Science fiction has played a variety of roles in the popular imagination since it began to emerge as a literary genre in the 19th century. Its own emergence being coterminous with the technological and colonial expansion of European imagination, it moves easily between the two poles of utopia and dystopia as its authors imagine the possibilities of the world around them. Recent efforts to expand Arabic literary studies beyond the traditional canon have moved to incorporate genres and literary categories traditionally ignored in writing the history of modern Arabic literature. Science fiction is among these ignored genres, though it made up a significant part of the literature that was translated from European languages during the nahdah. This presentation examines three distinct moments in the history of science fiction in Arabic literature. First, the wide popularity of science fiction stories translated into Arabic during the nahdah. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other popular European authors of science fiction were among the earliest works to be translated into Arabic in the 1880s and 1890s. These translations are carefully manipulated to capture the allure of modern technology and all the possibilities it promised to Arab society in the 19th century. In the post-independence period, we have another upswing in the amount of science fiction written in Arabic. I will take as an example of this period the work of Nihad Sharif, one of the few Arab authors to devote his entire career to science fiction. His work is much darker than nahdawi science fiction, introducing more clearlyh elements of social critique into Arabic science fiction. Recent years have seen a new interest surrounding Arabic science fiction. The science fiction novels Yutobia (2008), by Ahmad Khalid Tawfiq, and Nura Ahmad al-Numan’s young adult novels Ajwan (2012) and Mandaan (2014) describe dystopian futures characterized by a different set of social and political concerns than their predecessors in the field. These novels form an understudied thread running through modern Arabic literature. In bringing examples of Arabic science fiction from these three periods together, I hope to explore the ways in which science fiction is able to give voice to the vastly different political and social commentaries that these authors sought to express; from the utopian visions of the nahdah to the disillusionment of Egyptian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, to the slogans of the Arab Spring.

In the 1990s, a new ‘generation’ of Egyptian writers appeared on the literary scene in Cairo, including authors such as Mustafa Zikri, Mansoura Ez Eldin, Yasser Abdel-Latif, and Iman Mersal, and they often turned to independent literary journals as a common venue for debuting their works. Though the experimental writings of the so-called ‘nineties generation’ was originally marginalized, many have since become established authors with several books to their names. This paper takes as its focus the poet Hishām Qishṭah’s occasional journal dedicated to literary experimentation, al-Kitābah al-Uhkrá (Alternative Writing, 1991-2001), which I argue promoted the rise of this generation by providing the young writers with a place to publish and experiment on the page that lay outside of cultural institutions controlled by the government. While several scholars such as Sabry Hafez, Elisabeth Kendall, Samia Mehrez, Richard Jacquemond, and Hoda Elsadda have pointed to al-Kitābah al-Ukhrá as having influenced new writing that appeared over the course of its publication, the journal’s role has yet to be examined in depth. In this paper I situate the journal within the larger publishing scene in Cairo at that time and argue that the independence of the journal was integral to its ability to allow young writers to infiltrate the literary field and Cairo’s predominantly state-run publishing industry. Working at the intersection of literary analysis and book history, I consider examples of prose fiction by some of the aforementioned authors that appeared in al-Kitābah al-Ukhrá and were later expanded into book-length works published by local, independent publishing houses. I also bring my analysis into conversation with scholarship on the role of earlier, avant-garde Egyptian literary journals, particularly Jālīrī 68, a journal strongly affiliated with the well-known sixties generation who, by the nineties, had become the ‘old guard’ of Egyptian literature. The paper emerges from my dissertation research on this new generation of Egyptian writers and the intersections between their literature and the dynamic Cairene literary scene in which their works were published, circulated, and read. My presentation will be of interest to scholars of Arabic literature, Egyptian culture at the turn of the twenty-first century, and the broader field of postcolonial book history.

Turkish-American and Turkish-German writing occupies a space outside traditional canons and constitutes a rapidly growing minority literature that calls for further study and recognition. In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt remarks: “Great writers are … specialists in cultural exchange. … They take symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and move them to another, augmenting their emotional force, altering their significance, linking them with other materials taken from a different one, changing their place in a larger social design” (245). Greenblatt’s description of “great writers” applies equally well to the output of such writers as Halide Edip Adivar, Güneli Gün, Elif Shafak, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar who have published highly acclaimed bi-lingual or multilingual fiction, non-fiction, and autobiographies. Building on transnational studies (Azade Seyhan, Wail Hassan, Yasemin Yıldız), cosmopolitan studies (Bruce Robbins, Tim Brennan, Kwame Appiah), and diaspora studies (Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen), I interrogate the role of language(s) in the formation of new global identities. I ask how this transnational canon can be linked to the larger issues of identity, exclusion, memory, language politics, translation, and the psychology of loss and nostalgia. I suggest, a comparative approach to the work of bilingual and multilingual writers will help us go beyond the purely national or period approaches to Middle Eastern literatures. In this presentation, I focus on Gün’s The Book of Trances (1979) and demonstrate this writer’s linguistic, aesthetic, and formal negotiation of traumatic memories in the aftermath of the citizen exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. A lens through which to view theories of postcoloniality, this text questions assumption that predicate displaced subjectivities solely on colonial oppression. Part of a larger book project in which I explore the multilingual canon, this paper also participates in a type of transnational analysis of migratory texts from a position that Ella Shohat has identified as the “liminal zone of exile” (312) between and across multiple, sometimes divergent, often intersecting landscapes and signposts of identification and cultural expression. References Greenblatt, Stephen, Ines G. Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Firederike Pannewick. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gün, Güneli. Book of Trances: A Novel of Magic Recitals. London: J. Friedmann, 1979. Print.

Franco Moretti, founder of the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel, in his more recent works has enriched contemporary literary criticism by importing methodologies from the social sciences, perhaps the best known being data mining novels of place to create maps (“literary geographies”) of a single location – e.g. the Paris of Balzac (1998) – to expose the unanalyzed cultural assumptions and mental maps of individual authors, cultures, and eras. Modern Egyptian literature, with its tradition of realistic novels, especially novels of place (e.g. Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1957) and Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2004)), is fertile soil for such an analysis. The proposed individual paper is an expansion upon a (completed) term paper for a graduate literature course that applied Moretti’s heuristic methodology to one Egyptian novel of place, Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (1947), as a pilot test of the methodology’s usefulness to a new topos (Cairo) and era (World War II). Initial analysis involved creating six tables from spreadsheet sorting of the raw data – all unique location names in the novel (106) – by different criteria: frequency of the location’s mention, its larger geographic classification, the characters associated with the location, and its novelistic context(s). Based on these, larger social themes are then investigated and mapped at various geographic levels: the international level (Egypt versus the world beyond), national level (Cairo versus the rest of Egypt), and urban level (areas within Cairo). Themes investigated include the binary geographic and social division of poorer medieval Cairo and the (then) upscale khedival ”modern” downtown, especially as related to a central character, Hamida; internal migration from old to more modern Cairo neighborhoods; and comparisons of the geographic worlds and trajectories of the novel’s characters by various social variables: gender, ethnicity (Arab versus non-Arab), and class (marginal, working, middle, and upper). At the most focused level, the Alley itself, themes explored include larger trends in the relations between home and work locales, patterns of visitation/relationships within the Alley, and finally, a test of the hypothesis that leaving the Alley (i.e. medieval Cairo) is a mark of “success”, as many characters assume. Finally, one of the unique advantages of studying literature in situ is immediate access physically to places mentioned. The presenter would, whenever appropriate, include photographs from personal visits to the (very real) places mentioned in the novel to allow session attendees to appreciate the novel’s pivotal locations in more than just name.