Since the emergence of anti-colonial nationalist movements in the 1950s, Arab protest music has channeled the aspirations and anxieties of singers-songwriters as they navigated a troubled path towards emancipation. Throughout their trajectory, politically committed singers, from al-Sheikh Imam to Marcel Khalifeh, confronted foreign and native coercive powers, all within socialist, nationalist, and secular frameworks. Akin to the writings of politically committed intellectuals of their generations, their music evoked, to borrow Foucault’s terms, “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence.” In the last decades however, Arab authoritarian regimes have engaged in acts of patronage and coercion of artists whose music became incongruous in a political landscape of increased purges and unprecedented violence. As such, on the eve of the 2011 uprisings, Arab protest music had lost its political potency and ability to inspire emerging artists looking for new modes of expressing their dissent. In this paper, I suggest that contemporary Arab protest music has grown new aesthetic and political skin. I examine the ways in which spoken word poets, hailing from peripheral cities and refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon, have turned, not to the legacy of Arab protest music, but rather to Rap in search of new possibilities for critique and political change. I discuss the poetry of artists such as Watar, El Ras, El Darwish, and Far’i, particularly the ways in which they draw on traditional Arab poetics of dissent on the one hand, and the critical power of early American hip-hop on the other. I demonstrate how, as they reject the limits set by binaries such as East/West; secular/Islamic; tradition/modernity; and authoritarianism/chaos, they relocate the political from a teleological, nationalist, and secular discourse, to an anachronistic, transnational, and non-secular one. In so doing, these artists redefine the parameters of “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence” in protest music today.

One of the earliest representations of the outlaw activist in modern Arabic literature is Assad in Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. Arrested for participating in a demonstration, Assad wants to evade both the law and marriage to a woman he doesn’t love. More recently, we find two literary characters within the Jordanian literary field whose uneasy relationship with the state and the cultural norms it engenders compels them to re-assess preconceived identifications of national, social, ethnic and ideological natures. Amjad Nasser’s Haythu la tasqut al-amtar, 2011 (Land of No Rain, 2014) never gives the land a name, but like Saudi Arabia in Munif’s City of Salt series, the reader readily recognizes the militarized monarchy and the land it rules as Jordanian. The protagonist, complicit in a failed assassination attempt, returns to his homeland after decades in exile, and the resulting novel is a poetic reflection on the consequences of dissent and the difficulty of rejoining the past with the present. Ramadan Rawashida clearly situates his novel Min hayat rajal faqid al-dhakirah, aw al-Hamrawi (1993, From the life of a man who lost his memory, or al-Hamrawi) in Jordan, and predominately in Amman. This novel’s protagonist is lost, in search of both his identity and his place in a society that rejects both ambiguity and dissent. The productive power of these two novels lies in a discourse that repudiates the simulacrum of unity necessary for state stability. The state reaction to instability is to disavow and hide it away in prison or exile. By thinking in terms of the destabilizing power of representation as articulated by Kenneth Burke, this paper scrutinizes how the representation of these characters challenges state stability by constructing narratives that embody the fragments of a “broken” national paradigm.

Long before the eruption of protests across the Arab world in 2012, writers and intellectuals have been engaged in various forms of opposition and dissent. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the hopes then the disappointments of the anti-colonial nationalist projects in the Arab world. In what ways can narrative unsettle official nationalist discourse? How can it imagine other forms of identification and alternative spaces of belonging? This paper examines such questions with a focus upon the Egyptian context in the post-revolutionary period. Through a reading of the work of novelist and short story writer Muhammad al-Bisati (1937-2012), I explore his use of magical realism, as a means to question the dominance of earlier social realist narratives and the ideas of the nation-state which they supported. In framing this paper I use the distinction made by Christopher Warnes between “faith-based magical realism,” which requires that readers believe the unbelievable, and “irreverent magical realism,” which engages with actual, literary, cultural, or historical discourses. The work of al-Bisati brings together both types, blurring the lines between reality and fiction; questioning linearity as a reliable structuring device; and foregrounding multiple, polyphonic voices, often those from the margins. Story-telling itself thus becomes a form of dissent. This paper also interrogates magical realism as an aesthetics of dissent, and foregrounds the need to connect these narrative strategies both to magical realism in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, and also to the Arabic story telling traditions. Central to this examination is also the relationship between aesthetics, opposition, and prominence. As a significant member of the sixties generation in Egypt, al-Bisati was heavily invested in the role of the intellectual and the relationship between aesthetics and dissent. Perhaps most interesting is that although he was drawn to magical realism (a sub-genre that is not prolific in Egyptian literature) early in his career, he abandoned it quickly, only to return to it as an established writer. It is striking that Over the Bridge (2004), a novel that is more overtly political in as far as it can be seen as reflecting 1960s Egypt, has received more attention, and has already been translated into English. The Merchant and the Painter (1976) a more elusive text, that is less obviously political, remains virtually undiscussed. In examining both his literary works, and his literary career, this paper explores questions of aesthetics, politics, and eminence in the Egyptian cultural field.

Decades prior to the 2011 Syrian Revolution, the genre of prison literature (adab al-sijn or adab al-sujun) emerged into prominence in the field of Syrian cultural and literary production. As a genre, the proliferation in publication of works of prison literature coincided with the emergence of local human rights organizations and increased prevalence of the language of human rights by those opposing the authoritarianism of the Asad regime. Defined here as any text that is composed in, about, and through the experience of political detention, prison literature can be read as testimonial literature, as counter narratives to the Syrian state’s official version of history, and as a series of creative interventions against the political oppressions and human rights violations perpetrated by the Syrian regime. This paper will examine the ongoing debates genre about prison literature and demonstrate how particular works of prison literature, including texts by Hasiba ‘Abdalrahman, Rosa Yassin Hasan, and Faraj Bayrqadar present innovative narrative forms that not only challenge the authoritarianism of the Syrian regime but also call into question the generic conventions and limitations of human rights discourse, particularly the documentary inclination in human rights reportage. As will be shown, particular works of prison literature interrogate the construction of the speaking subject in human rights documentation and reflect and, at time, defy, the idea of what Joseph Slaughter refers to as “legibility” in the relationship between narrative and human rights law, This paper will focus on the varying ways works of prison literature transgresses traditional conceptions of genre, and in doing so, challenge the generic conventions of human rights as well as the notions of state authority and authoritarianism.