Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998) is one of the most prolific and controversial Arab poets of all time. In his extensive poetic oeuvre, and along with his peer poets, he shaped Arab culture and politics. What is unique about Qabbani is his ability to reinvent his language and bring Arabic politics and culture to the forefront of poetic discussions without compromising on aesthetics. This paper offers a close reading of Qabbani’s poem “The Complete Court Report of a Political Abduction Incident,” which speaks afresh to the status quo in the Arab world, and more specifically to the refugee crisis in Syria despite being written some 40 years ago. Qabbani questions the predominant narratives of Arab history, religion, and literature. He envisions the future of the Arab world either in a revolution where Arab leaders are attacked in their palaces and ousted by the people, or in a major refugee crisis where the people are ousted by their leaders. The paper argues that through his use of imagery and rhetorical language, Qabbani defends the people against the regime in this court trial, offering a complete account of an abduction incident that has been taking place in the Arab world without being reported or fairly tried. In ironically offering a poetic apology to oppressor-forces that crush Arab individuals and undermine their humanity, Qabbani reveals a history of systemic oppression in the Arab world and incites his people to revolt if they want to stop their abduction from continuing indefinitely. Towards the end of the poem, Qabbani speaks for his scattered fellow Arabs, particularly refugees who are denied entry by airports across the world: “Forgive us if we piled on the ship like a herd of sheep/ forgive us if we were displaced in all the oceans in the world for years and years/ for the valleys and the ports have rejected us/ and the airports that welcome birds day and night rejected us/ the sun of oppression everywhere has burnt us.” The paper engages in questions such as: how did the religious and political oppression in the Arab world lead to the Syrian refugee crisis? What is unique about Qabbani’s poem as a poetic response to injustice? How do Arab states use manipulated narratives of religion, history and literature to misinform, indoctrinate and oppress Arab citizens? What does it take, from this poetic standpoint, for change to take place in the Arab world?

Al-Quds/Jerusalem between the East and the West: Images of the Holy City in Arabic and English Poetry This paper examines representations and treatments of Jerusalem in selections of poetry in English and Arabic. The paper argues that these poems not only differ in language, but in far more significant ways as well. First all of the Arabic poems, even from widely different time periods, visualize the city as an actual city lived in by actual people, while the English poems represent Jerusalem in almost complete allegorical and symbolic ways. But even more important, it also becomes evident, in terms of the very real contest for identify that Jerusalem is now undergoing, the Arabic poems express the voices of actual inhabitants of the city while the English poems represent an imposed identity derived from the dominant discourse of the colonial powers whose helicopter gunships, teargas and bulldozers are in the process of erasing the Arab character of the city and impose an image derived from Western and ultimately Biblical resources. Though these Arabic poems are universally known, sung, listened to and wept over in the Arab world, they are unknown in the West except to a small number of people who have been educated in the contemporary culture of Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. This paper challenges the dominant discourse, i.e., to control the relevance of popular poetry with their cultural archetypes and myths to the actualities of what Foucault defined as the discourse of power. The dominant discourse, as Keith Whitelam has expressed it so eloquently has excluded the voices of the people of Al-Quds, the real city, in favor of an allegorical and a historic notion of Jerusalem as a useful tool of imperial designs on the Middle East. The paper stretches the discourse and brings these voices into immediate confrontation with the more central poetry of that canon. The Arabic poems the paper examines are: “On al-Quds” by Shiha ad-Din al-Mujawir, “he Night Song of the Bow Strings” by Muzzafer Al-Nawwab, the third and fourth poems are two popular songs sung by the widely known contemporary Lebanese female singer Fayruz: “The Flower of Cities” and “The Ancient al-Quds,” and finally “The Sorrowful City” by the contemporary Palestinian poet Harun Hashim Rashid. The English poems are: “Psalm 137” by William Blake, “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” and “The Holy City” by Frederick E. Weatherly.

In Geographies of Light (2009), Palestinian-American poet Lisa Suhair Majaj embarks on a poetic journey that breaks through linear temporalities, artificial boundaries and insurmountable distances to dream of an alternative way of dwelling in the world that is not partitioned by national borders. Her poems mobilize the imagery of light to discuss topics ranging from women’s experiences in the diaspora, exile and loss to identity, motherhood and nature. In its mobilization of metaphors of light, nature and landscape, Majaj’s poetry conjures up memories of different geographies and people while offering an imaginary and a language—an alternative to nationalist discourse—through which claims to justice can be made. In this paper, I provide a close reading of selected poems from Majaj’s Geographies of Light to expound on the ways in which she mobilizes nature imagery to formulate an imaginary that resists borders, immutability and amnesia. In Majaj’s poetry, nature is often portrayed as a site of potentiality and as a unifying presence that resists human-made borders. This is an imaginary that sees the transformative potentiality that lies within both the memories of the past and the experience of the present. Unlike static, nostalgic yearning for a lost past, Majaj’s poetics is fluid and mobile, geared toward a future to come. In my reading, I focus particularly on Majaj’s narration of female diasporic subjectivity and the role nature imagery plays in marking this subjectivity as a site of becoming, filled with potential. The poetics of potentiality that emerges from her weaving together of nature imagery is suggestive of a politics of potentiality that acknowledges the continued spectral presence of the past in the present and seeks to discover its relevance for the future. Drawing from my close reading, I offer a transnational feminist interpretation of the concept of diaspora as propounded by Majaj’s poetry and argue that transnationalism and multiculturalism are not sufficient frameworks to understand women’s experience of exilic diaspora. A transnational feminist framework both challenges the term’s heteronormative assumptions and exposes the hegemonic forces of globalization, capitalism and nationalism that collaborate in shaping diasporic formations. Driven by the scarcity of studies tackling the question of female subjectivities in the Palestinian diaspora, this paper contributes to discussions in literary and diaspora studies.

During my PhD research, I came across a copy of a rare magazine named “Karagöz and Hac?vat”. The magazine was published in the region of Alexandretta, contested at the time between Turkey and French-ruled Syria. It was published for a short period in the early 1930s, and named after the two popular protagonists of the Turkish folk culture in order to resuscitate the origins and significance of the Turks in the disputed region. The journal was illustrated and published by the local journalist Tar?k Mümtaz, who was once a strong opponent of the newly established Turkish Republic and of Mustafa Kemal, and was hence exiled by the Turkish government to Damascus. There, his critique was aimed towards the mandatory government of France in Syria that exiled him once again, this time to the province of Alexandretta. During his banishment in Alexandretta, he became more favorable towards the Turkish cause. In 1933 the Turkish authorities granted him a general pardon. The paper proposes to examine the socio-political mood and the construction of Turkish nationalism in Alexandretta between the years of 1933-1934, during the great debate on the region’s fate, through the cartoons of Tar?k Mümtaz, a local journalist. His political satire gazette was particularly interesting not only because of its artistically rich provincial characteristics, but also because it cracked open a door to the political atmosphere in Alexandretta at the time (1933-1934). Journalists like Mümtaz were a very important group of opinion makers; and were instrumental in promulgating and reflecting the dominant ideology. My proposed study aims to explore the reproduction of Turkish nationalist discourse in the Sanjak through Mümtaz’s artistically rich sense of humor. Thus contribute to the literature on the construction of Turkishness as an essential ingredient in self-determination and identity creation. The study will attempt to show that this construction is multi-layered and dynamic. The anti-Arab spirit of the new Turkish nationalism, hitched to the process of creating a new, “civilized” Turkish identity, expressed itself openly and violently in the cartoons of the early Republican period. It would be interesting to follow the complex traces of Turkish influence on the cartoons of Tar?k Mümtaz, who was once a major opponent of Turkishness. One of the supplementary questions my proposed study intends to look at is the possibility of another option – one that is neither Turkish nor Arab, but rather an independent Alexandrettan identity.

Abstract I have been an observer of digital media diffusion, use and impact in the MENA region since the mid-1990’s when the first public connections to the Internet were emerging in the region. By grounding my analyses of digital acts in ethnographies of everyday life, I have created a concept called “working around the state” to describe the rise of new, digitally enabled civic cultures throughout the region. The puzzle of why kingships including those in the Arabian Gulf, Jordan and Morocco, have survived, even in the face of increasingly activist publics, remains an important post-Arab Spring line of inquiry. This paper asks the question, “Will the Kingships Crumble?” Inspired by Christopher Davidson’s 2015 book After the Sheikhs, I use recently collected ethnographic evidence from Kuwait (2014) and Jordan (2016) to examine increasingly unstable relationships between state and society in these two monarchies. The decline in oil prices (Kuwait) the rise of the Syrian refugee crisis (Jordan), and the threat of ISIS based terrorism (Kuwait and Jordan) have placed enormous strain on both regimes. Will they survive? If so, how and why? What is the best course of action for Middle Eastern monarchs who are increasingly resource periled, facing mobilized angry publics, with increasingly overt threats from radical Islamist movements? What can we learn about governance and consent (or lack thereof) in these two increasingly fragile countries? My argument is that government coercion and authoritarianism in Jordan and Kuwait indicate increasingly fragile polities; and that ultimately coerced loyalty is not stable in the long run.

This paper examines the performance of political poetry on the stage of the popular televised nabati poetry competition Sha‘ir al-Milyun (“Millions Poet”). Current scholarly understandings of this program as primarily an experiment in the wedding of local tradition to modern technology fail to explain not just the continued appeal of the program to poets from the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, but particularly the significant amount of regime-affirming, patriotic verse termed “wataniyya” that is performed on stage. What accounts for the prominent place of this poetry on a talent show? As a backdrop to my analysis, I discuss the emergence of wataniyya poetry, which unlike the praise, boast, love poetry and invective of the nabati tradition, is intertwined with the rise of the nation-states in the Gulf. I offer a framework for understanding the functionality of wataniyya poetry by situating it amidst various practices – literary and otherwise – of bay‘a, or allegiance performance. This framework highlights the privileged role wataniyya poetry plays, compared to other thematic categories of nabati poetry, in the negotiation of the relationship between rulers and ruled in the Gulf states. The application of the bay‘a model to the context of Sha‘ir al-Milyun enables us to direct our attention to the patronage dynamics that inform the program’s identity. Based on my analysis of wataniyya verse recited during different seasons of Sha‘ir al-Milyun in addition to judges’ comments and the presence and interventions of the program’s princely patron and his representatives, I argue that the appeal of Sha‘ir al-Milyun is to a large extent rooted in its providing a platform for the public performance of loyalty and allegiance. Rather than just being a successful experiment in wedding tradition and modern technology, I suggest that Sha‘ir al-Milyun is better understood as a political technology, one which continues to produce rulers and ruled alike.