My talk will discuss attempts at collaborative poetic writing in Arabic literature. It will introduce a set of practical and theoretical concerns regarding the styles, forms, languages, and performative affect of collaborative poetics among Arab poets. First, I will analyze how collective composition works in the Arabic tradition and what historical circumstances give rise to it. I will frame this discussion within the framework of “poetry and the commons”, which refines our conception of how poetic language helps shape commonality and community. The commons created by poetry can be conceptualized as an imaginary ḥayyiz mussayaj (an enclosed space) or cooperative taḍāfur (tight interweaving, mutual assistance) that comes into existence to counteract the disintegration of al-ḥayyiz al-ʿām (public space) in Arab countries. It rejects the hostility between social groups by nurturing values of solidarity, affection, and shared initiative. To generate this alternative space, the construct of the solitary romantic artist is dismantled, and modes of writing that aspire for community-building effect take its place. In Arabic poetry, the turn towards collaboration has critical ramifications for the poem’s language and for reimagining the gaps between stylized expression and common life. The corpus I study starts from the 1947 surrealist poetry collection Siryāl and reaches the 2011 collage of Syrian poets titled Mundhir Maṣrī wa-Shurakāh (Mundhir Masri and Co.). Analyzing this body of works will give a fresh perspective on central notions in the intellectual history of the Arab 20th century such as iltizām and the “unmaking of the Arab intellectual” (Halabi), cultural authenticity (aṣāla) and modernity (ḥadātha), exile and postcolonial subjectivity. What can we learn about the literary and intellectual history of the Arab world from looking at the ways in which Arab artists collaborate and present the products of their shared probing of the collective psyche?

Contemporary Arabic hip-hop exhibits many literary features, and scholars of Arabic poetics would be remiss in ignoring hip-hop lyricism as a popular literary phenomenon. This paper, part of a larger project on Arabic hip-hop poetics, examines the role of Arabic rhetorical devices in the 2019 album Sindibād el Ward by the Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed. Specifically, the paper explores salient instances of two classic markers of innovation within the Arabic literary-cultural tradition (turāth): ṭibāq (antithesis) and jinās (paronomasia or wordplay). In doing so, the project engages with larger, ongoing debates on high and low culture in Arabic, language ideology, and the aesthetic consequences of the Oslo Accords. The paper argues that these rhetorical devices serve two complementary functions. First, they situate contemporary rappers within an aesthetic of innovation that evokes the ʿAbbāsid-era badīʿ mode as well as the culture of rhetorical creativity that sprang up around it. Just as ṭibāq and jinās came to be identified with medieval literary innovation, the two features mark hip-hop songs as objects of craft. Likewise, discrete hip-hop “scenes” have developed around particular rappers and music collectives, bringing to mind the affiliative character of ʿAbbāsid badīʿ, in which the “in-group” adopted sartorial and behavioral practices that distinguished them from the uninitiated. The paper’s comparative approach will demonstrate how ṭibāq and jinās are yet again marking a flowering of poetic creativity. Second, the paper argues that ṭibāq and jinās in contemporary Arabic hip-hop function as they have throughout Arabic’s literary history, adding formal elements that broaden the text’s possibilities for signification. For example, the paper’s title references an instance of ṭibāq in Shabjdeed’s NKD GLG (“Misery, Anxiety”): “we drink fire to chill out.” The line’s antithesis (fire/chill) draws attention to the extremes of Palestinian life, and its reference to drug use (“drinking fire” could refer to consuming alcohol or cannabis) invokes a means Palestinians might use to cope with life under Israeli occupation. Throughout the songs under consideration in the paper, ṭibāq and jinās reinforce the sociopolitical commentary Shabjdeed and his collaborators make about the realities of daily life for Palestinians. In depicting Palestinians’ lived experiences, Palestinian hip-hop therefore has much in common with the origins of the genre, which began as an expression of the struggles of U.S. Black and Latinx communities.

Through a reading of the prison writings of the Kurdish human rights lawyer and politician Selahattin Demirtaş, this paper will explore Demirtaş's multifaceted understanding of literature as fiction (kurgu). Demirtaş, who had no prior literary career, has published five works in Turkish since his incarceration in 2016 in a F-type maximum-security prison in Edirne in northwestern Turkey. These are the short story collections Seher (Dipnot, 2017), Devran (İletişim, 2019), and DAD (Dipnot, 2023) and the novels Leylan (Dipnot, 2020) and Efsun (Dipnot, 2021). (Thus far only Seher is available in English translation.) In his work Demirtaş enters the house of literature as a guest (hostis) and unashamedly embraces this feminized and otherwise undervalued domain as “the backbone of any culture” and “the vanguard of critical thinking.” I would suggest that on the strength of this commitment alone, literary critics should take his work seriously. Existing criticism in English has thus far focused on Dawn and its circulation in media networks. Rejecting the reduction of Demirtaş’s literary politics to a global media activism (“social” or otherwise), my paper will focus on the more substantive imperatives of his prison literature. Focusing on Demirtaş’s use of embedded narration and (meta)fictionality in his understudied novel Efsun, I will explore his thematization of authorship in the light of Hannah Arendt’s enduring essay “Truth and Politics.” I will suggest that like Arendt, Demirtaş recognizes fiction as danger: appropriated by totalitarian and authoritarian rule, fictionality is turned toward the annihilation of reality and its substitution by simulacra. But as Efsun and other writings demonstrate, fiction has also served as an opening to gendered alterity in Demirtaş’s work. In thus reminding us of the capacity of fiction to form nonidentitarian collectivities, he has developed a more sophisticated understanding of the power of literature than that which was available to Arendt. Literature matters here because it is a means of saving the truth, of freeing fictionality from the absolutism of the state, and of generalizing fiction as a ground of democracy.

This paper will look at collaborative and experimental music production in Lebanon as a site for curatorial activism (Reilly 2018) and homemaking practices in urban Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Beirut after the 2020 Port explosion and during the ongoing economic crisis, I argue that social and economic developments not only affect the labour conditions of music producers, musicians and consumers of non-state funded music in Lebanon but forges an affective network of practitioners and listeners with shared intimacies, vulnerabilities, lack of control and friendship as central themes in contemporary artistic practices. Sharing research findings from participant-observation during the festival season in Beirut, I present findings in the affective dimensions of artist-led institutions and cultural NGOs since the Port explosion that challenges neocolonial cultural policy frameworks and funding programmes in the SWANA region and European embassies stationed in Lebanon. Drawing on scholarly findings in the field of anthropology, ethnomusicology, media studies, and Middle Eastern studies (Thomas 2007, Swedenburg 2013, El-Ghadhban and Strohm 2013, Ventura 2017, Sprengel 2020), I look at the way narratives on liberation politics and modernity in Lebanon have shaped and continue to shape the productive capacities, emotional labour, and care work, of musicians, institutions and NGO funding for arts and culture in the SWANA region. In the context of alternatives themes outside resistance and politicised themes, the notion of “home” frequently came up in interviews with interlocutors in Beirut as a way of describing the affective networks that connect musicians with their city as a place that emotionally affects musicians in their practice and choice to stay and build platforms that work outside official cultural institutions. In analysing the song “Home is so sad” by Lebanese dream pop band Postcards and adjacent networks of producers and musicians, this paper draws on ambivalent feelings about “home” outside the public eye that act as a crucial counter narrative around musical practices and reflects on Beirut as both a psycho-social and physical space and ways to feel home in the uncanny (Freud 1919, Clack 2008).