In January of 1957, the first issue of Shi’r (Poetry)—a quarterly founded by Yusuf al-Khal (1917-1987) and members of his poetic circle, tajammu’ shi’r—was published in Beirut. By the time this “journal for modern poetry” (al-shi’r al-hadith) closed permanently in 1970, it had been banned by multiple Arab states and accused of serving as the front for a conspiracy led by the Syrian National Socialist Party and the CIA. This reputation reflects the widespread sense that Shi’r’s project, which founding member Nadhir al-‘Uzma described as a “poetic politics of liberation,” reached far beyond the poems on its pages to pose a threat to the promise of an independent, modern Arab collectivity that began to be realized in the revolutionary post-colonial regimes of the fifties and sixties. Indeed, the poetic and critical work published by the Shi’r avant-garde reads as if it were written after the 1967 defeat, imbued with deep disillusionment and a fundamental distrust of the modernist intellectual machinery of ideology and scientific knowledge (al-‘ilm) with which the post-independence Arab state planned to bring about the supposed inevitabilities of unity, freedom and modernity. In hostile opposition to the “literature of commitment” that dominated the intellectual-artistic milieu of late fifties, the members of tajammu’ shi’r defended a neo-decadent stance of “poetry for poetry’s sake” from which they revolutionized Arabic verse, articulating radically new poetic forms and themes inspired by American and European modernisms. While most scholarship on Shi’r has highlighted the significance of its contribution to Arab literary aesthetics, this paper seeks to excavate its philosophical intervention in the positivist narrative of Arab progress in the fifties and sixties. My analysis of the founders’ early manifestos and definitions of “modern poetry” reveals this journal’s systematic critique of enlightened modernity, targeted specifically at the privileging of al-‘ilm as the arbiter of conscious life. I argue that this avant-garde’s conceptualization of “modern poetry” as a vision (ru’iya) for reality based on the mystical, emotive aspect of human experience constitutes an alternative and direct challenge to the post-colonial Arab state and its scientific-socialist ideological premises. By revealing the philosophical valences of dissent in Shi’r’s articulation of a modernist poetics, this paper identifies a new terrain for investigating the relation between the literary and the political as it has unfolded in Arab culture and aesthetics since the mid-twentieth century.

Arab intellectuals have commented profusely on the gravity of 1967 as a historical juncture that redefined modern Arab thought. The collective introspection following the 1967 Arab political and military defeat by Israel has led Arab thinkers to search for the cause of the defeat within 19th century Enlightenment ideals of secularism, social justice, and nationalism, which they had incorporated into their modern critical discourse. In the Lebanese literary context, the Lebanese civil war (1990-1975) played a similar role of casting doubts on the romantic portrayal of the modern intellectual. In “Dear Mr. Kawabata” (1995) and “Learning English”(1998), the prominent Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif (b. 1945) began deconstructing the ideological premises that have shaped the politically engaged intellectual. Al-Daif illustrates in these two novels the disenchantment of the modern intellectual as he confronts his failure to sever his ties with traditional structures and his inability to fully embody the modernist discourse that his generation had construed. Al-Daif resumes his project of introspection in “Paving the Sea” (2011), in which he delves into the depths of Enlightenment binary structures such as tradition/modernity; superstition/science; religion/secularism; community/individual, among others. The reader accompanies Fares Hashem, a 19th century student of Protestant missionaries, in his journey to the United States as he seeks scientific knowledge, the liberation of women, and the advancement of his emerging Syrian nation. Embattled by contradictions inherent in both eastern and western modernities plagued by colonial and confessional wars, enslavement, and bigotry, Fares Hashem dies on his way back to Syria. In my examination of “Paving the Sea,” I argue that al-Daif deploys narrative techniques such as metafiction, farce, and reflexivity in order to write a requiem for both the intellectual and the Enlightenment values that he embodies. By retracing the romantic rise and steep fall of the 19th century intellectual, al-Daif completes his project of exposing the false start of Arab modernization, the pursuit of which is as futile as the act of paving the sea.

The concept of “home” in Palestinian literature is replete with cultural and national significance. For refugees, memories of home and physical keepsakes serve as a means of maintaining links to a distant Palestine, while for those who remained in Palestine, the home becomes a site of Israeli invasion and siege, a metaphor for the nation under occupation. In both instances it functions as a site for the literary expression of a commitment to the political struggle for Palestine, as seen in works by Ghassan Kanafani and Sahar Khalifeh, among others. Only in recent years has a younger generation of writers begun to challenge this understanding of “home” in Palestinian literature and culture. In this presentation I stage a reading of the one such work, Kulluna Ba’id bi-Dhat al-Miqdar ‘an al-Hubb [We Are All Equally Far from Love, 2004] by Palestinian author Adania Shibli. This novel, a fragmented narrative composed of loosely connected vignettes, portrays the home as an alienating, unwelcoming space, which complicates the metaphor of home as a site of national redemption and commitment to the nation. In this presentation I argue that Shibli’s novel, by rejecting the redemptive potential of “home” as a site of refuge and dissent, destabilizes the notion of home as nation by situating it not as a space for steadfastness and resistance, but as the nexus of a larger societal decay and stasis. I draw on works on space and boundaries by Inge Boer and place and violence by John Tyner to show that the home functions in this novel as a site of violence, entrapment, and physical and mental break down. Through this portrayal of home, Shibli’s novel rejects the redemptive potential of commitment and resistance through the metaphor of home as nation in favor of a desire to escape, the only possibility of which appears in the form of a series of love letters written by an unknown woman. In a context in which the physical home is an extension of the oppressive decay of a society under the weight of Israeli rule, the letters function as an imagined space of refuge and escape. The displacement of home as a refuge and site of national redemption by these letters suggests that the commitment of the text to “home” in service of a political cause gives way to a commitment to the text as a home and a site of redemption.

Launched in Cairo on April 1, 2010, Wasla was advertised as the Arab World’s first “blog-to-print” periodical. Publishing in broadsheet form an assemblage of blog posts, digital artworks, and informational articles on a semi-weekly basis, its principle raison d'être, according to the editors, is to make the work of younger bloggers more accessible to an older generation of journalists and policymakers accustomed to print genres. In doing so, Wasla attempts to address a major tension in both Arab politics – where “gerontocracy” looms large – and Arabic literature – where “generation” persists as a classificatory scheme for many authors. Both for and against the “old,” Wasla articulates an alternative ethics and aesthetics of association. In this paper, I probe the nature and significance of the “connections” that Wasla (lit. “connection”) forges through the “shared” praxis of narrative craft and technological reconfiguration. These connections, I argue, serve to break the familiar ideological commitments of older generations by bringing together writers from Islamists and communists to liberals, artists, bohemians, and the bourgeoisie. Additionally, I suggest, Wasla as a form of "cooperative parasitism" stands in clear contradistinction to the links and connections on which the ancien régime based its legitimacy: "Mubarak of the bridges," the victory of the "Crossing" in 1973. Articles by Gamal Eid, Ahmed Naje, Amr Gharbeia, in addition to artwork by Muhammad Gaber, form the basis of my analysis.

This paper explores the question of the political in new Arabic texts. The political, I suggest, can no longer be reduced to clearly defined ideological models and historical narratives shaped by nationalist struggles from the 1950s and 1960s. Social and political transformations and technological developments in writing and communication have permanently changed the nature of the political and the categories through which it’s explored in literature. In this context, I explore new tools of confrontation, critique, and subversion in scandalous and vulgar writing and tell-all novels, diaries, and blogs. Focusing on the nomenclature of scandal and exploring its different manifestations in Arab cultural history, I argue that “causing a scandal” or “making a scene” [fadiha, sharshaha, tajris, kashf] take shape through modes of embodiment emerging from interactive texts that refigure notions of authorship, readership, and community. Engaging these aesthetic frameworks across theoretical and cultural contexts elucidates key paradigmatic shifts in writing practices and sheds new light on political transformations in the Arab world.