The discourse over the current refugee crisis in Europe reflects a common pattern in times of disaster, as observers define their role in the crisis and their perceptions of the refugees themselves. Responses range from empathy and engagement to fear and defensiveness. In a similar manner, the grim atmosphere of the famine in Syria during World War I transformed the attitudes of those who lived through the crisis, causing them to reassess their own lives and their role in addressing the suffering that surrounded them. Observers of the famine despaired at the perceived decline in morality and the growing indifference towards the suffering of the poor, even as they themselves exhibited remarkable shifts in attitudes and opinions in their effort to cope with the horrors of starvation and the grinding monotony of the war. Although the lives of the non-suffering have been generally neglected in the study of the wartime famine, their diaries, memoirs and letters are a rich repository of information about how it was to actually live through the crisis, and the emotional toll that long-term exposure to calamity can have on individuals and society. A close reading of these sources indicates that attitudes and beliefs, like so many other aspects of life, began to adapt to the internal logic of the crisis. Over time, many famine survivors began to adopt and assign temporary situational identities that reflected their experiences in the famine and the ways they coped with it. Inevitably, the poor bore the brunt of this process of de and re-humanization, particularly as the disjuncture between the lives of the suffering and the secure sharpened in the latter years of the crisis. These reinterpretations began to shape social interactions in society and even alter the relative value of human life in such grave matters as public administration, death and charity.

A number of recent scholarly works have shed new light on how Palestinians and African Americans have compared their respective struggles for freedom with one another. This scholarship has focused mainly on the period prior to 1948 and the decades after 1967. Less attention has been paid to the crucial period in between these two watershed years. Moreover, given the dominance of English-language sources in this body of scholarship, important Palestinian perspectives have not yet been brought to the fore. In particular, the writings of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel who saw clear parallels between their own positionality as minority citizens and the positionality of African Americans have not yet been adequately investigated. I address this gap in the literature by tracing the ways in which Palestinian intellectuals in Israel engaged with multiple facets of the African-American struggle for freedom. I do so through a close reading and analysis of the three main Arabic publications of the Israeli Communist Party: al-Ittihad, al-Jadid and al-Ghad. In particular, I examine al-Jadid’s translation into Arabic of works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and W.E.B. Du Bois; al-Ittihad’s coverage of the Civil Rights movement; and al-Ghad’s discussion of the portrayal of African Americans in Hollywood movies. I also provide a careful reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s 1966 two-part essay, “Letter to a Negro.” Through a textual analysis of these writings, I argue that Palestinian citizens of Israel understood that they, like African Americans, faced a racialized system of oppression that had similar internal logics, albeit with different external manifestations. More importantly, I argue that these Palestinians drew upon the experiences and perspectives of African Americans in order to reaffirm their own sense of humanity, as well as to affirm the humanity of others who were likewise struggling against systems of oppression. By tracing the vicissitudes of these discourses, this paper elucidates the interconnectivity of political and cultural formations among Palestinian citizens of Israel and African Americans during an important—and often overlooked—period of history. By focusing on Palestinian writings in Arabic, this paper also provides fresh insights that can contribute to important and timely discussions developing among scholars in Middle Eastern studies, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, decolonization studies, and American studies.

This paper compares and contrasts the aesthetic deployment of empathy and violence in the work of Hoda Barakat and Hanan al-Shakyh. It considers how in the works of both these authors, the affects of trauma are utilized to craft an aesthetics of empathy that is simultaneously an aesthetics of violence. Hanan al-Shaykh's Hikayat Zahra follows a script predicated on traditional equations of the gendered fantasy of intersubjectivity as restorative gesture, only to critique and subvert that script, putting into question not only feminine affect, but also the contexts in which such affect is permitted to circulate. Hoda Barakat's Ahl al-Hawa, on the other hand, problematizes facile assumptions about the relationship between the intersubjective and violence, illuminating spaces where each serves as accessory to the other in ways that also problematize gender. Theoretically, this paper will consider the aesthetics of violence, specifically the usurpation and negation of the other, against the backdrop of recent work in English and Comparative Literature theorizing and bringing to the fore notions of empathy, compassion and optimism. This body of theoretical work includes David Palumbo-Liu, Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed as interlocutors. In this way the presentation also will contextualize itself as part of a larger project interrogating how Modern Arabic literature has deployed an aesthetics of empathy and intersubjectivity to negotiate, resist and co-opt the supposed disenchantment of the Modern. I conclude by bringing the examples of Barakat and al-Shaykh into a larger conversation to argue that in many examples of Modern Arabic prose, a sober, Kantian ethics features prominently alongside existentialist influences; where the mystical and the intersubjective are present, they tend to be framed in terms of responsibility, critique and social change, rather than in terms of the mystical recuperation of a lost wholeness. In this way, this paper and the larger project of which it is part engages with and complicates the field of Empathy Studies, loosely defined, which is primarily concerned with the Anglophone and thus to date has not considered the intersemiotic implications of the study of empathy and violence as aesthetic.

Among sixteenth-century Istanbul’s many social, economic, and political changes, the city saw a marked shift in how the state and society perceived and managed prostitution. Waves of migration had brought people from rural areas to this imperial capital for employment and access to resources. With a rising population and the introduction of outsiders to Istanbul, the city’s social and economic life began to evolve. One of the state's new concerns was the social phenomenon of rapidly increasing prostitution. In reaction to this phenomenon, the state developed new methods of punishment for prostitutes in Istanbul, implemented fines for prostitution, but also attempted to construct a new set of moral-political values and to create a "pure" city within the frame of those new values. Tracing the evolving values around prostitution with a literary voice reveals the human side to this change. The shehrengiz of the poet Azizi provides a significant literary voice to contrast the values promoted by the state. Azizi's shehrengiz challenges his own time in two different ways: first, he writes about women, whereas most poems in this genre focused on the beauty of boys. Second, Azizi writes about prostitutes. He clearly challenges the state's attempt to set new moral-legal values by writing about the beauty of prostitutes. Thus, Azizi’s shehrengiz was a parody of not only the corpus of shehrengiz poetry, but also the emerging sets of moral values. Whether his subversions of the literary establishment were intended or not, he ended up challenging his peers. Details regarding Azizi's position in the social strata give possible motivations for these challenges. He was a warder at Yedikule dungeons, a job that likely allowed for interaction with prostitutes, but a job that did not put him in "high" intellectual circles. Thus, one could interpret two possible, paradoxical motives he had for writing his original piece. First, one might understand that Azizi sought fame and respect among his famous contemporaries, and wrote a sensational shehrengiz to get attention. While his peers' tezkire entries showed their reluctance to praise his poem, they also admitted to its popular appeal. The second interpretation is that his lack of immediate fame allowed him to be critical of the canonical conventions of writing shehrengiz. He had the freedom to write his shehrengiz without concern for the criticism of his intellectual circles or for losing his prestigious position, which it seems he never had.