This paper sheds new light on the Syrian poet Adonis and, indirectly, on contemporary Arab thought generally by looking at his conceptualization of time. Contrary to common characterizations of Adonis as a run-of-the-mill liberal advocate for progress, modernization, and secularism in the Arab world, this paper argues that Adonis puts forward an idiosyncratic idea of time that undermines the binary division between future-oriented secular progressives and old-fashioned traditionalists, often used to portray the dominant discourse on the meaning and use of the Arab-Islamic heritage - turath. More specifically, Adonis introduces a notion of time as “creative”, “personal” and “vertical,” as opposed to the linear, horizontal, chronological notion of time that underpins both the conservative longing for a past Golden Age and the progressive open-ended anticipation of a more rational, productive, and better future. Instead, his conception of time privileges personal aesthetic discovery, creation, and re-invention over either respect for traditional values or an ideal of material, accumulative progress. This evaluation of Adonis’s temporal imaginary suggests a different understanding of his place within the Arab intellectual landscape. Rather than adopt a position within these debates, he may be said to reject the familiar discourse on turath entirely. Since the turath debate is inherently diachronic in nature, revolving around the question of how to combine allegiance to a an authentic historical heritage with the demands of a modern future, to suggest a different temporal is tantamount to changing the most fundamental parameters of this discourse. Such a move makes it impossible to discuss or even imagine the kind of discourse on authenticity (asala) and modernity (hadatha) that has been the mainstay of Arab thought in previous decades. Consequently, although it zooms in on the writings of Adonis, this paper also puts forward a thesis about modern Arab thought generally. Where most analyses have focused on detailing positions of various Arab intellectuals within the familiar binary paradigm, it suggests that we keep ourselves from seeing more depth in these debates if we continue to take for granted the particular parameters that have repeatedly been used to make sense of contemporary intellectual life in the Arab world. Instead, it may be more interesting and more fruitful to look how at how individual intellectuals contest the paradigm of turath discourse by suggesting different temporal and conceptual frameworks.

In the wake of the Oslo Accords, the temporal logic of Israeli rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been intensified. While Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted to eliminate any “gleam of hope” that Zionism could be defeated, today every facet of Palestinian life is subject to regulations that render the future ambiguous. Long waits at checkpoints, temporary ordinances, uncertainty over the status of political negotiations, and a calculated use of caprice in regulating mobility have contributed to the emergence of a despairing tone in Palestinian cultural discourse. Through a reading of Sahar Khalifeh’s novel al-M?r?th [The Inheritance, 1997], this paper elicits the stultifying conditions of everyday life in the West Bank that preempt individual and collective development. Mirroring this dynamic in the novel’s own fragmented representation of its characters’ lives, its representation of the experience of “stuckness” through dilated representations of encounters with checkpoints, and its tragic and inconclusive ending, al-M?r?th discloses the hopelessness that pervades much of post-Oslo Palestinian life. But Khalifeh also suggests that the struggles of Palestinian women against both settler colonialism and patriarchy promise to restore the sense of openness and hence potentiality that Israeli rule and Palestinian leadership suppress. For Khalifeh, this potentiality inheres in both the aporetic nature of Zionism itself, which yields precisely the contact, exposure, and self-encumbrance that it wishes to evade through methodical separation, and in the critical challenge that Palestinian women issue to the patriarchal principle that currently organizes much of Palestinian sociality and politics. When Palestinian women challenge the terms of their double subordination, they transmute Palestinian liberation from a closed project resting on a timeless claim into one that is open to the unforeseeable possibilities of future becoming. Their provocation, Khalifeh suggests, demands more than merely inclusion into the presently-constituted Palestinian order; it aims to recover the very constitutive powers of Palestinianness. In this way it also functions as a tacit refusal of Israel’s realist governance, which demands that Palestinians be practical, acknowledge facts on the ground, and accept the irreversible condition of their vanquishment. The paper concludes that the apparent state of hopelessness in much contemporary Palestinian writing in fact conceals a profoundly utopian critical impulse.

My talk focuses on recent literary attempts to leap over the political dead-end and the sense of hopelessness that permeates the present, and instead imagine a postcolonial future for Palestine, and specifically the city of Jaffa. Here I am attempting to probe the potential for “living well together,” teasing out potential futures, and point to the way some, both Palestinians and Israeli-Jews, engage in “forward dawning” by making the temporal leap through the present, imagine and bring into consciousness that which is not yet here. In fact, by articulating these imaginaries, those who engage with the future already, in a way, bring it into being, giving it shape and form through language and making these possible futures, potentialities, legible. The vantage points from which individuals are able to imagine these futures, however, are situated in the present and saturated in personal grief and a profound sense of injury. What I mean by that is to point to the fact that for many Palestinians, the idea of reciprocal exchange with their oppressors, let alone the potential for reconciliation remain unimaginable, and so is the notion of “living together” that transcends the present formations of coexistence under colonialism. As I will demonstrate, some eschew the mere idea of “living together” by imagining a future existence that excludes and elides the presence of Israeli-Jews. I will offer close readings of two short stories, by a Palestinian and an Israeli-Jew, both imagine a post-return reality in Jaffa, but with sharp difference in tone: while the Israeli-Jewish author’s engagement with the emergent future reality reflects hopefulness and sheer optimism, his Palestinian counterpart suggests that even when politically the path is open, “real” return remains impossible.

Leftist Writers in monarchic Iraq were interested, among other issues, in the evolution of political consciousness and involvement, in their own lives and in the lives of their characters. This presentation will show how the Iraqi writers Shakir Khusbak (1930-2018) and Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman (1927-1990) introduced themes of political persecution, students' demonstrations and opposition activity, and the generation gap between them and their parents in regard to relations between state and society and to the very right to oppose the ruler. In terms of Hayden White's Metahistory, we claim that we can use literature as a historical archive from which we can glean much information in regard to the evolution of political awareness in Iraqi society, while taking into account the authors' ideological leanings. The two stories, "A'wam al-ru'b" by Khusbak and "Sa'a 12" by Farman, demonstrate the complicated and tense relationship of young Leftists with the regime in the last years of the monarchy, and the rise of political awareness among young students and intellectuals-to-be. By means of a close reading we will show how in spite of the harsh persecutions, and in accordance with the Iraqi cultural pluralism in monarchic Iraq as described by Orit Bashkin and Muhsin al-Musawi, students were and still are the force that sparks political opposition, clearly to this day, in a struggle to build a better future for their country. Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman, "Sa'a 12" in: idem., Alam al-sayyid Ma'ruf (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1982), 141-154. Shakir Khusbak, "A'wam al-ru'b" in: idem., 'Ahd Jadid (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1951), 183-201. Muhsin al-Musawi, Naz'at al-hadatha fi al-qissa al-'Iraqiyya (Baghdad: al-Maktaba al-'alamiyya, 1984). Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).