Literary engagements with cities are contemporaneous with the emergence of urban culture as such. Cities have been perceived, reflected on, and interpreted in various ways. Literature and the arts not only reflect but also produce perceptions of the city. In Arabic literary texts, cities have often figured as symbols of progress and modernity, as places of longing and liberating experiences, but also of foreignness and alienation, of misery and conflicts. We often find binaries, such as city center/suburbs, city/village, or city/desert, home town/metropolis, private/public space, or destruction/reconstruction, which should, however, not only be looked on with regard to their contrast but also to their interrelations. In the context of the ‘spatial turn’, literary and cultural studies have discussed the mapping of space, i.e. the perception, conceptualization, and (re-)presentation of space in literature, arts and culture. In this regard, approaches to the urban space become an interdisciplinary lens to understand social interaction, cultural practices and material culture in a wider sense.
In this seminar, we will explore how the city is figured in modern Arabic literature and culture, in poetry and fiction, including different textual practices and genres, but also in the graphic novel, film and street art. The focus is planned to be on Cairo, Beirut and the exilic (mostly Western) city; however, depending on the participants’ interest other cities could be included. We will discuss both theoretical issues, such as concepts of space and social practice, based on the writings of De Certeau, Lefebvre, Foucault, Williams and others, and questions related to specific cities and literary and art works: How do the social and political conflicts in Tawfiq Yusuf ʿAwwad’s Death in Beirut (1972) relate to the urban/rural binary? How can we read imaginations of Beirut as a woman in the work of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani? And what are the strategies used by the Lebanese postwar generation of writers, artists and filmmakers to tackle the ghosts of the past and counter the politics of amnesia that seeks to erase all traces of the war from the urban space? To what end does Naguib Mahfouz manipulate the topography of Cairo in his novels? How are affects and emotions related to the urban space, and how did this change from the novels of the ‘generation of the 90s’ to Ahmad Khalid Tawfiq’s dystopic vision of a future Cairo in Utopia (2008) to Ahdaf Soueif’s intimate rendering of her experiences of the January 25 Revolution in Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012)? Finally, what do ‘everyday practices’, such as the exiled intellectual’s walking through the city in Samuel Shimon’s An Iraqi in Paris (2005), reveal about his precarious position? And why do New York neighborhoods compulsively evoke the protagonist’s Bedouin childhood in Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Hights (2010)? These and other questions could be discussed in this course.
The seminar is open for students of other literary and cultural studies programs (MA NTS, BAPS, Kulturpoetik and others). The texts we will discuss are either translated to or originally written in English, thus the knowledge of Arabic is not mandatory. In case all participants speak sufficiently German, the class may be held in German.
- Lehrende/r: Barbara Winckler