Discussions on contemporary Syrian arts centers predominantly around responses to the ongoing crisis. This panel seeks to historicize literary and cultural production from Syria and highlight continuities and ruptures between past and present modes of expression within larger timeframes. On what terms can we re-examine 20th-century Syrian media production, meta-literary discourse, novelistic and poetic writing? How to construe dynamics of secularism, piety and modernity, historical representation and textual experimentation in Baathist Syria? What are the legacies, genealogies, canons and critical paradigms of this modernity? What are the salient characteristics and institutions of literary autonomy cultivated in a state-controlled cultural environment? In addition, the panel will shift emphasis from questions of writing/production in wake of collective disaster to questions of reading/reception: what happens to the value of texts from Baathist Syria in the current moment of massive displacement and anguish? What texts/authors/critics/translators/thinkers increase in relevance or age badly, what experiences are discarded, excavated or revisited with the change of perception caused by the historical sea-change? How has the revolution and the ensuing war changed habits of reading and participation in debates of historiography, the politics of memory, cultural politics? How is Syria imaginatively re-mapped in light of these changes? How are connections with foreign cultures and other Arab modernisms affected?
The panel welcomes papers that explore cross-artistic and cross-cultural exchanges specific to Syrian culture in a range of genres, media, and time-periods (from the 1950s onwards). Broad-minded interdisciplinary approaches to literary historiography, cultural history, and sociology of the arts are likewise encouraged. Some areas and topics that participants are invited (but not exclusively obliged) to discuss:
- Formal experimentation and mimetic verisimilitude;
- Intertextuality and translation in postcolonial or state-sponsored world literature;
- Representations of place and displacement before and after 2011;
- The sociology of the Syrian champ littéraire, evolution of literary institutions and history of publishing;
- Soviet models of cultural engagement vs. ideals of Arab authenticity;
- Official culture vs. cultures of dissidence;
- Neo-Sufism, esotericism and the occult as political;
- Ethnic, religious and minority literatures under the Baath;
- Struggles of urban vs. rustic in Syrian literature, propaganda, and media.
The overall goal is to resist the full immersion in the fuzziness of the present and thus gain a sense of proportion with regard to the outpour of current artistic production. Our moment requires posing counterweight to present views of Syria as nothing but a disaster-struck site of carnage.
This paper will summarize and examine the activities and ideas cultivated in al-multaq? al-adab? li-j?mi?at h?alab (The Literary Forum at the University of Aleppo). Established in the early 1980s when the city of Aleppo was gripped by civil uproar and state violence, this Forum assembled some of Syria’s finest independent-minded thinkers and writers to create a space of intellectual rigor and literary experimentation. The culture critic Muh?ammad Jam?l B?r?t thought up the idea of a cultural forum as antidote to the climate of political intolerance, decided on its format and events, and composed its inaugural charter. He engaged the young Forum members in a thorough reckoning with the poetic and critical legacy of Ad?n?s and Majallat Shi?r. His co-organizer Fu??d Mir??, in turn, worked to soften and de-radicalize Sovietized modes of literary ideology prevalent in Syrian official discourse. The Forum members, I will argue, devised a plan and a poetics for coping with their moment’s crises of culture based on informed connections with both an Arab tradition of modernity and a global space of intellectual and literary enterprise. The continuous in-depth conversations it fostered were ultimately conducive to a change of sensibility in both the novel and the prose poem under conditions of extreme political duress and material deprivation. I will discuss the significance of these shifts and frame them within the context of the Forum’s overarching critical project, its selective uses of literary theory and translation and its re-orientation of modern Syrian literature. What is the lasting impact (if any) of this collective undertaking in the otherwise bleak cultural life of Baathist Syria? I will propose hypotheses about the continuity of the Forum’s achievements into the 21st century.
Historical fiction has been a mainstay of Syrian literary history throughout the 20th century. Historical fictions broadly speaking yield multiple readings and functions, such as filling in historical gaps left out by official histories; cooption by the State as exemplars of the past to influence the present; to provide alternative versions of major historical events, inscribing peripheral, ignored, and often minority voices into the historical record. Notably, these works tend to adhere to mimetic renderings of these events.
Very generally speaking, before the onset of the 2011 revolution that has resulted in the dismantling of numerous socio-political and cultural foundations, minimal experimental fiction had been produced in Syria (Selim Barakat and much prison literature being among the few exceptions). Situating the analysis in a theoretical framework of neo-historical fiction, this paper will explore the relationship of experimental writing to historical fictions. A sub-genre of contemporary historical novels, neo-historical fiction is not a mere return to a historical epoch, but rather a self-conscious return to re-tell, re-investigate, re-analyze, and as such even re-historicize. Looking closely at a handful of novels (limited to al-Rahib’s Rasamtu khattan fi-l-ramal, 1999 and Haydar’s Marathi al-ayyam, 2001 at the time of this writing), the paper intends to address the following issues and questions: How does history fit into the fiction? What is the interplay between the history, narrative, and aesthetic? What are the modes of experimentation the fictions project and what may that tell us of their contemporary moments?
By focusing on the experimental within one genre of literary production, this paper hopes to participate in a larger discussion that historicizes modernist tendencies in Syrian literature.
Any attempt to historicize literary and cultural production from Syria cannot fail to notice the neglect for the role that Islam and Islamism have played, particularly as a model against which canons and critical paradigms of modernity in Ba‘athist Syria have been constructed. The remarkable impact and popularity of Islamist ideologies – in their various conformations and orientations – in Muslim majority countries, particularly its unresolved confrontation with authoritarian regimes in the Arab World, have elicited the interest of political scientists, yet their impact on the literary and creative realms have received considerably little consideration.
This is particularly striking if compared with the relevance Arabic literature scholars have assigned to socialist, nationalist and emancipatory ideologies, their influence on modern Arabic literature, and how they have shaped its poetics and themes. Syria is no exception, and from a postcolonial point of view a deeper understanding of the country’s cultural trajectory up until the 2011 Revolution must take into account the struggle between the secular, modernizing ideology of the Ba‘ath party and the increasingly popular Islamist project which have shaped the country’s history and cultural arena in the decades following independence.
This paper engages with the works of Zakariyya Tamir and Khalid Khalifa as authors widely acknowledged to have influenced entire generations of Syrian writers and whose novels and short stories have enjoyed wide circulation in Europe and North America. What do creative practitioners and purveyors of culture such as Tamir and Khalifa project as Islamism and what do they make of it? What is the significance of Islamist subjectivities, trajectories, idioms and visions as these are represented in these two authors’ works?
In particular, drawing on Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, as well as Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Covering Islam, this paper looks at the evolution of the supposedly dissident and anti-authoritarian character of Tamir and Khalifa’s work against the backdrop of the modernity vs. Islam split, and their role in this struggle for symbolic power. Motivating this is the desire to explore the extent to which their protagonists deconstruct the secular vs. Islamist dichotomy through which modernization has been traditionally framed in Syria.
The official aspect of Syrian culture has been for long shaped and controlled by wizarat al-thaqafa, or the Ministry of Culture in a country whose government for long prided itself as culturally progressive. The history of this important government department reflects the political developments of the country, and the cultural activities and materials it produces deeply influence the intellectual development of Syrian society. I argue in this article that even though the Ministry is part of the Syrian government and regime, it attempts to be a more independent and democratic enterprise that produces a great deal of cultural resources and allows artistic and intellectual spaces for the Syrian public. Many Syrian voices of dissent were provoked by the performance of the Ministry which is often viewed as an extension of the leading Ba’ath Party and its outdated literature and ideologies. This Ministry has impacted for decades the culture of Syria, where being sponsored by the regime implies often serving it exclusively. Through it, the regime attempted to control public and private media outlets and the educational system to pass its discourse to the public. This paper shows that the Ministry of Culture has sometimes successfully escaped serving as a mouthpiece for the party. Its role in Syrian cultural development goes beyond offering legitimation to the regime in exchange for institutional support. It also aims to demonstrate how the way we view and understand cultural outputs in Syria enables us to comprehend the complexities of the country.
