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My dissertation explores the role of the translator-as-author in the work, Kalīlah and Dimnah. The material history of the Kalīlah offers a new perspective on translation; while the text we have today originates in Arabic, the different Arabic manuscript versions come from the translation of a Pahlavi text, which itself is a heavily edited translation of multiple mutable Sanskrit texts. This history prompts the question, how do we talk about translation without an original work and author? I examine the works of three translators – Barzawayh in Pahlavi, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ in Arabic, and Alfonso X in Castilian, whose interventions become part of the Kalīlah’s narrative itself. Barzawayh and Ibn al-Muqaffa‘’s names are retained in most versions of the Kalīlah, which establishes a tradition of authorship that is passed on through translation. I examine how the introductory chapters of Barzawayh and Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ – as instructions for the reader, both reinforce the didactic philosophy of the “original” Kalīlah as well as establish the translators’ interpretations of the work. While Alfonso X has written only a colophon at the end, his epithet El Sabio, “The Learned” king guides us to read his Kalīlah through his sagacity. I specifically focus on how Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ and Alfonso X contributed to their respective language traditions through their Kalīlah translations, importing the interpreted wisdom of the translators who came before them; Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ and Alfonso X are therefore recognized alongside Barzawayh as the authors, or translator-authors, of the work. Further, especially because the original Persian, Arabic, and Castilian manuscripts are lost, the names of these translators become almost apocryphal. More than historical markers of the text, these three translators have become hermeneutical models of reading. The Kalīlah is a text both in translation and of translation, where translation as the transfer of knowledge is the foundation of the narrative. This understanding does not prioritize an original work or its author in translation, but rather indicates a pluralistic lineage of authorship in Kalīlah and Dimnah.

This dissertation takes a comparative approach in examining works of literary fiction that represent the 1975-1990 war in Lebanon, the 2011-present war in Syria, and the 2003-present war in Iraq. Drawing on a corpus of writings by Mahā Ḥassan, Dīma Wannūs, Imān Ḥumaydān, Azhar Jirjīs, and others, some of which have received little or no scholarly attention, the dissertation examines works of Arabic war fiction that draw on an aesthetic of the uncanny in order to disrupt wartime temporal discourses. In Lebanon, these works disrupt the postwar reconstruction process, which relied upon the production of the illusion of a prosperous future at the expense of erasing the memory of the war and the unresolved losses that accompanied it. Uncanny works of Iraqi fiction, meanwhile, stage the return of histories left out of dominant discourses through frightening and often grotesque figures like the ghost and the animated corpse who act as powerful metaphors for the ways in which unresolved histories continue to haunt the present. Contemporary Syrian novels, finally, explore the psychological impact of protracted dictatorship through family sagas that explore long-lasting legacies of trauma. Ultimately, these works explore the temporal discourses that underlie protracted states of violence and, by drawing on an aesthetic of the uncanny, excavate memories that demonstrate that this violence emerged historically and that endeavor to keep alternative visions of the future alive even as violence continues.

A comparative study of German and Turkish literature and film, this dissertation analyzes the entanglement of processes of modernization and discourses of racialization. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s work, the first part examines the relationship between modernity and race in the context of the transition from pre-modern “anti-Judaism” to modern antisemitism. While this transition is often explained by means of a paradigm shift—race replaces religion as the dominant identity category—Postone identifies a connection between the social relations inscribed in the commodity form and the underlying ideological structures of antisemitism. Instead of limiting the ascription of the “abstract” to figurations of Jews in antisemitic imagery, however, my reading detaches Postone’s theory of racism from the idiosyncrasies of German-Jewish history, and, by linking the emergence of the modern notion of race to developments immanent to capitalist modernity as such, proposes to establish a theoretical basis capable of transcending Western metropolitan borders. The second part of this dissertation then illuminates how in the Levante as well the emergence of the modern concept of race was part and parcel of accelerated processes of nation-building and capitalist modernization. Finally, the third part examines representations of the Armenian genocide and the racialization of Armenians in the Weimar era and in contemporary German cultural discourse.

Hāfiz (d. 1390) of the fourteenth century is admired as the most iconic Persian poet. However, almost no scholarship has examined the status of the poet throughout Iranian history. This dissertation investigates the early modern reception of Hāfiz, and demonstrates the multiple ways in which the poet was appropriated by the Safavids, the theocratic dynasty that ruled Persia from 1501 to 1722. The characteristic ambivalence of Hāfiz’s language in reference to the mystical and/or the lyrical and the courtly imagery embedded in his poems allowed the shahs, in the formative Safavid period, to draw from Hāfizian legitimacy, while highlighting their Sufi background as well as the royal grandeur they were seeking. At the same time, the Safavid’s major political rivals reacted to the emerging cult of Hāfiz. The Ottoman’s engagement in this discourse is reflected in the commentary on Dīvān’s beginning line by Sūdī (d. ca. 1590) as well as in the fatwa issued by Shaykh al-Islam Ebussuud (d. 1574) who warned against unconditional recitation of Hāfiz’s poetry. Towards the end of the Safavid era, the courtly-sponsored approach to Hāfiz altered commensurate with the religious reorientation of the state. Having turned its support from Sufis toward Imamite scholars, the Safavid house disseminated new religious norms through the poetry of Hāfiz. Two versions of a single poetryline by Hāfiz, inscribed on two monuments in Isfahan, the capital of ‘Abbās I (r. 1588-1629), capture the Persianate Sufi/Shii controversy in the seventeenth century. Finally, the attempts to read Hāfiz in line with the contemporary Safavid discourse expanded to exegetical and commentarial texts, which discussed the theological basis of Hāfiz’s verse to render him a true Shii. This project, therefore, traces the contemporary intimacy of the Persian speakers with Hāfiz, in retrospect, to the early modern period, when the first Iranian nation-state self-identified with Hāfiz despite the transformative dynamics of their religious policies.

This dissertation critically investigates the literary and artistic production that shapes and is shaped by the global movement for sexual rights throughout its iterations in the Arabic language across Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). I argue that the digital magazine produced by sexual rights activists in the wake of the 2011 popular uprisings was expressly concerned with what it means to be “Arab” and fall outside of heteronormative society. These magazines function as nerve centers for queer Arabic counterpublics, and their digital nature facilitates transnational networks across precarious conduits while leaving traces of a counter-archive in cyberspace. This archive ultimately documents a historical moment of the coming together of three processes wherein contemporary forms of sexual knowledge, Arabness, and cybernetics mutually constitute each other. Following a brief introduction to the project’s historical and critical framework, the first chapter interrogates the development of an Arabic vocabulary of gender and sexuality in translation by situating the term queer (kwīr) and its variants as a concept that not only travels from the Western sexual rights milieu, but across heterogenous geopolitical contexts of SWANA and within “Arabic” itself. By looking at counterpublic approaches to translating terminology, including Lebanon Support’s bilingual Qāmūs al-Jindir and Nisreen Mazzawi’s criticism of queer theory, the chapter elaborates the networked debate around forming a lexicon. Chapter Two builds on the Arabization of queerness and vice versa by investigating the production and circulation of a queer turāth. The chapter focuses on surveys of literature and historical figure profiles to examine counterpublic conceptions of Arabo-Islamic history and their attempts to recuperate or contrive a gay or lesbian subject. The chapter elaborates how sexual nonconformity is Arabized through the figure of literary heritage, resulting in a political tool that simultaneously authenticates the intersections of Arabness and queerness while diminishing the scope of both sexuality and heritage. The final chapter turns to examine the space of circulation for the digital kwīr magazine as a realm where the distinction between physical and cyberspace is blurred. The chapter specifically takes up the concept of data privacy in Morocco, Syria, and Egypt, to understand how the digital magazine navigates cyberspace both as a facilitator of counterpublic networks and as evidence of violating codified sexual norms. In highlighting the porous nature of physical and cyberspace, the chapter reveals how state power and dissident networks virtually coexist and shape each other. By taking as its focal point the Arabic digital magazine in a wider movement for sexual rights, this study sheds light on how Orientalism continues to shape ostensibly new media forms that only appear to be dislodged from geopolitics, calling for a reconsideration of current models for archival and digital literary analysis.

Left Behind: Literature and Left Critique in Neoliberal Egypt traces trajectories of the Left literary critique of neoliberalism in Egypt from the aftermath of Nasser’s imprisonment of the communists in 1959-64 and the 1967 defeat to Israel, through the present aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. I contend that despite the 1967 defeat and the Left’s political capitulations, disillusionment, and rents that emerged in its fallout, the literary Left has remained a force for engagement. Its approach shifted from literary forms of political commitment (iltizām) – rooted in socialism and national liberation, but also tied to the Nasserist state – to forms of Left literary critique marked by alienation, Marxism, and innovative literary aesthetics. I extend the lineage of Left literary critique from the Sixties Generation’s New Sensibility (Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm), through the rightward swing of infitāḥ (Arwa Ṣāliḥ), and to the consolidation of the postrevolutionary neoliberal order (Nādiya Kāmil and Muḥammad Rabīʿ). I am primarily concerned with gendered aesthetic and epistemological aspects of the literature of iltizām and its legacies in the neoliberal era. Specifically, I refer here to sexual-political symbolism, gendered affect, and modes of reading and critique that were produced during the hegemony of the Nasser era. The authors I examine deform, intensify, reroute and reject these aesthetic aspects of iltizām as central components of their critiques of neoliberalism.My attention to the symbolism and aesthetics of these literary critiques of neoliberalism is grounded in a concern for sex and gender: gendered affect, sexual-political symbolism, and gendered language and literary forms. This is a divergence from dominant scholarly approaches to iltizām and its legacies, which are articulated largely in terms of literary theory and political critique. While I engage this scholarship and these aspects of iltizām’s literary and intellectual history, my focus on aesthetics and symbolism is important because they are among the most enduring aspects of iltizām in the literature of the neoliberal era and in modes of reading Arabic literature broadly speaking. The critical literary works discussed in Left Behind are marked by exhausted and grotesque aesthetics (Ibrāhīm, Rabīʿ), analytical rigor and principled despair (Ṣāliḥ), and reanimated and reframed past political commitments (Kāmil). These aesthetic, methodological, and formal aspects direct our authors’ literary critiques of neoliberalism Egypt. Together they form the contours of the Left literary critique of neoliberalism in Egypt.

‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078 or 474/1081) was a grammarian and literary theorist whose two works Dalā’il al-i‘jāz (Proofs of the Inimitability of the Qur’ān) and Asrār al-balāgha (The Secrets of Eloquence) laid the groundwork for ‘ilm al-balāgha (the science of eloquence) in Arabic literary theory. Al-Jurjānī began his work by focusing on the concept of the inimitability of the Qur’ān (i‘jāz al-Qur’ān) and extended it by devising a comprehensive theory of eloquence. He claims that naẓm (construction) is the basis of eloquence, which is not a random combination of sounds but requires the operation of the mind to organize the intended words. The structure of a grammatical composition is determined by its meaning, and the determinant of eloquence is the interrelationship of syntax and semantics. In his theory of majāz (figurative language), al-Jurjānī claims that it occurs when the underlying meaning is diverted to another or when one intends to broaden the scope of meaning. Al-Jurjānī introduces two types of majāz: majāz lughawī (a lexical trope) and majāz ‘aqlī (a mental trope). The former occurs when the majāz happens in the muthbat (the affirmed object) and the latter when it happens in the ithbāt (affirmation). Every isti‘āra (metaphor) is a majāz, and the process of creating an isti‘āra is not merely the transference of a name; it expresses a unique relationship between two entities by borrowing a meaning from one entity and attributing it to another. As for his notion of kināya (descriptive periphrasis), al-Jurjānī defines it as the intentional use of one or more words to convey a meaning other than the words’ conventional literal meaning; meanwhile, the literal language itself does relate to reality.Cognitive linguistics emerged in the 1970s as an approach to the study of linguistic thought and practice. Since the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980), analyses of the use of figurative language, particularly metaphor and metonymy, have been one of the more fruitful areas of cognitive linguistic study. Cognitive linguists view discourse as the means of human knowledge and of the communication of human consciousness. The words used in discourse should be constructed in a particular pattern that is meaningful and presupposed by the intellect. Metaphor is an inherent part of the human conceptual system, an element of everyday language that involves a cognitive process that enhances comprehension via mapping between domains. On the other hand, metonymy is not considered a linguistic substitution but does involve a cognitive process through which we are able to access a mental entity by means of another entity.This dissertation examines al-Jurjānī’s theories to engage them in a dialogue with Cognitive Linguistics. Both al-Jurjānī and cognitive linguists agree that grammar is meaningful, emphasize the process of “conceptualization” in the production of meaning, stress the interrelationship of semantics and syntax, and underscore how grammatical construction itself functions in figurative speech to evoke hidden meanings. I demonstrate that both traditions view metaphors as relating to intellectual concepts rather than reflecting only a linguistic aspect. I also examine the “blind translation” of metonymy, which is generally considered equal to the Arabic kināya, but I argue that majāz ‘aqlī and one branch of majāz lughawī that al-Jurjānī illustrates could be other options. Adopting a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this dissertation provides a comprehensive guide to how figurative language functions and is understood both in the framework of al-Jurjānī’s theory and in the cognitive linguistic approach. It shows that language is not independent of the mind but rather reflects the human perceptual and conceptual understanding of the world.

The relationship between artistic practice and liberatory politics in Palestine is framed by two related and pervasive problems affecting both Palestinian lives on the ground and representations of the Palestinian people in media, politics, and intellectual discourses: Narrative disenfranchisement, or the enforced lack of discursive control and narrative agency stemming from the “shrinking” of Palestinian identity, culture, and history in dominant political discourse; and relative humanization as the sociopolitical and discursive practice of both differentially distributing and limiting the protections or applications of inalienable human rights for those bodies and communities deemed not fully human. Palestinian displacement, oppression, collective criminalization, and death continues to exemplify and be informed by the discursive and actual dehumanization of Palestinian identities and bodies. Consequently, Palestinian cultural and artistic performances of nationalism and national identity involve an affirmation of or demand for human rights in the face of inhumane campaigns of violence and ongoing cultural erasure amid widespread international indifference and the geopolitical hegemony of human rights as both policy and industry in Palestine. I examine this interplay between humanization and narrativization as it is played out in the production and performance of Palestinian collective identity and cultural resistance through theatre, literature, and film as artistic and political practices of literary, performative, and visual storytelling. I broaden the term “texts” to include and accommodate informal, everyday, or marginalized storytelling practices so often central to the survival of persecuted communities, cultures, histories and narratives, and communal and collective memories. Combining onsite ethnographic observations from fieldwork with firsthand Palestinian narrations and artistic interventions, my aim is to paint a comprehensive portrait of the often underexplored quotidian and popular ways in which Palestinians confront and negotiate their misrepresentation in news media, their underrepresentation in historical and political narratives, their simplification in Euro-American politico-cultural imaginaries, and their ambivalent interactions with the global industrialization of human rights. The interdisciplinary nature of my study highlights the necessity of engaging with Palestinian popular culture and narrative practices through bottom-up cultural studies approaches and interventions invested in de-limiting and de-centering academic research practices on Palestine and Palestinians.

This dissertation examines the representation of women in premodern Persian epic romance poetry by focusing on three key texts of the genre: Ferdowsi’s Šāhnāme (c. 1010 CE), Neẓāmi’s Ḵosrow o Širin (1191 CE), and Gorgāni’s Vis o Rāmin (1050–1055 CE). It identifies four female characters from the earlier portion of the Šāhnāme—Rudābe, Tahmine, Sudābe, and Maniže—and isolates two specific characteristics for each of these women. These characteristics are then traced in the characters of Širin and Vis: the main female protagonists of Neẓāmi and Gorgāni’s works. In doing so, this dissertation demonstrates the interlinked nature of these characters throughout the three different texts. This work also engages with the subject of ethnicity. The texts in question seem to suggest that women who hail from the peripheries of the Iranian empire may exercise greater agency, in comparison to their counterparts from the heartland, so long as it is to the benefit of the Iranian crown. Once these women have played their role to the benefit of the monarchy, however, they are expected to relinquish their agency and to leave the spotlight; otherwise, they will be severely punished. In stark opposition to this notion stands the character of Vis who, as an Iranian noblewoman from the heartland, defies the patriarchal boundaries set upon her and her kind. She does so by exercising her sexuality as an act of political agency, while remaining the most morally stable character in the poem. In her fiction-world, Vis is ultimately rewarded for her courage and audacity. In the literary milieu, however, she is severely punished for it by becoming a sign of ill repute. It is thus, this dissertation posits, that she and her tale appear to dissipate into the shadows, while the story and character of Širin—who predominantly wields her agency through abstinence—become renowned and “worthy” of emulation.

This dissertation examines the relationship between social movements and cultural production in the long sixties in Turkey and the U.S. The concept of cultural revolution speaks to an oft noticed but under-theorized aspect of the period: the way movements across the world (from Cuba to France, Ghana to China) included questions of consciousness, psychic states, habits, modes of interaction, and everyday life within more concrete discussions of political/economic revolution. This project traces the theory and practice of cultural revolution through developments in cultural production. In both the Turkey and the U.S. poetry and popular music were sites of vigorous aesthetic-political debate. This dissertation compares the Turkish sixties (vastly understudied within anglophone scholarship) with the more canonical case of the U.S. and examines points of overlap and divergence in the spirit of offering a more worlded account of the period. Chapter 1 builds on scholarship on the global sixties, the Cold War, and twentieth-century aesthetics and politics to sketch the historical and theoretical contexts for the four case studies that follow. Chapter 2 focuses on poets associated with the Second New (İkinci Yeni), an experimental literary movement that was severely critiqued by the sixties Left for being ‘formalist’ and ‘meaningless.’ My recuperative reading argues that the Second New’s seemingly hermetic modernism contains a rebuke to more ascetic factions of the Left and a call for sexuality, everyday life, and psychic states to be incorporated into visions of revolutionary change. Chapter 3 explores U.S.-based poet Denise Levertov’s anti-Vietnam War poetry that stimulated vigorous debate over the relationship of art and politics, modernism and realism. Chapter 4 centers on a genre fusing rock ‘n’ roll with Turkish folk music called Anatolian Rock. The music of Tülay German, Cem Karaca, Erkin Koray, Moğollar, and Selda Bağcan reveals how the encounter of Turkish youth with international mass culture produced hybrid and creative re-inventions of tradition: Left-leaning rockers produced anti-imperialist battle anthems for the Turkish peasantry performed in a musical genre associated with the U.S. Chapter 5 centers on two U.S. poets: Diane Di Prima, most often associated with the Beat writers in New York and the California counterculture, and Sonia Sanchez, a prominent poet in the Black Arts movement who wrote for and about other African Americans. Both poets focus their attention both on practical and the mystical, social reproduction and consciousness-transformation.

A discussion of majāz or allegory that is commonly ascribed to the 15th-century Ottoman polygraph Mollā Lüṭfī and that builds on the works of al-Sakkākī and al-Qazwīnī. The author gives two alternative overarching classifications: a linguistic vs. cognitive allegory classification, and a metaphor vs. hypallage classification that is supplemented with three more ways of cognitive signification. Following a brief discussion of the various types of hypallage, the author provides a rather confusing array of alternative metaphor typologies, including types such as basic metaphor, metaphor of dependency, explicit metaphor, implicit metaphor, imaginary metaphor, confirmatory metaphor, absolute metaphor, enhanced metaphor, naked metaphor, proverbializing metaphor, metaphor of affectionate irony, and metaphor of sarcastic irony.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when a new style of Persian poetry was developing in the Persianate world, several erudite literary critics appeared in India, whose meticulous critiques of Persian poetry was unprecedented in the long history of Persian literature. A close study of the works produced by these critics reveals their vast knowledge of Persian literary techniques and their attention to the details of semantics and forms in their evaluation of Persian poetry. A poet who was the main target of these critics was Ḥazīn Lāhījī (d. 1766), whose perception of the aesthetics of poetry did not align with that of some of his contemporaries in India. A serious critic of Ḥazīn’s verses was the eminent litterateur, philologist, lexicographer, and poet Khān-i Ārzū (d. 1756), whose critique of Ḥazīn’s poetry motivated a number of other critics to write their own critique of Ḥazīn’s verses and pass judgements on Ārzū’s critique of Ḥazīn’s poetry. This issue of GlobalLit Working Papers, presents in English translation excerpts from Ārzū’s critique of Ḥazīn’s verses, and the critiques of two scholars who tried to a be fair judges between Ārzū and Ḥazīn.

This working paper presents a full and annotated translation of two titles by 19th-century Ottoman author-cum-statesman Ziya Pasha: (1) a newspaper article written in exile, modern in terms of format and reformist in terms of tenor and providing an staunch and iconoclastic critique of Ottoman language and literature, and (2) the versified preface to his seminal three-language anthology of "Ottoman literature", the Ḫarābāt, traditional in terms of format and conservative or even reactionary in terms of subject matter. Laudable and making sense in their own term, when juxtaposed, these two titles provide a puzzling duality and raise some difficult questions. What is Ottoman language? The deplorable bastard son of the union of Arabic and Persian, or rather a vast ocean of linguistic and literary potential unmatched by any other language? What is Ottoman literature? The blind imitation of hackneyed words and images taken from Arabic and Persian, or rather a festive banquet unprecedented? What is popular literature? The way forward to rid ourselves from blind imitation, or rather not even literature but merely the "braying of donkeys" in the street? And what exactly is Ziya Pasha? A hypocrite iki yüzlü or "Janus-faced" author, or rather a genuine reflection of his era's ikilik ruhu or "spirit of duality"?

This essay proposes the theory of multiple simultaneous temporalities as a constitutive feature of global modernism. It spotlights varieties of heterogeneous time—outside but alongside the homogeneous empty time of clocks and calendars—in modernist literature. These overlapping temporalities replace the linear succession of past, present, and future with a principle of nonteleology. The multiple simultaneous temporalities of these works analogize the multiple simultaneous temporalities of global modernity. Thus the temporalization of difference that separates developed nations from developing ones is refuted by the pluralization of temporality. The simultaneity of these temporalities denies, a priori, the ideology of progress. The essay makes this point through a series of interlaced epiphanies about time, across time, staging an East-West comparison that reflects the creole nature of global modernity. It does so via readings of interconnected novels by Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Marcel Proust.

This dissertation demonstrates how the work of three contemporary Mizrahi authors (Haviva Pedaya, Albert Swissa, and Dvir Tzur) challenges the postsecular framing of Mizrahi Jewish practice as masortiyut (“traditionism”), which refers to the flexible form of Jewish observance associated with Arab-Jews in Israel/Palestine. Postsecular critics have mobilized this position to challenge the terms of Jewish national sovereignty. This study claims that, while these writers refuse “masortiyut” as a coherent subject position, they extend certain of its challenges by reconsidering the interaction of the secular and the theological with regard to the nationalist narrative of return entailed in Shivat Tzion (“the return to Zion”). By means of an allusive engagement with mystical texts, these authors reconceive of exile as a reparative condition rather than as a defective state. They replace a notion of static “return” with a “Wandering East” which potentially reorients the Jewish presence in the Middle East away from a relationship of strict identity with the geopolitical territory of Israel.