and the production of imaginary spaces, among others. I also briefly address the specificity and controversial nature of the term “political prisoner”. My aim is to contribute to the scholarship of an under-researched, though widely written, variety of literary production, particularly from a comparative perspective.