Search

In this essay, I use the concept of naql to connect textual transmission and physical movement in two contemporary Arabic fictional works that are structured around questions of the circulation of narratives and bodies: Khālid al-Khamīsī's Tāksī , a fictional collection of tales about Cairo taxi drivers, and Aḥmad Saʿdāwī's Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād , which depicts a monster roaming the streets of Baghdad. I begin with a discussion of naql as both transmission and movement, reading a tension between fixity and change that complicates notions of authenticity and authority in realms such as language, time, and mobility. I then argue that Tāksī uses the mobility of the taxi and the types of transmissions that it receives and produces to reposition cultural and political knowledge gleaned from cabdrivers who move through the gridlocked streets of Cairo. In Saʿdāwī's novel, the monster's movements and actions begin as a response to violence but fail to cohere as an alternative to structural corruption, revealing the limits of naql as political critique. I conclude by considering how this reading of naql is reflected in the global circulation of these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines three documentary depictions of gay Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. These documentaries often problematically assume a fundamental incompatibility between gay identities and Arab and Palestinian cultures, thereby, first, placing their subjects in the position of choosing between living in Palestine/Israel and living as openly gay; and second, producing a narrative of impossibility, in which Palestinian and gay identities can only exist in irresolvable conflict. However, Paul also argues that critical reactions to these films, as well as some broader scholarly debates over sexual identities and practices in the Arab world, also reinforce this narrative of impossibility in a way that makes little room for the diverse lived experiences of gay Palestinians. In order to move beyond this narrative, Paul rereads these documentaries with an emphasis on the quotidian experiences of the films' gay Palestinian subjects. Through attention to queerness as a spatial experience, he analyzes the ways in which these characters inhabit urban spaces in Israel and Palestine in ways that contest and disorient dominant narratives about these spaces. Paul concludes that a focus on such experiential moments reveals queer lives that are exuberant and subversive, and he shows the necessity of moving beyond narratives of impossibility in studies of sexuality in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent Palestinian airport narratives, with a specific emphasis on depictions of Ben Gurion/Lydda airport in Israel, a site where Palestinians often receive extra scrutiny and disparate treatment. Focusing on works by Adania Shibli, Raba'i al-Madhoun, and Randa Jarrar, it argues that such narratives reveal airports to be, for Palestinians, sites of stasis, displacement, and detention, and offers a counter-reading of the popular imaginary of airports as facilitators of unfettered global mobility. The narratives depict this stasis through the spatial and temporal distortions experienced at the airport by individuals and groups excluded from global networks of free movement, tourism, and travel, but they also use moments of suspension and immobility to imagine and stage various forms of collective, shared experiences. This suggests that the stasis of the airport can unexpectedly be a catalyst for acts of solidarity and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2013, Palestinian activists set up a camp on Israeli-occupied land in the West Bank to protest Israeli settlement plans. They named their village "Bāb al-shams," or "Gate of the Sun," after Ilyās Khūrī's novel by the same name that chronicles the Palestinian refugee experience from the beginning of the conflict to the present. A subsequent protest camp, called "Aḥfād Yūnis" or "the Grandchildren of Yūnis," positioned the protesters as the heirs to the struggle waged by the novel's hero, Yūnis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter who has fallen into a coma. They drew upon the novel's narrative and characters to create videos, images, and songs in support of their protest. This article uses this moment of interaction between literature and politics to consider how the protesters' invocation of the novel complicates the relationship between literature, memory, and political activism. Just as the novel critiques an overreliance on certain forms of memory of Palestine, the protesters use the novel's narrative to move beyond memory as a primary mode of articulating Palestinian political aims in the present. They seek a mode of engaging with the past that is not bound by the fragmented and unreliable recollections of earlier generations, but rather one that is dynamic and constituted through acts of infiltration and movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]