The expansiveness of Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun is not to be underestimated. The novel narrates the period between 1967 and 1981, crucial years that mark a turning point in modern Egypt’s national history: the defeat in the Six-Day War inaugurates Egyptians’ disillusionment with pan-Arabism as well as the waning of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab socialism and paves the way for Anwar Sadat’s neo-liberalism. In narrating this political history, the novel problematizes attempts at neat, comfortable categorizations, foregoing teleology in place of re-tracings and repetitions. By ordering these historical events through innovative modes of emplotment, Soueif’s novel upsets modernist narratives of progression. Examining the epilogue – itself outside of the temporal demands of a novel – I focus my analysis on the epilogue’s representation of an ancient Egyptian artifact, specifically an unnamed idol that the protagonist, Asya, accidentally finds lying face down in the sand at an excavation site in a remote village in rural Egypt. Soueif’s focus on the ancient idol situates her in relation to masculinist Eurocentric discourses of Egyptology. The most obvious, among many, fault of these hegemonic discourses is that they center power struggles between European colonial rivalries while consistently evacuating modern Egyptians from the narrative – especially women, people from rural areas, or the working classes. Through a close reading of the figure of the ancient Egyptian idol, I contend that Soueif rescues it from warring hegemonic discourses and actively engages in re-signifying the ancient artifact within the horizon of the political moment in which she is narrating, that of the transition from Nasser to Sadat. Centering the excavation site in the remote village before the idol becomes an artifact, with no Egyptologists or Archeologists in sight, Soueif saves the ancient idol from a temporal upset in the museum. Ultimately, I propose that ending the novel with this image offers a decolonial national history, one that centers a polyvocal community, women’s collective voices, and an indigenous Egyptology.

This paper explores the Tunisian Arabic novel genre in light of the uprisings of 2010 and 2011. By reading comparatively two texts which were written on the eve of this political turning point, Ḥusayn al-Wād´s Saʿādatuhu sayyid al-wazīr (His Excellency the Minister) (2011) and Āmna al-Rumaylī al-Wislātī´s al-Bāqī (The Remnants) (2013), it engages with a new trend in the writing of modern Arabic novels. The Tunisian novelist Kamāl al-Riyāḥī called it “the political novel”, “al-riwāya al-siyāsiyya”. I argue that while grounded in previous trends of the Tunisian novel inspired by authors such as ʿAlī al-Duʿājī (1909-1949), Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī (1911-2004), and Bashīr Khrayyif (1917-1983), al-Wād and al-Rumaylī al-Wislātī interpret satire anew. Saʿādatuhu sayyid al-wazīr is a critical allegory of corruption and neo-colonial endeavours set in the liberalisation of the economy during the 1970s and 1980s. In search of femininities and masculinities beyond the cliché, al-Bāqī adds the element of tragedy and exaggeration by revisiting the student protests of the 1970s. Despite speaking to a similar historical period, both authors focus on different social groups. While al-Wād follows the trajectory of a teacher who is appointed as minister in his cousin´s government, al-Rumaylī al-Wislātī stages three former students who look back at their lost hopes and dreams. Their protagonists struggle with the expectations of colleagues and families, as well as of themselves. Both texts narrate the trope of failure, albeit from different points of view. Taking these two novels as point of departure, the paper allows for insights into developments of the novel genre in Tunisia and North Africa, as well as in the wider Arab-speaking context. How do these texts differ from previous Tunisian novels? Are they truly more “political” than other trends in modern Arabic prose – and if yes, how so? Which tensions arise from writing these novels on the verge of 2011, while revisiting the regime of Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987)? The proposed paper explores these questions in conversation with literary theories of the Tunisian and Arabic novel.

The Apartment in Bab El Louk (2013), a collaborative project penned by Donia Maher and brought to visual life by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady, epitomizes the fusion of art and literature and delves into the fragmented nature of identity amidst the tumultuous milieu of Cairo’s Bab El Louk neighborhood. While Ganzeer refrains from categorizing it as a graphic novel, The Apartment seamlessly integrates written and visual languages, enriching the narrative with layers of depth and meaning. Central to this work are thematic elements of claustrophobia, chaos, and confusion that mold the identity of the anonymous narrator. From the illustration of a closed door on the front cover to the often-disheveled images throughout the book, The Apartment divulges the narrator’s disorderly inner world shaped by Egypt’s broader sociopolitical landscape. Aligned with the visual narrative, textual descriptions of the narrator’s indifference and detachment imbue this novella with noir aesthetics, mirroring the psychological pressures that challenge an individual’s well-being. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that draws from literary analysis and visual culture studies, this paper undertakes a meticulous examination of The Apartment to unveil the complex process of identity construction and reaffirmation interwoven throughout the narrative. It demonstrates that the apartment itself emerges as a microcosm, encapsulating the broader societal forces at play in Cairo. The apartment’s claustrophobic setting serves as a canvas upon which the narrator grapples with the complexity of their identity to make sense of their place in Egyptian society. Furthermore, this paper sheds light on the symbiotic relationship between creative writing and comic illustration in The Apartment and emphasizes how they collectively contribute to the novella’s nonlinear narrative. It argues that The Apartment becomes a testament to the intersection of creativity and social commentary, inviting readers to contemplate the intricate interplay between individual identity and societal structures in a rapidly changing world.

In West-östlicher Divan, Goethe proffers a hybrid poetic enunciation par excellence that merges the compositional principles of Occidental and Oriental poetry. That this new type of poetry could emerge at a time when nationalism was at its inception and theories of German national and cultural heritage and identity circulated with increasing apace and dominance places Goethe in a particular niche with respect to his contemporaries. Against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century zeitgeist, Goethe, in his Divan, conceptualizes an alternative vision to frame the questions of German identity and, indispensably, that of home(land), Heimat—a fraught concept that has come to accrue a polysemy of meaning over its long history. While this notion, during the formative years of the nineteenth century, began to burgeon with narrow, static, and exclusionary connotations, Goethe’s engagement with it manifests different, if not oppositional, dynamics. It proffers new schemata and formats to approach this term, mapping out new (symbolic as well as textual) geographies to explore not only Heimat but also German Orientalism. Heimat, in its poetic renderings in Divan, as I will argue in this paper, not only challenges and refigures, the static articulations of the trope of home in the German context, but it further expands to encompass the imaginary sites of the Islamic Orient. Heimat’s aestheticized renderings, as I argue in this paper, demonstrates that the construction of the idea of home in the nineteenth century is intricately linked with that of Orient. This, I further argue, while demonstrating the extent to which literature may facilitate new conceptualizations of Heimat from its very emergence in the discourse in the nineteenth century, has further implications for the German engagement with the Orient, in that it enacts the condition in which oppositional and taxonomic enactment of East and West, center and periphery, and Self and Other of the Orientalist parlance finds a novel frame of reference via Heimat beyond the reification of simplistic binary orders. I argue that Goethe’s poetology (diverting from the Saidian claim that German Orientalism designates a mere scholarly engagement) in part demonstrates also epistemological alternatives to colonialism through constant acts of learning, unlearning, and relearning many an episteme with respect to such dichotomies.