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This article examines the representation of disability and Islamic fundamentalism in contemporary postcolonial Arab fiction. It argues that disability is used as a narrative tool in these texts, while also exposing the instrumentalization of disability. The essay focuses on three aspects of disability: conversion narratives, histories of Islamic fundamentalist violence, and the figure of the disabled Islamist. Two novels, "The Sirens of Baghdad" and "The American Quarter," are discussed as examples of how disability and Islamic fundamentalism are portrayed in postcolonial contexts. The article emphasizes the complex relationship between disability and fundamentalism, influenced by political contexts, and highlights the use of disability as a metaphor for societal issues and critiques of violence. It also explores the emotional response to disability encounters and the need for a critical examination of disability affect. [Extracted from the article]

This essay focuses on the trope of the missing corpse in two contemporary Iraqi novels: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) and Muhsin al-Ramli’s Daughter of the Tigris (2019). Drawing mainly on critical work on the corpse and death studies as well as critical ideas on relics and hauntology the essay asks: What place does the missing corpse occupy in a body of contemporary literary outputs that have witnessed a significant engagement with the materiality of the dead body? How is the narrative of the absent corpse structured and framed? How is it experienced and accounted for? What forms and shapes replace the absent body? The essay argues that the missing corpse takes on an “absent presence” that haunts the narrative while the dead body’s very disappearance is compensated for through relics, surrogates, replacements, and repetitions. In conclusion, the essay contends that this absent presence further signals a haunted futurity that is entangled in Iraq’s history of violence but which, nonetheless, offers the potential for a radically new and democratic vision for the country’s future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the trope of the decapitated, severed head as it appears in a range of works produced by three emigrant Iraqi artists: Afifa Aleiby, Baldin Ahmad and Ahmed Alsoudani. Drawing on a range of cultural, political and philosophical readings of the severed head by figures such as Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva and Francois Debrix, the essay seeks to map the diverse affects, meanings and contexts the severed head takes on in Aleiby, Baldin and Alsoudani's paintings and sculptures from Saddam's dictatorship to the present. What kind of affects – horror, disgust, pleasure, ecstasy – does the spectacle of the severed head generate? How does the figure of the head detached from the body become a metonymy or synechdoche for the political state of exile, displacement or alienation? Finally, what function does the representation of the severed head play in the production and articulation of loss, trauma and mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reflection on the play IAm Waiting for You [Wasafuli Al-Sabr] which was written by the author and directed by Lina Abyad. Based on extensive interviews with real-life female cancer patients from the Arab world, the play was the first dramatic staging of Arab women's experience of cancer. To summarise, the paper begins by underlining that the history of women's cancer in the Arab World has hitherto been a history of silence – of shame, taboo, prohibition, and repression – before going on to reflect upon the creative, textual, and dramatic strategies the play deployed to make this silence 'speak.' The essay then focuses on the ways in which this unspoken and unexpressed experience of cancer itself became a (necessary) artistic medium by which the subjectivity of women who had experienced cancer could be articulated. In particular, the essay addresses three layers or forms of silence in the play: (1) the silence of the women the author interviewed; (2) how silence functioned as a structural device or trope within the play and, finally and most importantly, (3) how this silence could be resisted, if not verbally, then at least physically and materially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the material, phenomenological and political meaning of the Syrian corpse and the question of its dignity as represented in a series of media and visual outputs from 2011 to the present. The essay begins by arguing that the violence in Syria now targets the dead as much as the living. As such, the essay highlights the forms of ‘necroviolence’ that the Syrian corpse has been subjected to: mistreatment, erasure of markers of identity, denial of burial, mutilation and ultimately an attempt to erase it from memory. The essay concludes by arguing that the Syrian corpse is not merely the passive subject or victim of ‘necroviolence’ but can also become the paradoxical agent of what we might call ‘postmortem resistance’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the material, phenomenological and political meaning of the Syrian corpse and the question of its dignity as represented in a series of media and visual outputs from 2011 to the present. The essay begins by arguing that the violence in Syria now targets the dead as much as the living. As such, the essay highlights the forms of ‘necroviolence’ that the Syrian corpse has been subjected to: mistreatment, erasure of markers of identity, denial of burial, mutilation and ultimately an attempt to erase it from memory. The essay concludes by arguing that the Syrian corpse is not merely the passive subject or victim of ‘necroviolence’ but can also become the paradoxical agent of what we might call ‘postmortem resistance’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is the first examination of the literary output of the Lebanese political party and militia Hizbullah. It examines a series of little-known fiction and non-fiction texts including novels, memoirs and autobiographies by Hizbullah fighters, supporters and sympathisers. At the same time, it seeks to place such Hizbullah narratives within the context not only of the Party’s media strategy but of the publishing industry in Lebanon more widely. The essay also argues that Hizbullah narratives consistently explore a cluster of key themes including the Karbala tragedy, Anti-Zionism and, in particular, the “infitah” or “Lebanonisation” of the Party. In conclusion, the essay argues that narratives of Hizbullah reflect the Party’s own gradual evolution over its 30-year existence from a purely sectarian group to a broader resistance movement that attracts support from across the religious and political spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]