friederike pannewick / georges khalil c o m (eds.) m i t m e n t commitment a n d b and beyond e y o n d · p a reflections n n on/of the political e w in arabic literature i c k since the 1940s / k h a l i l reichert 195788-Pannewick-LitKon41.indd 1 22.09.15 09:44 195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 1 21.09.15 09:34 literaturen im kontext arabisch – persisch – türkisch literatures in context arabic – persian – turkish Vol. 41: Commitment and Beyond. Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s Series Editors Verena Klemm (Universität Leipzig, Germany) Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (American University of Beirut, Lebanon) Friederike Pannewick (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany) Barbara Winckler (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany) Advisory Board Hülya Adak (Sabanci University, Turkey) Roger Allen (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Sinan Antoon (New York University, USA) Tarek El-Ariss (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Angelika Neuwirth (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Bilal Orfali (American University of Beirut, Lebanon) Sunil Sharma (Boston University, USA) Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2015 195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 2 21.09.15 09:34 Commitment and Beyond Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s Edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil together with Yvonne Albers Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2015 195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 3 21.09.15 09:34 Die Publikation wurde aus Mitteln der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) unterstützt. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2015 Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden ISBN: 978-3-95490-040-4 eISBN: 978-3-95490-613-0 www.reichert-verlag.de Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urhebergesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Speicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany 195788-Pannewick-Titelei.indd 4 21.09.15 09:34 Table of Contents Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................7 Yvonne Albers, Georges Khalil, Friederike Pannewick Introduction: Tracks and Traces of Literary Commitment— On Iltizām as an Ongoing Intellectual Project.......................................................................9 Part 1 Of Poetics and Politics: Revolution and Literary Commitment Randa Aboubakr The Egyptian Colloquial Poet as Popular Intellectual: A Differentiated Manifestation of Commitment....................................................29 Atef Botros Rewriting Resistance: The Revival of Poetry of Dissent in Egypt after January 2011 (Surūr, Najm and Dunqul).....................................................................................45 Dina Heshmat Egyptian Narratives of the 2011 Revolution: Diary as a Medium of Reconciliation with the Political........................................63 Part 2 Roots of a Discourse: Historical Concepts of Literary Commitment Elias Khoury Beyond Commitment.............................................................................................79 Yoav Di-Capua The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the “Fall of the Udabāʾ”.......................89 Rachid Ouaissa On the Trail of Frantz Fanon...............................................................................105 Part 3 Refiguring Iltizām: Literary Commitment after 1967 Stephan Guth Between Commitment and Marginalization: The ‘Generation of the Sixties’ in the Sadat Era..................................................125 Sonja Mejcher-Atassi The Arabic Novel between Aesthetic Concerns and the Causes of Man: Commitment in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif......................143 Zeina G. Halabi The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and the Fashioning of Political Commitment......................157 Refqa Abu-Remaileh The Afterlives of Iltizām: Emile Habibi through a Kanafaniesque Lens of Resistance Literature...............171 6 Table of Contents Michael Allan You, The Sacrificial Reader: Poetics and Pronouns in Mahmoud Darwish’s “al-Qurbān”................................185 Leslie Tramontini Molding the Clay: Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb’s Concept of Colloquial Poetry as Art of Resistance.................................................................................................201 Sinan Antoon Sargūn Būluṣ’s Commitment...............................................................................213 Friederike Pannewick From the Politicization of Theater to Individual Humanism: Towards a New Concept of Engagement in the Theater of Saadallah Wannous..............................................................................................221 Part 4 Commitment or Dissent? Contemporary Perspectives Tarek El-Ariss Fiction of Scandal................................................................................................237 Christian Junge On Affect and Emotion as Dissent: The Kifāya Rhetoric in Pre-Revolutionary Egyptian Literature..........................253 Charlotte Pardey A Body of Dissenting Images: Kamāl al-Riyāḥī’s Novel Al-Ghurillā Read as an Example of Engaged Literature from Tunisia.........................................................................273 Stephan Milich Narrating, Metaphorizing or Performing the Unforgettable? The Politics of Trauma in Contemporary Arabic Literature................................285 Felix Lang Redeemed from Politics: Notions of Literary Legitimacy in the Lebanese Literary Field..........................303 Yvonne Albers The Empty Chair: On the Politics of Spectatorial Situatedness in the Performances of Rabih Mroué.............................................................................317 Hanan Toukan Whatever Happened to Iltizām? Words in Arab Art after the Cold War..................................................................333 Notes on the Contributors..................................................................................................351 Acknowledgments This volume is the outcome of an ongoing interest pursued by the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME), a research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien,1 namely to investigate the interplay between aesthetical practices and politics in the Middle East. It draws in part on a conference entitled “Commitment and Dis- sent in Arabic Literature since the 1950s” convened at the CNMS in June 2013 and organized jointly by the research group Figures of Thought | Turning Points: Cultural Practices and So- cial Change in the Arab World at the CNMS and EUME.2 The conference was a follow-up to a EUME summer academy devoted to the theme “Aesthetics and Politics: Counter-Narratives, New Publics, and the Role of Dissent in the Arab World” that was held in September 2012 at the American University in Cairo,3 in cooperation with its Center for Translation Studies, the Department of English Literature at Cairo University, and the CNMS. Under the title “Aesthetics and Politics” the 2012 Cairo Summer Academy addressed the role of dissent, new publics and counter-narratives. “Aesthetics and Politics” and “Culture and Politics” were also the themes of the regular EUME Berliner Seminar in the winter term of 2012/13 and the summer term of 2013. Seminar sessions included presentations by EUME fellows such as Tarek El-Ariss on “Fiction of Scandal: Literature, New Media and Revolu- tionary Politics in the Arab World” or round-tables on “Culture, Class, Youth, Performativity and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in the Arab World,” where a group of scholars from the CNMS in Marburg presented their work to colleagues in Berlin. All of the contribu- tors to this volume have been associated with these academies or involved in these events and debates. Many have been fellows of EUME or are part of the CNMS-based research group Turning Points. The present volume is a part of this growing network based on common interests and shared commitment, not only to scholarship as such but to actively fostering greater inclu- siveness, more freedom, and what the late Edward Said described as democratic humanism. We thus owe a heartfelt thankyou to all those without whom these encounters could not have taken place: Samia Mehrez and Randa Aboubakr, who hosted the Summer School in Cairo; the members of its steering committee, Samah Selim, Ayman El-Desouky, Elias Khoury, Michael Allan, and Rachid Ouaissa; the Summer school’s organizational team, Manuela Campos and Barbara Bishay (both EUME), and the organizational team of the Marburg workshop, Yvonne Albers, Charlotte Pardey, and Ali Sonay (all CNMS). The editors would also like to thank all institutions that have supported EUME and the CNMS over the past years, the Forum Transregionale Studien, the Land of Berlin, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and German Research Foundation (DFG). We are grateful to the DFG (DFG-Leibniz-Prize) for granting the generous financial support that has enabled the publication of this volume. Our sincerest gratitude goes to all those directly involved in the realization of this volume. First, we wish to express our gratitude to the contributors for their patience and perse- verance during a two-year editorial process and their willingness to share their important work and thus support this publication project. 8 Acknowledgments In particular, the editors wish to thank Michael Allan who has taken the time to read and comment critically on some chapters. His insights have helped shape and further sharpen quite a few of the arguments in these chapters. We would also like to express our deep gratitude to the editorial assistants Ricarda Macco, Jessica Metz and Amina Nolte, whose meticulous work lies at the heart of this un- dertaking. This book would be much the poorer without their unstinting dedication and at- tentive diligence, which extended to even the smallest details of the style editing process. A special thank goes to Abdellatif Aghsain and Hafid Zghouli who, despite a pressing deadline, nevertheless took on the task of checking the Arabic of the complete manuscript. We are also indebted to Paul Bowman, who reviewed the chapters, and our typesetter Thomas Breier for their professionalism and perseverance over the last two years. We have also greatly valued the kind support provided by the Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag as well as the attractive presentation of the volume, so too Sigrun Kotb’s reliable assistance. This book would not have been possible without Yvonne Albers, who has patiently and effi- ciently supervised the entire editing process and communicated throughout the whole produc- tion period with the authors. The co-editors would like to extend their sincere thanks and gratitude to her. She was not only a source of inspiration creatively and intellectually but her versatility and work ethic, qualities crucial for such a long-term project, were humbling. * * * The transliteration of Arabic names has been adapted according to the IJMES transliteration system. However, some common names and notions have been left in their commonly used spelling without further indication. 1 http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/about-us/profile.html; www.forum-transregionale-studien.de 2 The conference was funded by the Land of Berlin and the German Research Foundation (DFG). http://www. eume-berlin.de/en/events/workshops/workshops-since-2006/commitment-and-dissent.html; https://www.uni- marburg.de/cnms/forschung/denkfiguren-wendepunkte/aktivitaeten/konferenzen-workshops/conference- commitment-dissent 3 http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/events/summer-academies/eume-summer-academies/2012-aesthetics-and-politics. html Introduction: Tracks and Traces of Literary Commitment— On Iltizām as an Ongoing Intellectual Project Yvonne Albers, Georges Khalil, Friederike Pannewick If one day the people will to live Then destiny must reply; The darkness must disappear, And bonds must break.1 These are the lines of the poem “The Will to Live” (“Irādat al-ḥayāh”) written in 1933 by the Tunisian poet Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī (1909‒1934) to which the rallying chant of the popu- lar uprisings in the Arab world in 2011 responded: “The people want the fall of the re- gime/system” (“Al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām”). Regimes indeed fell and history is evolving. The euphoria sparked by the fall of authoritarian rulers in Tunisia and Egypt that year has now evaporated. Current developments in many countries of the region seem to be heading in different directions, towards greater fragmentation, sectarianism, and violence, witnessing a resurgence of the paradigms of the old order, such as the outworn dichotomy of authoritari- anism versus religious extremism. While the temptation of authoritarianism may be strong now, and prove to be so in the years ahead, aspirations for a new era of democracy, human dignity and social justice in the Middle East and North Africa persist. The popular uprisings and ongoing struggles in the region are profoundly changing the political landscape. The category of society and the political itself have resurfaced, once more attracting public atten- tion. The struggle for a new order challenges those traditional paradigms employed to under- stand the politics and culture in and about the region, burgeoning a new set of questions. ‘Revolution,’ as both a theoretical concept and a concrete practice, has facilitated the emergence of innovative modes of critique and allowed the reconfiguring of individual sub- jectivities and communal solidarities. ‘Revolution’ as a process is related to, shaped by, and expressed in new aesthetic and political practices as well as new channels of communication. Similar to other precedents evident in transitional moments in history, the imminent question of literature’s contributory role in times of social change and upheaval is once again being subjected to reevaluation, both by writers themselves as well as in scholarly debate. At the heart of this endeavor lies the question as to the impact of literature on social reality and,