Trials of Arab Modernity

Title Page, Copyright

Download PDF (39.9 KB)
 

Contents

Download PDF (21.5 KB)
pp. v-vi

Acknowledgments

Download PDF (45.2 KB)
pp. vii-viii

...kind of support that a junior faculty can only dream of. But my special thanks goes first to my editor, Helen Tartar, and to the editorial team at Fordham University Press; I’m grateful for the the Humanities Institute and its director, Pauline Strong, for pro-and Esther Raizen for their ongoing support. I’m also grateful to ...

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Download PDF (42.8 KB)
pp. ix-

1. Introduction: Debating Modernity

Download PDF (142.5 KB)
pp. 1-18

The events of Rashid al-Daif’s (b. 1945) novel Tablit al-Bahr (Paving over the sea) (2011) begin in 1860, following the sectarian massacres that claimed the lives of thousands in Lebanon and Syria and led to a French military intervention. Al-Daif’s main character, Faris, whose family survives the killing in Mount Lebanon...

2. Fantasy of the Imam

Download PDF (245.4 KB)
pp. 19-52

Adonis traces Arab literary modernity to Abu Nuwas (756–814), al-Mutanabbi (915–965), and other Abbasid poets who refigure jāhilī, or pre-Islamic poetry, by displacing it from the register of personal loss and sentiments and inscribing it in a universal human condition. This modernity is anchored in new urban...

3. Aversion to Civilization

Download PDF (237.2 KB)
pp. 53-87

Of all the questions that preoccupied Arab intellectuals in the nineteenth century, civilization was the most important. Arab thinkers engaged European theories of development, which examined the role of religion and social and political institutions in preventing or bringing about civilization. From despotic government...

4. Staging the Colonial Encounter

Download PDF (191.0 KB)
pp. 88-113

Literary representations of the Arab encounter with modernity in the “late Nahda period”¹ often depicts the transformative experience of a male Arab student studying in France or England. This long and well-established genre includes Tawfiq al-Hakim’s (1898–1987) ʿUsfur min al-Sharq (Bird from the East)...

5. Majnun Strikes Back

Download PDF (227.9 KB)
pp. 114-144

Bareed Mistaӡjil: True Stories (Express mail) (2009) is an anonymously published collection of autobiographical writings by queer Lebanese women. In these essays, sexuality is at the core of identity formation, individuality, family struggle, and a slew of social and political forces cutting across class and religious backgrounds...

6. Hacking the Modern

Download PDF (196.9 KB)
pp. 145-171

With the proliferation of Arabic blogging, e-mailing, chatting, text messaging, and other forms of techno-writing, contemporary Arabic literature is undergoing a series of structural and linguistic transformations. Specifically, the encounter with the virtual and the effects of globalization are ushering in a new set of intertextual...

7. Conclusion: Writing the New Political

Download PDF (100.0 KB)
pp. 172-182

In this book I presented different articulations of modernity in Arabic travel narratives, novels, and experimental writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Starting with the staging of the Arab encounter with Europe, I challenged the reading of modernity (ḥadātha) as innovation (iḥdāth) in relation to tradition...

Notes

Download PDF (275.5 KB)
pp. 183-210

Glossary

Download PDF (65.7 KB)
pp. 211-212

Bibliography

Download PDF (154.3 KB)
pp. 213-226

Index

Download PDF (137.3 KB)
pp. 227-233