In his first novel, Mersault contre-enquête (2013), Kamel Daoud names the unnamed “Arabe” from Albert Camus’s L’Étranger Musa and gives him a family to demonstrate how an event that served as a mere backdrop for Camus’s existential musings transformed the lives of Musa’s entire family. The novel caused a sensation in France and much of the Western world, garnering multiple prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, and translations in multiple languages, including English; however, its reception in Algeria has been much more critical due partially Daoud’s politics as expressed through his weekly newspaper column. Though Daoud is currently receiving the most attention for his engagement with Camus’s work, he is far from the only Algerian author to engage with Camus’s oeuvre. Spectres of Camus haunt many Algerian novels, from the early francophone novels of the 1950s to the novels of Assia Djebar and other contemporary authors, such as Hamid Grine. Be it with subtle gestures, such as a quotation at the beginning of a chapter, or through a narrative that explicitly centers on the pied-noir author, Algerian authors have continued to engage with Camus’s writing. These references are complicated by Camus’s position in Algerian literary society; he is critiqued for failing to present multidimensional Algerian characters or an honest portrait of Algerian society, even though the much of his work is set in or inspired by his childhood in Algeria. This paper analyzes the various ways Camus has been (re)written by the Algerian writer and how these works have been received in the West and in Algeria, lingering on the question of why a body of work that has been criticized for its absence of Algerians has nevertheless dominated their collective literary imagination. Examining the ways in which Camus—who straddles the line between Algerian and Frenchman—has been refracted through the lens of the Algerian writer sheds further light on the connections between Algeria and France, demonstrating the extent to which the spectre of colonization continues to haunt postcolonial Algeria. If authors such as Daoud do indeed see the French language as a “bien vacant,” they strives to fill it by (re)inserting the Algerian into cannoical French narratives such as Camus’s. Just as the French presence changed Algeria, Algerians impacted French culture, and Algerian writers’ creative (re)interpretations of Camus not only invite, but force, his readers to confront this fact.

The Middle Eastern studies today considers Ottoman literature a “pre-national” literature that prepared the ground for the 20th century Turkish nationalist novel and hence confines it to Turkish studies. I analyze Ziya Pasha’s Harabat ("Tavern," 1876)— a literary anthology that includes works in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chagatai from pre-Islamic times to late 19th century—as a work of comparative Middle Eastern literatures. I make a close reading of the anthology’s introduction, which is a comparative history of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and French literatures. These traditions constituted the Ottoman literary community’s intellectual formation during the late 19th century. I thus argue that Harabat crystallizes a key transitional moment for the Ottoman literary history: While it projects the works of these traditions as members of a textual corpus that defines a multilingual Ottoman literary elite whose members come from the empire’s cosmopolitan cities such as Beirut, Damascus, and Istanbul, Ziya Pasha’s introduction also includes instances that augur the emergence of later literary histories that project these texts as properties of national civilizations. To delineate this eventual transformation, I analyze Ziya Pasha’s anthology in conjunction with literary histories written after Harabat during the late Ottoman period such as Tarih-i edebiyat-i Osmaniye (History of Ottoman Literature) by Faik Reşat and Istılahat-ı Edebiye (Literary Terms) by Muallim Naci, which projected Arabic and Persian texts as “old classics” that influenced the Ottoman Turkish literature. This perspective signified the dissolution of a literary community whose identity relied on its ability to draw upon the reservoir of canonized Turkish, Persian, and Arabic texts. These works, which hitherto constituted a cultural reservoir that formed the basis for the Ottoman literary community’s identity, become akin to cultural ambassadors of nations and civilizations. The current Middle Eastern studies that creates stark divisions between classical and modern as well as among Iranian, Turkish, and Arabic studies has detrimental consequences for understanding the multilingual Ottoman literary community that strived to undermine these very divisions to maintain its cultural identity. Only a comparative framework that bridges these divisions can redefine Ottoman literature as a multilingual, imperial literature rather than the heritage of modern Turkish literature only.

Films produced within the Arab world particularly by Arab filmmakers have always provided scholars not only in the west but also in the Arab region a window into social life and its transformations from tradition to modernity. Film also serves as an important medium for the analysis of Arab domestic space since it pierces an eye into the interior space of the family that is otherwise guarded by silent walls. The paper will examine how spatial and social relationships form and transform over time in Cairo as articulated by director Hasan Al-Imam in the Cairo Trilogy: a film sequel adapted from Naguib Mahfouz’s three novels Palace Walk or Bayn Al-Qasrayn covering the period between 1917-1919; Palace of Desire or Qasr Al-Shuuq covering the period between 1924-1927, and Sugar Street or Al-Sukkariyya covering the period between 1935-1944. Through Al-Imam’s cinematic adaptation the traditions of a middle class Cairene family and the traditional nature and content of the Arab house as articulated by the Trilogy will be investigated. Moreover, I aim to look into the modalities of production through Mahfouz’s eyes, his nationalistic agenda at the time he wrote the novels (1956-1957) and the ways in which this may have augmented the narrative of the home space and its familial associations. My entry into the subject will be through the spaces that accommodate essential activities including sleeping or sexual relations (in most instances the bedroom); eating (in some cases a dinning room in others a living room); entering (as in spaces for guests and outsiders); and other outdoor private spaces (such as the courtyard or the roof). Summarily, the paper will focus on the ways in which Al-Imam’s articulation of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, had the capacity to present, construct, or reinvent the image of a Cairene house and it’s family- with a focus on the content of these traditions which included hyper patriarchy, subjugated femininity, the fluctuating traditions of the haptic and its gender dynamics, and the ways in which these cinematic representations articulated the changing physical domestic landscape through sets and décor.

Today, the temporal and geographical boundaries of the modern Arabic Nah?a are much disputed, and the question of its origins is a tense one. The word ‘nah?a’ itself has taken diverse paths; now generally translated or glossed as ‘renaissance’ or ‘revival’, it has reappeared in recent years in both political and cultural incarnations. However, the emergence of the term itself in modern times has rarely been examined directly. This paper therefore returns to the nineteenth century to examine early usages of the word 'nah?a', charting its shifts from a sort of synonym for ‘threshold’ or ‘stair’ (Lis?n al-'Arab, 1290), to a word meaning ‘energy', 'strength' or ' movement’ (Muh?t al-Muh?t, 1867), to a widely recognizable term signifying social transformation. This is not primarily an etymological study, nor does it posit yet another Nah?a origin: rather, it is an attempt to trace the early genealogy of a key concept in Arab modernity. I therefore examine mid-nineteenth century lexicographical and historical works by, among others, Ahmad F?ris al-Shidy?q, B?trus al-Bust?n? and Abd al-Rahm?n al-Jab?rt?; I both interrogate the ways they use and define the word ‘nah?a’, and pay attention to the places where they significantly do not. Informing close textual analysis with approaches drawn from translation studies and critical theory, I use these sources to complicate the imitative relationship between the Arabic Nah?a and the European Renaissance implied by current translations of the word as ‘renaissance’ or ‘Arab renaissance’. I find that although this connection exists in the early texts, it is by no means straightforward. The process by which ‘nah?a’ apparently came to denote (or at least to symbolise) an ideal of social and cultural change took place in a context of unevenly circulating texts and ideas, and encompassed multiple definitions, redefinitions, debates and disagreements. The term was, and surely remains, thoroughly unstable. This initial study will, I hope, make a contribution to our understanding of the early coalescence and conceptualisation of the Arab Nah?a, in addition to prompting an interrogation of some of the ways the term is used and translated today. Equally, the paper’s close focus on a single term and its translation I suggest provides more general insights into the ways in which cultural concepts travel and transform, and into the interactions between social and cultural movements across time and space.

In the prevailing narrative about modern Arabic literature, the latter emerges when writers free themselves from the shackles of traditional forms, such as the maqama and the qasida, and adopt the new forms of the West, notably the novel and short story, and later on and to a lesser extent, free verse. However, this formalist vision of Arabic literature is both reductive and eurocentric, and it fails to account for the complex relationship that Arabic literature maintained with European works, not only mimicking, but rewriting, parodying, and reinventing them. From the mid-nineteenth century to the second decade of the twentieth, the tension between budding nationalisms and European imperialism has translated into works that grapple with themes of familiarity and estrangement, self and other. In this paper, I analyze strangeness and estrangement through narratives of spatial alienation. This motif first manifests in the mid-nineteenth century in Arabic literature in travel narratives and variations thereof, with a genealogy stretching back not only to al-Tahtawi and to European orientalists, but also to 'aja'ib writings in the pre-modern and early modern periods--and generating variations and parodies. Analyzing hybrid narratives inspired both by European travel writing and an Arab literary tradition of the picaresque, such as al-Shidyaq's al-Saq 'ala al-Saq, Taymur's Nata'ij al-Ahwal fi al-Aqwal wa al-Af'al, and al-Muwaylihi's Hadith 'Isa Ibn Hisham, I argue that the colonizer's gaze is reshaped into an aesthetic of the bizarre as well as a metaphor for national alienation. Finally, far from dismissing these works as “embryonic” or attempts at novels, I make the case that they were paramount to the development of modern Arabic literature, and made possible the monumental novels of the twentieth century.