Studies in the Humanities articles from June 1 2003

Studies in the Humanities archives from June 1 2003

Introduction.
June 1, 2003... In the original call for papers for "Arabesque: Arabic Literature in Translation and Arab Diasporic Writing," this special number of Studies in the Humanities, we sought papers on a variety of topics concerning Arabic writers in translation and...

Exilic memories of war: Lebanese women writers looking back.
June 1, 2003... Redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands The necessary survival of any society depends on its confronting any hurdles that incapacitate its sense of collectivity...

Surpassing borders and "folded maps": Etel Adnan's location in there.
June 1, 2003... The translation of reality into language by a writer creates possibilities of interrogating conditions of human existence and aspects of recorded history. The poetics of movement across spatial, temporal, and political constructions by a poet...

Going the extra mile: redefining identity, home, and family in Hanan al-Shaykh's Only in London.
June 1, 2003... To live "elsewhere" means to continually find yourself involved in a conversation in which different identities are recognized, exchanged and mixed, but do not vanish. Here differences function not necessarily as barriers but...

Scattered like seeds: Palestinian prose goes global.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2003... This essay's title is borrowed from Shaw Dallal's 1998 novel, Scattered Like Seeds, a novel that, along with Ibrahim Fawal's On the Hills of God (1998), allows us to assess the shifting location of modern Palestinian literature. Both novels,...

The hyphenated identity and the question of belonging: a study of Samia Serageldin's The Cairo House.
June 1, 2003... The hyphenated identity is a term that implies a dual identity, an ethnocultural one, and evokes questions and debates regarding which side of the hyphen the person belongs to. Such questions often loom large in the minds of immigrants, those...

An interview with Samia Serageldin.(Interview)
June 1, 2003... Samia Serageldin's life has been divided into two parts. Born and raised in Cairo, she lived through, and witnessed first-hand, the political and social turmoil of the Nasser years and the disruptions that followed. Her semi-autobiographical...

Narrating England and Egypt: the hybrid fiction of Ahdaf Soueif.
June 1, 2003... Writing in The Guardian in September 1999, Andrew Marr was shocked that "the superstars of contemporary English literature aren't English, and haven't been for years." He refers to the finalists for that year's Booker Prize, which...

The diasporic memoirist as Saidian itinerant intellectual: a reading of Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage.
June 1, 2003... In her memoir, A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed tells her story of growing up in Egypt at about the time that the country acquired independence from the British, the complications of the process of weaning from the western ethos--to the extent...

Negotiating self in diaspora: historicizing Faiza Shereen's play The Country Within.
June 1, 2003... Distance from Egypt was like distance from self. Faiza Wahby Shereen's play The Country Within had its premiere presentation on Sunday, November 17, 1991. The play had been written several years earlier but was put "away in a drawer," (43)...

An interview with Miriam Cooke.(Interview)
June 1, 2003... Miriam Cooke has served the field of Arab studies as a distinguished author, translator, editor, and teacher. After earning her D.Phil. from Oxford University, she joined the faculty of Duke University in 1980. She has...

The contemporary Arabic novel as social history: urban decadence, politics and women in Naguib Mahfouz's fiction.
June 1, 2003... The Arabic novel, like any other regional version, is a product of the unfolding socio-political events in its enabling society. It has continued to undergo different stages of metamorphosis depending, of course, on the generation of writers...

An interview with Gamal El Ghitani.(Interview)
June 1, 2003... Translated by Mohamed El Nahal A bird may fly in other skies, but it will definitely return to its nest. Gamal El Ghitani Gamal El Ghitani is an Upper Egyptian who still uses his Upper Egyptian Johayni dialect at borne. As he says,...

El zar: a tool of oppression and liberation.
June 1, 2003... Out El Kouloub El Demerdashiyya uses the seemingly primitive practice of the zar or exorcism in the tale of Nazira to offer pointed feminist, literary, social and political critiques of the Egyptian society in the first half of the 20th...

An interview with Fatheya El Asaal.(Interview)
June 1, 2003... Translated by Maysa Hayward The dramatist, memoirist, and social activist Fatheya El Asaal lives in a special way. She lives the moment with its dynamic details and takes in everything, like a camcorder recording life in her memory. In the...

An interview with Salwa Bakr.(Interview)
June 1, 2003... Salwa Bakr is a prize-winning short story author and novelist. Her works often deal with history, including re-writing history as a way to critique the ideologies of the past and present. Her best-known work available in English are the nopel...

Arabic literature, Sans joy: introduction: Mohammed Barrada and psychic mobility.
June 1, 2003... Mohammed Barrada's 1979 short story, "Life by Installments" (1979), follows a class of disaffected cultured men who have become "conscious of the same feeling of disintegration in our bones, also an even gloomier melancholy (ka'aba)" (133)....

The face of the enemy: (61) Arab-American writing post-9/11.
June 1, 2003... Right now, the face of terror mostly looks like me. --Richard Montoya, "Anthems" The predicament of 9/11 was not only an American national security plight, it brought about a personal dilemma to...

Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba, eds. Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women's Novels.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba, eds. Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women's Novels. Syracuse University Press, 2003. In the first chapter of Intersections, Salma Khadra Jayyusi writes that...