Rabih Alameddine’s novel An Unnecessary Woman (2014) tells the story of Aaliya Saleh, a seventy-two-year-old woman living in Beirut as she reflects on a lifetime spent translating some thirty-seven novels from various European languages into Arabic. The introverted and erudite Aaliya spends her life voluntarily isolated from her outside world as she produces translations which she then packs into shoeboxes and stores in the maid’s bathroom. The invisibility of the process of translation and its products, therefore, is central in this fictional autobiography of a translator. By directly and explicitly engaging with Walter Benjamin and using specific examples of translation practices outside of the novel, Alameddine’s work extends beyond the expectations of its ostensible genre and becomes a commentary on translation. The character of Aaliya, furthermore, emerges as a metaphor for the invisible translator who, despite producing textual afterlives, remains invisible In this paper, I read An Unnecessary Woman as a literary historiography of the reception and place of Arabic within the canon of world literature and as an allegory of the (Arab) translator’s invisibility. I argue that the novel’s intertextual engagement with European literature and translation theory (specifically Walter Benjamin’s) can be read as literary metacommentary on the exclusion of the Arabic translator and her products as well as on the literary interactions of Arabic and other languages. Alameddine’s allegorical project, I further argue, is an adaptation of the ethos of classical Arabic commentary in which the novel’s numerous metaphoric elements together present a treatise on the relationship of Arabic to English and French. Read in this way, An Unnecessary Woman is a necessary allegory of language politics. In working toward this reading, this paper interrogates Alameddine’s text in relation to three problematics or concepts: 1) Frederic Jameson’s National Allegory; 2) Julia Kristeva’s reflections on the concept of the Silent Polyglot; and 3) Abdelfattah Kilito’s reading of authorship and translation in classical Arabic literary culture. My interpretive framework places Jameson, Kristeva, and Kilito in conversation with each other to produce a reading of Alameddine in which silence at the level of character and authorial commentary can be understood as generic concern or national allegorical expression.

This paper asks why the ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual history has emerged as a relevant and appealing method of historical inquiry for a strand of Iranian intellectuals since 2014. Forged in the post-World War II era and during collapse of liberalism in the 1960s when post-structural thought jettisoned definitive ‘truths’ and social history was becoming more popular, several Cambridge professors sought to promote historical inquiry through authorial context and language. The Cambridge School, for whom a complete consensus on method does no exist, thus emerged as a mode of inquiry that attempted to ‘see things [the author’s] way’. Despite having been translated in Iran to Persian in 1994, Quentin Skinner’s Machiavelli failed to bring attention to the author’s ideas—best known among the Cambridge School—let alone instigate public debate on the merits of his methodology. Only since 2014 it seems, due to a handful of Iranian professors and intellectuals, has the School gained noticeable currency in Iran, resulting in debates on how methodologies developed for a canonized ‘Western’ narrative might be relevant to Iranian history. In May 2016 the humanities journal Farhang Emrooz published a series of articles exploring the relationship between the ‘Gangs of the Cambridge School’ and Iranian intellectual history. Neither the first nor only exploration of this relationship, this series not only constitutes what appears to be the most sophisticated exploration of this relationship to date, but also excavates, as Professor Hatem Qaderi argues, a shared historical perspective found in England and Iran, most apparent in the conservative currents of thought in both countries (which are not always aligned with conservative political parties). This paper undertakes a comparative view of the conservatism referenced by Qaderi—as well as other authors in Farhang Emrooz’s series—and that of Richard Bourke’s English conservatism, also examined in Farhang Emrooz, to ascertain the appeal and re-reading of conservatism in Iran’s contemporary intellectual context. The Cambridge School’s Iranian appeal, this paper argues, lies in its perceived role as an alternative to methods that favor political orientations. Indeed, such conservatism is marked not by a global return to but a break with the past, occasioned in the twentieth and twenty first centuries by European instability and post-modernist thought on the one hand and, on the other, by the attraction of some Iranian intellectuals to intellectual history, which, according to Anthony Grafton, is opposed to leftist or Marxist methodologies employed by social history.

What role did translation of fiction and drama play in Teodor Kasap’s periodicals? How were translated texts received, used, and discussed? Most studies consider translations as disconnected from the environment in which they appeared. By contrast, I propose to study them as part of the entity constituted by the periodic press. My aim in this paper is to frame Kasap’s translations and interest with translation within a larger framework of late Ottoman translation. Departing from Micromégas and translated dramatic texts, I will provide a novel perspective on the late Ottoman public sphere, the way it worked, and not least, the role and function of translation within it. Diyojen, Ç?ng?rakl? Tatar, and Hayal, the satirical periodicals edited by Teodor Kasap in the 1870s, are among the most interesting publications at the time. As Madeleine Elfenbein (2017) convincingly argues, Kasap’s vision was Ottomanist. He aimed at gathering all Ottoman subjects, independent of religious, ethnic and cultural background. His main device was the press, and his periodicals are extremely rich sources: Kasap draws on the manifold and multilingual Ottoman print culture in order to propagate for his ideas. However, the way in which his translations contributed to shaping the public sphere remains understudied. Voltaire’s science fiction novella Micromégas started to appear in Ottoman translation in Diyojen in October 1871. The translator was Teodor Kasap himself. In the foreword to the translation, he praises Voltaire’s fearlessness faced with state authorities, and emphasizes his criticism of power, oppression, as well as his illustrious strength of mind. Ottoman society needed these insights, according to Kasap. Micromégas is not the only example of translation in Kasap’s publications: His interest with French drama, and their Ottoman translations, is of major significance in both Diyojen, Ç?ng?rakl? Tatar, and later Hayal. My paper cuts across social history, intellectual history, and literary studies: I investigate how the circulation of cultural products raised debates about language, society and identity. Kasap’s translation endeavors serve as brilliant examples. Late Ottoman writers, journalists, and readers strived to carve out an intellectual space able to house the rapidly changing cultural, social, and political circumstances. Translated fiction became parts of ongoing debates; they contributed to launch them, being both enriching, challenging, and in some cases even limiting.

Morocco is well-known as a destination for foreign film productions, with much of the action centered around the desert oasis of Ouarzazate. This location, now home to a large studio complex (Atlas), has welcomed famous Hollywood productions such as "The Last Temptation of Christ" (Martin Scorsese, 1988) and "Gladiator" (Ridley Scott, 2000). Years before these famous American examples, however, the iconoclastic Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) shot his film "Oedipus the King" in Morocco in 1966. While the many Hollywood productions in the area were completely indifferent to their location—using it to represent a kind of no-place of Orientalist interchangeability (the Holy Land, Roman African locations)—Pasolini’s case presents a different set of possibilities and challenges. As many critics have pointed out, Pasolini’s films are deeply invested in their respective locations, just as the filmmaker himself was deeply invested in the idea that encounters with “Third World” peoples and places held a radical potential for rethinking the relations of capitalist modernity. In particular, the settings for films like "Scouting Locations in Palestine for the Gospel of St. Matthew" (1964), "The Arabian Nights" (1974) or N"otes for an African Orestes" (1970) were to be found in Africa and the Middle East: Persia, Eritrea, Palestine, and Yemen. While some critics have accused Pasolini of Orientalism in these films, others like Caminati and Steimatsky have argued that Pasolini’s embrace of a radical tiers-mondisme instead evinces a critical, anti-colonial stance which links queer desire and eroticism to questions of class, race, and geopolitics. Yet the particularities of Pasolini’s Moroccan experience and its afterlives have been mostly ignored by Italian-centric film theorists. Instead, it is filmmakers who have addressed them: Daoud Aoulad-Syad’s comedy "Waiting for Pasolini" (Fi intidhar Pasolini, 2007) imagines a local Moroccan extra who worked on Pasolini’s film and who is convinced he will return with a new project. Aoulad-Syad draws consciously on an earlier documentary by Ali Essafi, "Ouarzazate Movie" (2001), which features extensive interviews with local people who worked as extras on Ouarzazate’s many Hollywood productions. Combining a critical analysis of Pasolini’s Moroccan film in its transnational contexts along with an engagement with its Moroccan interlocutors, this paper will contribute to a theoretical investigation of the geopolitics of cinema in the Maghreb.