A decade before Che Guevara published his captivating call for the forging of a so-called “New Man, (“Socialism and Man in Cuba”, 1965), Arab intellectuals were already busy theorizing the very same persona. Postcolonial societies all over the world were thirsty for a clean break with colonialism and a new beginning which will be both modern and authentic, entirely new as well as respectfully old. While the idea of reinventing the human subject can be traced back to Enlightenment (and even before that), and have a long modern pedigree with Communism and other revolutionary societies, Arab intellectuals were not simply copying someone else’s agenda. To the contrary, they were attentive to the specific condition of the Arab world and envisioned something much wider than a state-lead pedagogical effort as in the Soviet Union. Specifically, similar to early Ba`thi theorists and at times inspired by them, they vied for a full ontological transformation that would forever alter the Arab nature of being. While this project was to be carried on a mass scale, the essence of change was to nest in each and every individual. Bearing an entirely new consciousness, this type of new human being will be selfless, resolute, free, rational, independent and would have the capacity for sacrifice on behalf of the common good of the masses. In other words, he will be a revolutionary man who will symbolize the re-birth of the sovereign Arab nation as a whole and the resurrection of its masses. Alas, this idealist project was not without problems. What about the “New Woman”? Was the “New Man” automatically assumed to be a masculine heterosexual male and if so what were the possible consequences of a revolutionary project that is modeled only on men? How could this new human subject be simultaneously both old and new? Was he assumed to be secular and yet carry the legacy of Islam? How was his authenticity theorized? Of equal importance given the revolutionary tasks ahead and the call for sacrifice, how was his relation to violence theorized? Based on a forgotten body of work from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, this paper revisits the remarkable ontological effort to create a new revolutionary subject; a project that affords us a more intimate understanding of revolutionary Arab societies than the common investigation of “big ideologies” such as Pan Arabism.

For three decades starting in 1959, thousands of Arab students each year studied in the USSR, the number growing every year to peak above 22,000 in 1989 (Katsakioris 2016, 2017). Most were in medical or technical fields, predominantly engineers instructed to tune out Soviet ideological teaching and focus on learning to use the machines. However, Arab countries also sent trainees in cultural fields such as journalism, cinema, theatre, and even literature. Since culture was their machinery, these ?ul?b ba`tha had to engage, often ambivalently, with the Soviet cultural system. They continued to do so upon return to their countries. While relatively few in number, the Soviet-trained intellectuals made a major impact on cultural production in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and even Morocco. Their writings in and about the USSR – and what their Soviet hosts wrote about them – constitute a barely explored archive of Arab intellectual history of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This paper will present some items from the early part of that archive, showing how they both complicate our received wisdom about Arab-Soviet educational ties (“Oh sure, you mean the Communists? The people who, when it rained in Moscow, raised their umbrellas in Baghdad?”) and offer new angles on Arab debates about committed art and political belonging.

Ba?thism had an unmistakable impact on the making of the twentieth-century Middle East, in Syria and Iraq, most importantly, but also in less remarked upon ways beyond those two countries. There are notable weaknesses, though, in the various attempts that have been made to explain its beginnings, its influence, and its legacies or afterlives. This paper focuses on the thought and writings of Michel ?Aflaq, and is part of a broader research project to reconstruct an intellectual genealogy of Ba?thism in modern Syria. ?Aflaq, perhaps the most important intellectual resource for the Ba?th—at least during the early period, and despite subsequent controversy surrounding his role and his legacy—remains stubbornly “wrapped in obscurity,” to borrow an expression from the late social historian Hanna Batatu. Re-reading ?Aflaq in conversation and conflict with his contemporaries and his heirs, therefore, can enable not only a reinterpretation of Ba?thism in Syria—as both intellectual and political project—but also a reconsideration of Arab intellectual history during the mid-twentieth century, between nationalism and liberalism, the religious and the secular. This paper contributes to the collective effort of the panel to demonstrate how a new generation of scholarship is shedding different light on mid-twentieth century Arab intellectual culture, a period ripe for further study by historians, literature scholars, and cultural critics.

During the 1960s, Egyptian colloquial poets worked at the center of radical Egyptian political movements. While scholars have observed this in different ways, they have treated these two fields of activity—poetry and contentious politics—as if they were relatively autonomous. This is odd given that poetic practices and performances are so entangled in the repertoires of modern Egyptian social movements that there is often no line between the activities of movement poetry and contentious politics itself. But what exactly was the role of movement poets within the protest cycle of 1968-1977 and what labor did such poetry perform? To address this this question, we need to move beyond the major poets of this period to see the much broader field of activists using poetry (and poetic performance) to engage in contentious politics, and poets engaging in contentious politics to develop their craft and audience. This essay draws on activist memoirs to develop the concept of “movement poetry” and explores the roles of poetry within the repertoires of contentious Egyptian politics during late 1960s. Shifting away from the purely linguistic and semantic aspects of poetry to the other dynamics of collective performances and repertoires, this paper conceptualizes “movement poetry” as a coherent field of aesthetic/political activity in itself, and argues that for movement poets, poetry is not just about what poems say, it is also about what poems—and poets—do. In this way movement poetry creates a discursive context that enables and fuels contentious politics or, in the language of social movement theory, poetry works to “frame” insurgent politics by thematizing issues, articulating complaints, and setting demands. And, perhaps more importantly, as an embodied and ritualized collective practice, movement poetry contributes centrally to the labor of (micro)mobilization.

This paper explores the genealogy of philosophical personalism, a little studied but highly significant strand of Lebanese intellectual life in the 1950s and 60s. Personalism was a neo-Thomist movement that argued for a spiritualist “third way” between individualist Liberalism and totalitarian Communism. Its most prominent international advocate was the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who supplied much of the intellectual framework for the post-war discourse of human rights. But its most prominent exponent in the Arab world was Charles Malik--the founder AUB's philosophy department in the late 1930s, and later a prominent diplomat (and uncle to Edward Said). This paper will examine the writings and pedagogical impact of Malik on a generation of Lebanese intellectuals, including Yusuf al-Khal, Hisham Sharabi, and Rene Habashi. It will examine how several tropes of personalism made their way into the poetry of the Shi'r magazine group--including Adonis and Unsi al-Hajj--and how it engaged rival humanisms of the period.