English 240: Literature of North Africa and the Middle East > Updates


Look here for routine announcements, afterthoughts, reminders, important information I forgot to mention in class, schedule changes, and/or "homework" that I'd like you to do before we next see each other. I'll always try my best to update this page by 10:00 p.m. on days that class meets, but please make a habit of checking regularly.

For Anyone Out There Still Listening:

December 11th: Happy Naguib Mahfouz Day! The Nobel Prize-winning author of Midaq Alley was born 105 years ago today. Tomorrow, the 2016 Mahfouz Medal for Literature will be awarded. (Update: the awardee is Egyptian novelist Adel Ismat, who gives an interview here.)

As horrifying news leaks out of the fallen city of Aleppo, an English translation of Khaled Khalifa's novel No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, set in Aleppo before the civil war, has just appeared. You can read Jennifer Senior's review in The New York Times.

Watan, "a Chicago-based community space and arts studio" created by the Palestinian-American artist Jumana al-Qawasmi, opens officially on Saturday, December 17, but if you're not in Chicago you can visit WatanPalestine.com, where an online store features al-Qawasmi's prints and jewellery, some of it inspired by Palestinian writers. I especially like the print of Emile Habibi:

Emile Habibi Print

Finally: I eventually posted the final words that I didn't have time to deliver on the last day of class. As for other things final: final revisions of your Arab Comix Project pages should be complete by midday Thursday, December 15th; please let me know if you're declaring it "done" before then. (You all should have received an e-mail from me over the weekend of December 10th & 11th.) Kyle Morgan e-mailed me on the Friday morning of exam week to say how impressed he was with the site. (He's gone through "a lot of student/class projects" recently, he said, and ours "really does look great." If you'd like to know I assessed your portion of the site, then e-mail me or stop in to see me next semester.)

Do well on your other finals, too, eh? And may you have a happy and peaceful break.

For Thursday, December 8 (Day 30):

Thanks to the digital humanists who showed off their work yesterday. Some pages were more nearly ready for prime time than others, but it was good--for all of you--to see what everyone had been up to. I'll try to get back to each of you with concerns, advice, and--who knows?--maybe even a little praise, in time for you to be able to act on whatever I tell you. (Final revisions need to be completed no later than our scheduled exam period, which is Thursday, December 15 at 12:40.) Two things I can say right now, though, that would apply to almost everybody: 1) Remember to provide some context, some orientation: we won't be in a position to appreciate details and specifics about your book, author, or topic without having a sense of the big picture first. Give us an overview; start with the basic who-what-when-where-why. 2) Copy-edit and proofread your text! English majors should take special pride in being meticulously correct and professional about their way with words. No hinky grammar or syntax, no misused words, no typos. Don't embarrass yourself. You're puttin' this out there for the whole world to see.

So Thursday, we'll get the quick 'n' dirty versions of the following pages:

  • The 99 (David)
  • The anthology Muqtatafat (Eriin)
  • Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future (Melanie)
  • Tarek Shahin's Rise (Gabe)
  • Zeina Abirached's A Game for Swallows (Chris)
  • Magdy el Shaffee's work beyond Metro (Louegie)
  • Illustrator/musician/comics artist Mazen Kerbaj (Brian)
  • Censorship & persecution of comics and comics artists (Ashley)
  • Academic centers and other initiatives for the study of comics (Jack)

Remember: you're not giving us the comprehensive tour; just highlights, plus some insight into your process. (See the guidelines under Day 28, below.) Given how tight things were on Tuesday, I doubt we'll have much, if any, time left over for last words from Yours Truly. We'll see. If we don't--and if we don't want to reconvene next Thursday, then I'll send them out to you over the ether.

 

For Tuesday, December 6 (Day 29):

Again, I saw some exciting things coming together in class on Thursday and I'm looking forward to next week. But as you ratchet things up over the weekend to work out kinks and apply finishing touches, I beg you: PLEASE leave anything having to do with the site's "Theme" alone--especially the Header Area and Site Title. The only areas of the site you should be working in are "Pages" (to select your page only) and then "Build" (after you've selected your page). Also: when you're selecting your page from the "Pages" menu open, please be careful not to DRAG your page anywhere, as that changes the site's section structure. To see how your pages look once you've published them, go to arabcomixproject.weebly.com.

OK: so Tuesday we'll have official web page debuts from:

  • Laura on the history of political & editorial cartooning in the Arab world and
  • Terry on the history of (children's) comic books & comic strips;
  • Christi on Oum Cartoon and Sebastian on Samandal & TokTok (important online venues for contemporary comics artists);
  • Kylie on The Solar Grid, a serial by Ganzeer;
  • Kat on Ahmed Naji's Using Life;
  • Nic on Hamid Sulaiman's Freedom Hospital;
  • Eleanor on Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi; and
  • Socorro on Magdy el Shafee's Metro

Guidelines for presentations under Day 28, below.

For almost half of the above pages, I'm still (as of Friday morning) seeing very little--or, in many cases, nothing, built so far. Surely I needn't point out that you've had a good long time to work on this already, and it's now very late in the game, and as your Executive Editor, I'm...concerned?

On the web:

For Thursday, December 1 (Day 28):

(Dateline: Wednesday a.m.--sorry for the belated update!): I was excited by some of the things I saw people working on yesterday, but it also seemed pretty clear that no one's work was anywhere near what you could call a finished state. One more workday, then, with public viewings split between next Tuesday and Thursday. (We'll either determine the batting order tomorrow in class, or I'll decide it by executive fiat.) Here's what, at a minimum, you should be prepared to do next week:

  • Talk to us for 7 to 10 minutes (I'll have to cut you off at 10 if there's to be enough time for everyone)—casually, confidently, articulately. Plan and time what you're going to say; don't wing it.
  • Offer us a brief introduction to your book or author or topic—the bullet-pointed SparkNotes version, not the Full Monty—and then give us a short walking tour of your page, showing us how things are organized and how they work, and highlighting…well, the highlights (and maybe drawing our attention to things that wouldn’t be immediately obvious and/or that you’re especially proud of). 
  • Then give us a narrative of your process: how did you decide what to include on this page (beyond the requisite expository prose, I mean): what did you think it was important to convey about your book, your author, or your topic; how did you decide what would be the best means of conveying that; etc.
  • Finally, speak to how close your final product comes to realizing the vision you had in your mind’s eye.  If you faced technical challenges along the way—you just couldn’t find a tool that let you realize your vision, or you couldn’t get the tool you did find to work right, or whatever—then tell us about that (and/or about the compromises you settled on or the creative solutions you devised), and tell us what you would still like to do if you only had world enough and time.

Karantina postscript:

  • Dystopia now: Diaa Hadid, "Remembering My Mother's Alexandria" (New York Times 30 November 2016; published in the print edition under the title "Returning to Egypt's Heart, Once Grand, Now Crumbling")

For Tuesday, November 29 (Day 27):

Another workday--whose focus will be on putting finishing touches on your Arab Comix Project pages. Before Thanksgiving, I mean to check in on what you've done so far. If you've got something for me to look at, then I'll get some feedback to you after Thanksgiving. And if you have little or nothing for me to look at...well, you should be very nervous.

As you review the Arab Comix Project assignment page (ahem: you should review the Arab Comix Project assignment page!), don't forget to check out the items posted under "Background/History/Introduction" and "Resources/Links." There's info contained in those stories and on those pages that should be of interest to all of you, regardless of the specific topic, author, or book you're focusing on.

At Arabic Literature (In English), M. Lynx Qualey blogs about a dystopian-global-climate-change short-story comic published by The Offing: "8 Minutes" by Mohamed Saleh, translated by Elisabeth Jacquette (who is also working on Donia Maher and Ganzeer's The Apartment in Bab El-Louk). Qualey's post also contains links to two other comics that Jacquette translated: "The Dump" by Chakid Daoud and "Stop Shehata," which should be of particular interest to one of you...

Other links:

  • In case you needed something else to get angry about, you might ponder what our government has been doing in Yemen with your tax dollars and mine:
  • (Meanwhile: M. Lynx Qualey blogs about "The First Yemeni Play Translated Into English")
  • And if you're looking for something practical to do (say, in the face of Crumpf's plans to make a far-right racist xenophobe the chief law enforcement officer of our country, or to put hard-line crypto-fascist torture advocates in charge of the "national security" apparatus--which includes a half-dozen spy agencies you've never heard of):
  • Postscript re:an item I mentioned on October 18th: Iraq + 100, an anthology of short stories, edited by Hassan Blasim, imagining what Iraq will be like in 2103, one hundred years on from the American-led invasion, is now out. Order it from the publisher (or from Amazon, or from your local independent bookseller), and read about it at Arabic Literature (In Translation).
  • Lizzie Widdicombe, "Muslim Sisterhood" (The New Yorker 21 November 2016): American Muslim women, including some recent immigrants, veterans of Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo's writing workshop, discuss Trump's election.

For Thursday, November 17 (Day 26):

Lesson learned: Don't Believe the Hype. Still, Eltoukhy is an interesting character, and I'm not sorry to have sent some royalty money and attention his way. It's worth reading the interviews I posted to the "New Dystopians" page in the Course Reader--and it's really worth reading Eltoukhy's non-fiction pieces in Mada Masr (keep clicking the "More Op-Eds" link to open all seven essays). And here's the short story I was telling you about, "The Next President of Egypt."

Thursday is a workday. Get a laptop from the library before class if you need to. And scroll down to Tuesday's update, below, to see how things should go.

  • Here's that link from Jack I mentioned in passing: a tutorial on how to create an "immersive Gigapixel image" with Storymap.js. (This lets you create not a map, but rather a high-resolution image that you can zoom in and out of, in order to focus the viewer's attention on particular points of interest.) The tutorial claims that, in addition to Storymap, you need the full version of Photoshop, which you can probably use in the Library's Digital Media Lab. Alternatively, you could download Gimpshop, a free alternative to Photoshop.

For Tuesday, November 15 (Day 25):

Thanks for your patience yesterday: that wasn't an especially scintillating or edifying way to spend an hour+, I know, but under the circumstances I think we needed something mindless to occupy ourselves with, and I'm glad that almost everyone is now registered as an administrator/editor for the "Arab Comix Project" site. (Gabe, Kylie, and Louegie: you'll need to contact me ASAP.) Now it's time to roll up your sleeves and get to work translating your research and creativity into "digital" form. More on that below.

Tuesday, we'll come back to Women of Karentina. You may still post to that book's Moodle forum--or revise or add to an existing post--without penalty, through Monday evening. In the meantime: read what your classmates have written. (Some of you have made a lot more headway with this book than I have!) For my part: I'm way behind on forum bookkeeping, and I hope to get at least partially caught up over the weekend.

Thursday, November 17th will be an in-class workshop day. Everyone should bring a laptop or tablet--not a phone. (If necessary, you can check out a laptop for up to four hours from the Library's front desk. They have at least 15 available.) I will circulate around the room, consulting on content, design, layout, and tech issues. But since I want to be able to give you some feedback on first drafts of your individual web pages over Thanksgiving Break, that means you'll have to have done a whole lot of work on your own before Thursday's class.

  • Each of you will have done some diligent research, I hope--both web- and library-based--on your assigned topic, book, and/or writer-artist. What form will the presentation of that research take? Probably, at a minimum, some combination of expository prose (including hyperlinked text), bulleted lists, and/or (captioned?) images, together with a bibliographic/webliographic list of references and/or suggestions for further reading/viewing. You'll need to make the initial call on how best to do this; I may have suggestions once I see what you've done. (Remember: no copying and pasting except for purposes of direct quotation with attribution. No close paraphrases, either. And I'm trusting you to find a clear and scrupulous way of acknowledging your sources.)
  • You'll "enhance" that basic content by using one or more DH platforms or tools, and this may be where your creative and/or interpretive talents really come into play. As I mentioned in class a week or so ago: I suppose that those of you working on specific books or writers may make more use of annotation & markup tools, whereas those of you working on broader topics may have more call to incorporate things like timelines, storymaps, and various forms of data "visualization." But I could be wrong about that. As for more pedestrian stuff like images, YouTube videos, sound files: there are any number of meaningful ways you could include those kinds of "assets," too. Get creative. (The key word for any and all of these digital assets is: meaningful. Do you think a given tool might help us see, understand, appreciate, or interpret what you're presenting in a way that plain old prose can't? Okay, then: go for it.)
  • Most of you should now be able to find and edit your page of the Arab Comix Project after logging in to your own account at education.weebly.com. Once you're logged in, select "The Arab Comix Project" from "My Sites," select "Pages" from the menu bar at the top of the screen, and finally select your assigned page from the sidebar at the left. Please do not edit the Main page or any other page at the site besides your own!
  • Once your page is displaying in the main window, then go back to the top menu bar and select "Build." (You needn't concern yourself with any of the other menu items--Theme, Store, Settings, etc. Please leave those alone.) Scroll down in the main window until you see an empty box surrounded by a dotted line with text reading "drag elements here," then choose elements from the lefthand sidebar to drag and drop into that box. (By clicking anywhere inside of that box, you can also bring up a menu that lets you edit its background and/or change its layout. And you can add more boxes--i.e., "Sections"--to your page with the "Structure" elements in the lefthand sidebar.) Timelines, storymaps, videos, and so on, which you have created separately using other DH tools will generally be added to your Weebly page by using an "embed" code.
  • By and large, Weebly makes things fairly intuitive, but you should certainly make use of its Help pages, especially those pertaining to Building Your Site. Once you've added some text and other elements to your page, we can talk about removing its "Header" (or just making it invisible), if you like. Please don't do that on your own just yet, though. (Don't worry about "SEO Settings" if you happen to run across those, either.) If you're using any elements whose permissions or copyright status is unclear, then we can also change your page's "Visibility" setting by making it password-protected. But again: please let me do that; don't you do it on your own.

Links:

For Thursday, November 10 (Day 24):

Wedesday morning, November 9th: It's a terrifyingly bleak day in our nation's history, and it may be cold comfort to remember that other parts of the world have faced--and continue to face--far more appalling dystopias than the one we're facing now. Egyptians like Nael Eltoukhy, for example, know a little something about confronting the forces of reactionism. Maybe his book will have some lessons for us. I just don't know.

Because I believe in the power of words to animate and inspire, I've been looking this morning for as much inspiration as I can find. New Yorker editor David Remnick's "An American Tragedy" helps, and so does staff writer John Cassidy's early interpretation of statistical data and exit polls. And if those pieces smack too much of the condescension with which the "liberal media elite" have supposedly dismissed an aggrieved majority of our fellow citizens, then try this statement by the editorial board of Jacobin, a leftist journal named indirectly for the great Trinidadian intellectual, novelist, political theorist, activist, and cultural critic C.L.R. James (whose magisterial study of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution was entitled The Black Jacobins).

For Tuesday, November 8 (Day 23 - Election Day)

On to uncharted (dystopian) territory! (Please, inch'allah--not in real life....) I'm reading Women of Karantina for the first time right along with you. Look for some resources about Eltoukhy and contemporary dystopianism in the Course Reader (on the "Dystopian Fictions" page). Let's commit to getting through at least the first half of the book (p. 150) for this week. I've opened a Moodle forum. We'll see what happens.

Links:

For Thursday, November 3 (Day 22):

We continue our post-mortems of all those exquisite corpses. (Meanwhile: you should get started on Women of Karentina.)

Mara sends this excerpt from a report on the October 31 edition of the PBS Newshour:

Turkey has opened another phase of the crackdown that began after last summer’s failed coup. Today, police arrested the chief editor and 11 senior staff of a major opposition newspaper. Supporters rallied outside the newspaper offices, one of the oldest in Turkey. A cartoonist for the paper condemned the attempts to silence journalists.

MUSA KART, Cartoonist, Cumhuriyet (through translator): This is ridiculous. You will not intimidate anyone by putting pressure. I want to say that. It is impossible for people with conscience to endorse this scene. You cannot justify this to the world. Today, I am being detained for drawing cartoons, and only for drawing cartoons.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just yesterday, another 10,000 people were fired from their government jobs in Turkey. More than 100,000 have been dismissed since the coup.

And as a good student, an intellectually curious person, and an ecumenically-minded woman of the cloth, she looked up the Quranic references (in "The Reality and The Record") to the "Throne verse" and the "Rahman verse." Here's what she found: "The former is Surah 2, verse 255: 'His throne extends over the heavens and the earth.'  Reciting this verse is believed by some Muslims to protect the one who recites it.  The latter describes how Allah created the Cosmos."

 

For Tuesday, November 1 (Day 21):

Here are the stories to read from Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition: "The Corpse Exhibition," "The Killers and the Compass," "The Iraqi Christ," "The Song of the Goats," and "The Reality and the Record." (How appropriate is it that we're reading a book called The Corpse Exhibition for the week of Hallowe'en and Day of the Dead? I honestly wasn't smart enough to plan it that way....but M. Lynx Qualey includes Blasim's book among "Five Richly Terrifying Arab Novels" for Halloween.) I've opened a Moodle forum and added a page of resources in the Course Reader. Please be aware that these stories contain casual and sometimes unexpected references to rape and other forms of brutality.

Paging back through Black Box in search of Boaz's Ten Commandments, his "new covenant," I came across Alex's excoriation of Michel the Fanatic (my pages 229-232--the passage beginning "Zakheim decribes you"). It's brilliant, and worth re-reading. But so is Boaz's Decalogue, which is on my page 158. ("III. Against being bitter...VI. Bastards are still human beings, not shit...X. Cool it.")

Links:

  • (Research Paper in a) Boxing Day Postscript: do use EasyBib for an overview of 8th Edition MLA Style (or of the differences between the 7th and 8th editions of the MLA Handbook). (Better yet: go straight to the source or, failing that, to Purdue's OWL.) But please, I'm begging you: DO NOT rely on EasyBib or similar citation-generating sites to do your work for you. They almost always get it wrong, especially if you make one or more mistakes on the "input" end. Learn it yourself. It ain't rocket science.
  • Post-postscript: don't forget that you may raise your paper grade once by attending a Wiki-editing SkillShop at the Library and again by starting a Wikipedia page for your writer (or making a substantive improvement to an already existing one). They still haven't scheduled that Wiki workshop they promised me, but if you look at the November calendar as it now stands, you'll see workshops on shooting 360 video, making and publishing 'zines, audio editing, and GoPro.
  • In light of our recent reading, Sarah Leonard's interview with veteran feminist activist & scholar Ann Snitow in The Nation is interesting not just for what Snitow has to say about head scarves and Western feminism's sometime complicity with colonialism, but what she has to say about a feminism that is not just about individual freedom and transformation but one "that has the utopian yearning that things would be organized differently."
  • As long as I'm touting The Nation: see Anthony Lowenstein and Matt Kennard's article in the November 14th issue, "How Israel Privatized Its Occupation of Palestine."
  • Palestine- and film-related: the acclaimed 2010 documentary This Is My Land...Hebron
  • Finally: I meant to tell you about Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber back when we were reading Hanan al-Shaykh. If you Google his name, you'll find lots of good stuff, including this excerpt from his novel Birds of Holiday Inn in the journal Banipal.

For Thursday, October 27 (Day 20):

Our last scheduled day on Black Box. We'll hear about husbands and sons: Alec, Michel, Boaz.

Take the time to look over the Black Box discussion forum, especially if you haven't visited the forums in a while.

Links:

For Tuesday, October 25 (Day 19):

Over the weekend, continue on your own the work you began in class. Now that you have a list of your writer's letters, tagged by date, addressee, and page numbers (with a brief description of each letter's content/topic/subject matter), go back and examine them one by one:

  • Do any significant plot points (including hitherto unknown back-story) emerge in this letter?
  • Do any significant aspects of character--the writer's or someone else's--get revealed there? (If so, then how and where? Is it purely a matter of something that's narrated or described or said? Tone or mood? Something even more ineffable?)
  • What else, if anything, does this letter do besides communicate?

Bring your notes with you, of course. Your aim, after regrouping and comparing notes and lining up some talking points at the start of class, will be for your group to help us chart an unfolding sense of your writer. You won't need to walk us through the book letter by letter, necessarily, but you'll want to help us identify the major "indicators" or "data points" about your character that emerge from the black box. In which two or three (or four or five) letters or exchanges does our understanding of this character (or their relationship with another character, or their relationship to what you take to be the book's major themes) really coalesce, take a big turn, get elucidated, whatever? Elaborate.

  • Ilana: Melanie, Sebastian, Terry
  • Alex: Gabe, Chris, Laura, Louegie
  • Michel: Nic, Ashley, Erin, Eleanor, Kylie
  • Manfred: Mara, George, David, Socorro
  • Boaz: Christi, Jack, Kat, Brian

Name-checks:

Public Service Announcement:

  • The deadline to register to vote in the upcoming election is Monday, October 24.  You can register online at: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/

    In California, college students can choose to register either from your home address or your school address.

    You need to re-register to vote when:

    1. You move to a new permanent residence
    2. You change your name, or
    3. You change your political party choice.

You can check the status of your voter registration here: https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov

 

For Tuesday, October 18 (Day 17) and Thursday, October 20 (Day 18):

Tuesday is Sick and Tired Day! Use it to do all kinds of things:

  • Send me all your DH-related discoveries (see Update for Thursday, October 13, below)--and get started on your project (you know, in a casual, I've-got-all-the-time-in-the-world sort of way).
  • Try to make sense of Chronicle of a Disappearance (and your reactions to it), in writing. (I've opened a Moodle forum.)
  • Explore the Elia Suleiman Course Reader Page--and, if Suleiman's quirky, enigmatic, non-narrative style of filmmaking didn't float your boat, then make plans to see Hany Abu-Assad's Rana's Wedding at Richard's Goat next Thursday, October 20th. If it did float your boat, and if you want to watch part or all of it again, then you'll find it at the Reserve Desk in the HSU Library. You'll find Suleiman's other films, Divine Intervention and The Time That Remains, in the HSU Library catalog.
  • Read Amos Oz's Black Box. There's a copy of that at the Reserve Desk, too--and more copies, perhaps, at local used bookstores like Tin Can Mailman (Arcata), Booklegger (Eureka), and Blake's Books (McKinleyville). I've opened a Moodle forum and will be updating links on the corresponding Course Reader page over the next little while. Reading responses will be due Wednesday, October 19. Like Saeed the Pessoptimist only moreso (or more obviously so, anyway), Black Box is written in epistolary form. Also like Saeed but moreso: it's a book about land, territory, and real estate.

Random Links (more coming):

For Thursday, October 13 (Day 16):

Boxed Research Papers due at the start of class!

And then let's watch a movie--by another Palestinian Israeli, and about another "disappearance," this one chronicled on film (so to speak). The film itself will be your only text, so bring a pen and notepad (or a laptop or tablet) and take good notes, especially if you hope to write about it. You may also want check out the resources that I've assembled on the Suleiman page of the Course Reader; I would highly recommend "A Cinema of Nowhere" (an interview of Suleiman by Anne Bourlond) and Hamid Dabashi's article, "Elia Suleiman's cinema as the premonition of the Arab revolutions." The 5-minute video origianlly featured in Joy Dietrich's New York Times blog is also good.

By the end of the week, please give me--in hard copy or by e-mail--websites and/or DH tools that you were impressed by. (I'll collect them on a web page.)

For Tuesday, October 11 (Day 15):

Arab Comix Project DH Braindump! Scroll down to the update for Tuesday, October 4 (below) for a reminder about how to get ready. Come prepared to share a) one or two cool "Digital Humanities" projects you've found, b) one or two tools one might use to build such projects, and c) some very tentative ideas about how you might adapt any of this to your assignment. We'll ooh and ahh at the things you've found and give you some feedback and critique to help you refine your ideas.

A few last words to ponder regarding The strange occurrences concerning the disappearance of Said, father of ill-fortune, the pessoptimist:

  • There are lots of multi-lingual puns in this book, some of them a function of the English translation. "Farce," for instance (see p.44), is a genre of comedy that relies on slapstick and improbability. But it comes from the French word farcir, which means "to stuff" (as in: what you do when you make a sausage--like those famous donkey-meat sausages served up by the legendary Kiork). Another example: the word "extra-terrestrial" literally means "outside of the land." A synonym for extra-terrestrial, of course, is "alien," which literally means "other," but which is also the word we use for "non-citizen." To be "alienated" from something, meanwhile, is to be estranged, distanced, or cut off from it.) In Arabic, the word for "extra-terrestrial" or "alien" is فَضائيّ (fada'ee), while the word for "guerilla" or "resistance fighter" is فِدائيّ (fedayee). (English transliterations of Arabic words vary, they're all inexact. Read more here, and compare the Arabic pronunciations for yourself here and here.) So...you decide who it is that's taken Saeed away to live with them underground.
  • Want to see a stage adaptation of Saeed? There you go.
  • I suggested in class that Saeed's "stake-sitting" evokes (among other things) the practice of "staking a claim," which was what men and/or corporations were invited to do in 18th- and 19th-century America, for example, whenever the federal government opened up land seized from Native Americans to white settlement and/or development. How does that relate to the present-day situation in Israel's occupied territories? Try Jonah Walters, "The Settlement Industry" (Jacobin 11 June 2016).

Finally: links!

For Thursday, October 6 (Day 14):

Was there an emerging consensus that our friend Happy the Ill-Fated isn't so much dumb as playing dumb? Perhaps we can start by searching for more evidence of that proposition: where, if anywhere, do we perceive lapses in tone, expressions of genuine emotion or intelligence (as opposed to passivity or obliviousness)? Where, if at all, do we see Saeed being not just dopey, timid, or paranoid, but canny, discreet, or circumspect?

Then: madness, "truth and history," stake-sitting, extra-terrestrialism, donkey sausages, and other brands of outlandishness and absurdity.

So: decide whom you're researching for your boxy paper! (Like, yesterday!) The Reader's Digest version of my research refresher course: the library's English Research Guide (MLA, Project MUSE, JSTOR) for scholarly articles, plus the library catalog and the WorldCat database for books. Book reviews? ProQuest Newsstand, Ethnic NewsWatch, and LA Times databases, all accessible via the ProQuest portal. Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian (London), the London Review of Books, and TLS (Times Literary Supplement--i.e., the weekly book review section of the London Times). (You may have to search the individual websites of those publications and either pay for articles you find or obtain them via Inter-Library Loan.) Google Scholar. Google.

Finally: scroll down to the previous update for instructions on what to prep, DH-wise, for next Tuesday. (Here, by the way, is the complete list of Arab Comix Project topic assignments.)

Today's links:

  • Don't have time to read Candide just now? Read about it, at least.
  • "Palestine olive farmers cultivate resistance" (Al-Jazeera)
  • Emerging Palestinian Authors (I have the issue of Banipal mentioned here, if anyone would like to borrow it)
  • Eyal Press's Shelf Life column in The Nation (16 March 2015) discusses S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh, a 1940s Israeli novel critical of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
  • Caleb Crain's introductory remarks about Israeli-Arab writer Sayed Kashua are apropos to our study of Saeed, as is Ruth Margalit's 2015 profile of Kashua in The New Yorker.
  • Sahar Mandour is a young Lebanese writer whose novel 32 (her third), which is a "slice-of-life" story about...well, being young and Lebanese, has just been translated into English. You can read excerpts here, here, and here. And if we were at a wealthier institution whose library had full instead of partial access to Project MUSE, you could read the entire novel there.

 

For Tuesday, October 4 (Day 13):

What's it like to be an Arab citizen of Israel? Saeed, the ill-fated, pessoptimist, wants to tell you, in epistolary-picaresque form. Discussion forum with reading questions open. Links in the Course Reader updated (mostly--let me know if you find any that are broken or misbehaving). Read carefully. Make good annotations, and take good notes.

Get started on your "Research Paper in a Box," of course; I'll be polling you on Tuesday to find out who has decided to work on whom. (Get crackin'!)

And remember that the Arab Comix Project link is now live, too. (It's a "beta" version, which means I'll be revising it semi-regularly.) Folks who were around till the end of class today already have their assignments; folks who weren't...will, soon. Read through the entire project. Follow all the links, even the ones you don't think will be relevant to what you're doing.

Here's your mission between now and Tuesday, October 11th: ponder the assignment, ponder your options, and do some exploratory research. In particular:

  1. Dig around in the "Project Showcases" links (bottom of the page of the project guidelines, below the jump) and come up with two examples of what you think are outstanding--or at least intriguing--projects. If a project is cool, then tell us what's cool about it. If you wish you could do something like that, say why. (I expect to be adding to those links.)
  2. Dig around in the "Tools/Platforms" links and come up with two digital tools--tools used to build one the projects above, perhaps--that you could imaging adapting to your own purposes. (I expect to be adding to those links, too.) You could also track down some of the specific tools that Kyle mentioned or demo'd, and/or do some additional searching on your own. (E.g., "Best infographics tool.") Watch the tool's tutorial videos, find user reviews, look at the galleries of sample projects built with that tool, etc. Ask yourself: How might I use this to spotlight, interpret, or contextualize (aspects of) my research, to really make something "pop," or to help people see or understand something afresh?

Again, what we're gradually trying to figure out is 1) how to display, arrange, and "curate" the information you assemble about your topic; 2) how to annotate, explain, or comment on that information, as necessary and appropriate; and 3) how to supplement any or all of that, meaningfully, with other "digital assets" (maps, storymaps, concept maps, playlists, videos, timelines, other types of infographics & data visualization, etc., etc.).

As for which platform to use to house all of our work under one roof: we could start a Wordpress blog, an Omeka exhibit (check out the showcase), or a Weebly for Education site. Have a look at those three and tell me what you think.

 

For Thursday, September 29 (Day 12):

A reprieve! I'm feeling like we should pause to discuss both the Research Paper in a Box and the Arab Comix Project, and to see if we can collectively come to a clearer understanding of what the latter project aims to do (and what it will look like). My sense right now is that it is primarily a research project on specific texts, topics, and creators that I will assign. The "Digital Humanities" aspect of all this is probably secondary. The most pressing things to discover/determine, then, might be:

  1. What platforms or technologies should we use to present, "curate," and/or annotate the results of your research (and should we aim to collect everyone's individual projects under one roof)? and
  2. What platforms or technologies could we use to augment, supplement, or enhance #1--not just as bells and whistles, but as meaningful ways of spotlighting, interpreting, contextualizing, or re-envisioning (aspects of) your research?

That's what I'd like to determine with you. But I'm open to other visions for this project, too.

Practically speaking, this means that we won't begin our discussion of Saeed the Pessoptimist until next Tuesday, October 4th--and that reading responses to that text won't be due until Monday, October 3d. (That also gives you more time to explore some of the supplemental reading! See the Update for September 25, below.)

For Tuesday, September 25 (Day 11):

We meet in Library 209 (the Fishbowl) for a show-and-tell session about "Digital Humanities."

I'll also take questions about the "Research Paper in a Box" assignment. Know that in November, there will be an opportunity to raise your grade on that assignment by attending a Wikipedia editing skillshop at the library and/or by creating or editing a Wikipedia page for your chosen writer.

A last word about Women of Sand and Myrhh: Tamr is grateful to Suha not for showing her that she is oppressed and therefore ought to run away from this bleak and barren and constricting place, but for "introducing me to another way of life in the desert" (97, my emphasis). Suha may have convinced herself that nothing she's done in the desert has made or can make any difference at all (it's easy for teachers to descend into that sort of gloomy cynicism, believe me), when actually she's made a huge difference in Tamr's outlook. Tamr, of course, is unflaggingly rebellious and upbeat to begin with, and she doesn't need anyone to teach her about the arbitrariness of patriarchal power. But as far as she is concerned, Suha's metaphorical canary has all sorts of freedom, and Suha herself has "nothing to complain about" (96). Suha's example, meanwhile, has inspired her, as she sees it, to "do anything I want" (83). What's "normal," then, is relative. Tamr, it seems, together with her three counterparts, is part of what Sophie Chamas calls "a literary refusal to whittle down the diversity of experiences lived by Middle Eastern women into a single, neatly defined condition" ("10 Middle Eastern Writers You Should Know," Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East, 24 March 2015).

Linkage:

  • Interested in reading (other) Saudi writers? Here are M. Lynx Qualey's recommendations. (You can find longer, un-annotated lists of Saudi writers on Wikipedia.)
  • More recently, Qualey has written about "queerness" in Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa's newly translated No Knives in the Kitchens of This City: "Homosexuality, in [this] novel, seems to be doorway — only partially opened — to discussing the toxic rigidities of masculine identity."
  • And in a recent issue of The Nation (12 & 19 September), Rafia Zakaria writes about American women reporting from Muslim countries, placing them within a longer tradition of "[w]hite female journalists exposing the intimate lives of the 'other'--black and brown women--to prove themselves to male bosses." There is a presumed "feminism of sisterhood" at play here, Zakaria says, but feminist solidarity is not what "determines the outcome of the exchange." The story, which appeared in the print edition of the magazine as "Whose Stories?" (and in the online edition as "Can War Reporting Be a Feminist Project?"), is more than obliquely relevant to Women of Sand and Myrrh. (In the same issue: a column by Katha Pollitt, "France's Cultural Panic," which may be the smartest thing I've read yet on the "burkini" controversy.)

Thursday, we begin another classic of modern Arabic fiction—a loopy, absurdist classic—that presents some special difficulties to Western readers. Even if you know, or think you know, the basic outlines of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may be left scratching your head over this book. But if you don't know any of the basics, then you're liable to miss a lot of references, and much of the humor is likely to fly right by you. We're going to be spending quite a bit of time in Israel & Palestine over the next few weeks; over the weekend, as usual, I'll be updating links on the Course Reader page for The Secret Life of Saeed (as well as opening up a Moodle forum with some reading questions). If you can make time for only a bit of next week's supplemental reading, then let it be one of the "primers" in the first bullet in the lefthand column.

For Thursday, September 22 (Day 10):

Three other women of sand & myrrh. And maybe some dudes, too.

And since that's such a short update, then maybe this is an opportune time to lay down some links I've been saving up--on Middle Eastern writers who have recently so offended or threatened local authorities that they've been locked up. (Can you imagine an American politician with such thin skin? Well, maybe you can...Can you imagine an American politician who would indirectly lend such credence to the power of words?)

  • Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian writer currently serving a two-year jail term for "violating public modesty" with his novel The Use of Life. Read about his case in Al-Jazeera |The Guardian | The Guardian | PEN America | Arabic Literature (In English). Ursula Lindsey (of The Arabist blog) gives a wider snapshot of the current repressive climate in Egyptian arts/letters/publishing in a piece for The Nation (21 March 2016) that was entitled “Unreal City” in the print edition.
  • Dareen Tatour is a Palestinian writer imprisoned and tried for posting a poem to her Facebook page considered an "incitement to violence" by the state of Israel. Here's the latest from Arabic Literature (In English), with links to earlier stories at the bottom of the page. Kim Jensen offers analysis and critique at Mondoweiss. And Laila Lalami provides context with her "Letter from the Palestine Festival of Literature" (The Nation 8 January 2016).
  • Meanwhile, Mohamed Tamalt, an Algerian writer imprisoned for a poem and other Facebook posts insulting that country's president, has fallen into a coma after a hunger strike.

 

For Tuesday, September 20 (Day 9):

Well, dang: here I was hoping that the little exercise I devised had isolated some of the key terms and dynamics in Season of Migration, and that expending just a few minutes’ worth of concentrated energy on them would magically crack the book wide open.  Back to the drawing board!

(Sorry to jump down Brian and Kat’s throats, by the way: this book is so enigmatic, in so many different ways, that it invites all kinds of speculation, and we shouldn’t reject any interpretation out of hand, especially when we’re collectively thinking out loud. I’d still maintain that some interpretations are more plausible than others, of course; it’s always a matter of accounting for as many details of the text as possible. But that kind of meticulousness can take time, which by 2:30 was already in short supply….)

Anyway: even if we didn’t gain a whole lot more traction, I still think the questions we tackled were worth spinning our wheels over: What is “the lie” that Mustapha Sa’eed refers to, and what does it have to do with the history of colonial encounter and/or the so-called “clash of civilizations” between East and West?  What sort of “contagion” was spread in the course of that centuries-long “encounter”; who was “infected,” by whom, and with what?  And what, if anything, does all this have to do with “strangers”?  (“She accepted the stranger,” says Bint Majzoub, ruefully, at the end of her gruesome report about Hosna Bint Mahmoud; “why didn’t she accept Wad Rayyes?”)

Since I can’t resist having the last word, and since this blog gives me a kind of bully pulpit, I’ll throw out a couple more thoughts: we began to see yesterday that, like so many things in this book, the term “contagion” seems to have more than one referent. In his will (which is worth re-reading, carefully, in its entirety), Mustafa Sa’eed equates it with “wanderlust.”  He entrusts the narrator to let his sons learn, in due time, “the truth” about their father’s life, in part so that it might help them know the truth about themselves. Above all he entreats the narrator to “spare them the pangs of wanderlust,” a force which, in spite of his best efforts to settle down and live a good life, still “impels [him] toward faraway parts.”  So wanderlust is a yearning or a compulsion for the Other?  For an eroticized/exoticized Other?  For indulging the sort of cold-hearted, unfettered will that Mustafa Sa’aeed first recognized in himself as a child, which eventually took the form of envisioning foreign places as women’s bodies that he could conquer and possess?

Next week, at last, we make the leap across the Red Sea and into the Arabian peninsula--the "Middle East" proper--with Hanan al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh. (In a related story: ever wonder what kind of trouble second-guessing Saudi attitudes towards women might get you into? Just ask Ikea. And: New York Times correspondent Diaa Hadid has been writing about her experience as a pilgrim making the hajj to Mecca. The latest installment appeared Friday in the print edition as "The Conflicted Feelings of a Woman in Mecca.") I'll open a Moodle forum and update Course Reader links soon.

For Thursday, September 15 (Day 8):

The (Sa'eedo-Mustaphean? Sado-masochistic?) sexual tension builds. What is the "germ of contagion"? What is the "lie" that Mustapha Sa'eed wants killed? Is there some magic antiseptic that will knock them both out? Are there really "no lessons" to Mustapha Sa'eed's life, "no secret" contained in his room? And is it "undue curiosity" on our part to wonder about all this?

For Tuesday, September 13 (Day 7):

Well, that was a cheery discussion! Here is your mission for the weekend, dazed and shattered though you may be: hark to the hypnotic tale of Mr. Mustafa Sa'eed. Discussion forum (with reading questions) is now open; links on the Salih Course Reader page have been refreshed. I may add more to this update on Saturday or Sunday. For now:

For Thursday, September 8 (Day 6):

We'll get down to zero, via the questions you cooked up today. (I've posted them here.)

For several different takes on the question of whether a book like Woman at Point Zero plays into Western stereotypes about Islam and the oppression of women: explore selected links in the "What Gets Translated" section of my introductory remarks, as well as Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

For Tuesday, September 6 (Day 5):

Enjoy the Labor Day holiday. (Honor Labor!) One of the things I'll be laboring at is acknowledging the first round of Discussion Forum posts; if you submitted something, expect to hear from me sometime over the long weekend.

Tuesday, we'll move on to Nawal el Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero. (I've updated links on the Saadawi page of the Course Reader and opened a new Discussion Forum--and posted a few reading questions--in Moodle.)

On the Interwebs: lots of interesting stuff on Arab Literature (In English) over the last couple of weeks. Here's a sampling:

For Thursday, September 1 (Day 4):

Okay: now that we've identified some points of entry, let's see how thoroughly we can manage to explore Midaq Alley in the short time we've got left. Anything and everything can be on the table, but I think there's some interest in getting back to the discussion of narrative point-of-view, for starters...

Props, by the way, to those brave 7 who stuck their necks out and posted reading responses this week, setting an example for the rest of us. The rest of you: log on to Moodle and give those responses the once-over if you haven't already.

Links:

A review of Oriented (which is being shown on campus next Tuesday, September 6, at 6:00 p.m. in KBR) in +972, and the film's official website. Related resources:

And this may not be quite as relevant as it was four years when it appeared, but I'll offer it up anyway: a reprint of an Op-Ed piece from the Egypt Independent, "The Cultural Project of the Revolution," by Paul Sedra, a history professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Sedra was lamenting the fact that since the "Arab Spring" in Egypt, liberals and secularists weren't managing to advance their vision of a new Egypt as effectively as Islamists--even though liberals and secularists had been in the vanguard of the masses in Tahrir Square. (Nawal el Saadawi, for instance, now in her eighties, was a regular.) This, he says, is above all a cultural project:

An op-ed recently penned by Ahdaf Soueif for The Guardian drove this point home for me in vivid terms. Soueif suggests that Egyptian novelists “seem to have given up — for the moment — on fiction.” This is because, she argues, they feel the urgency of the political moment — the need, as citizens, “to be present, there, on the ground, marching, supporting, talking, instigating, articulating.” All in all, fiction is inadequate to the political moment through which Egypt is moving, as she explains: “Attempts at fiction right now would be too simple. The immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take form. For reality has to take time to be processed, to transform into fiction.”

This is an eloquent statement of the dilemma the novelist, the artist, the intellectual faces in situations of revolution. The work of the novelist, the artist, the intellectual requires a certain distance from one’s subject matter, to capture the nuances and complexities of human life — but this is a distance one cannot afford if one is to participate in a revolutionary moment.

The problem with this choice, of engagement over reflection — or, in the terms I set forth above, of the political project of the revolution over the cultural project — is that Egyptians at large are deprived of the reflective work of the artist at a time at which they desperately need that work, to navigate a world turned upside down, the world of post-Mubarak Egypt.

After the 2013 military coup d'etat (against the Islamist-friendly Mohammed Morsi) effectively dashed all remaining hopes of the "Arab Spring," writers have increasingly "processed" reality into fiction in the form of futuristic dystopian novels, as we will see later in the semester. (Other installments in the "Why we can't read any recent fiction from Iraq" saga: "Why Aren't More Iraqi Stories Being Published" and "Baghdad's Readers.")

For Tuesday, August 30 (Day 3):

Your main order of business is to finish Midaq Alley and be ready and eager to talk about it. (Don't forget to check the Course Reader for additional items of interest. Teacher Prep types may be especially interested in the essay by Michelle Hartman.) If you intend to submit a reading response this first time out, then know that there's a Moodle forum (with some reading questions) open now--and your response is due Monday night.

A couple of items related to today's lecture and video (the latter of which you may finish watching at the library: it's in the Video/DVD collection, 2d floor, call number DS12 .E39 2002):

  • There's lots more about "Orientalism" on the General Introduction page of the online Course Reader. (Unfortunately the version of the film of Jack Shaheen's "Reel Bad Arabs" that I've linked to was posted by someone who indulges in wacko-paranoid "Zionist conspiracy" theories--but it's the only version I've found that's not split up into shorter segments.)
  • Tania Kamal-Eldin's essay "Orientalism and Gender in American Cinema" at the blog TV Multiversity is also worth reading (Kamal-Eldin is the director of a documentary called Hollywood Harems). I may talk just a tiny bit about the role of "the Orient" in the West's erotic imagination myself next Tuesday, but in the meantime you could go to images.google.com, search on "orientalism harem" and/or "postcards colonial harem," and have a peek at some of the hair-raising stuff that turns up. (Or you could go to Wikipedia and, um, admire Ingres's famous painting "The Turkish Bath." Or check out some of the cheesecake covers of "belly dance" records from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.) If you'd like to supplement all this by reading an excerpt from Malek Alloula's famous study, The Colonial Harem, then be my guest.
  • And if you have any interest in perusing the 23 volumes of the Déscription de l'Egypte commissioned by Napoleon, you can find an online version of it here. (Select the "English" version of the site unless your French is strong. I find that it works best in Firefox--and that it requires the Flash plugin.)

I hope today's proceedings weren't unbearably preachy. Mainly, as I said, I wanted to give you some historical & theoretical context for how I've set up this course (that was also the idea behind the longish reading assignment), and I want for us to be aware of some of the dubious enterprises in which our own well-intended ambitions may be implicated. But let's not get too solemn: we're also going to be reading and analyzing and enjoying some very good literature this semester. So let's start doing that...now.

Finally, for your weekend enjoyment, more bloggage of interest:

  • If you wade through my "Introductory Remarks," you'll eventually find some links pertaining to a subject I raised in class today, namely: the commercial (and ideological) calculations behind what, from the Middle East, gets translated and published in the West. Here's one more, a propos of that same subject: a few years ago, M. Lynx Qualey (have you subscribed to her blog yet?) wrote about Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Farghali on "Why You're Reading the Wrong Arabic Books." Is he speaking to us? Maybe.
  • As for more immediately timely links: plenty of coverage out there of France's bizarre efforts to force Muslim women to bare their flesh by removing their "burkinis" at the beach. Not much of the coverage is terribly smart. This Op-Ed piece by Asma Uddin, "The Swimsuit as Security Threat," is. In loosely related news: film critic Stephen Holden reviews a new film by French director Philippe Faucon, Fatima, about a North African single mother raising two teenage girls in Lyon. (Holden calls it "a small miracle of a film.")

 

For Thursday, August 25 (Day 2):

You've got lots to do (!).

  1. Re-read the syllabus, along with online addenda and course policies, carefully.
  2. Get Mahfouz's Midaq Alley and start reading. (We begin discussing that book next Tuesday, the 30th, and if you want to write about it, you'll need to have it finished by Monday night.) I'll open a forum in Moodle and post some reading questions as soon as I can.
  3. Go to the Course Reader and delve into the required introductory reading for Thursday (and as much of the recommended reading as you can make time for). This is probably the most additional reading I’ll assign—even on a recommended basis—for any one class session all semester.  It lays a good foundation for the course, and I’ll refer to much of it, both directly and indirectly, in class on Thursday.
  4. Nose around the rest of the course website: have a gander at the General Reference page and (if you haven't already had quite enough of my long-windedness) my additional Introductory Remarks.

More on the question of categories and generalizations that I raised in class:

For kicks: here's a bunch of links from the blogosphere (and beyond) that I've been saving up, some of them for years (I may post a few more later):

  • In 2012, Syrian novelist and journalist Samar Yazbek wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times entitled "In the Shadow of Assad's Bombs." Tragically, four years later, his words are still relevant.
  • On her blog Arabic Literature (in English)--to which you should all subscribe, I hasten to add--M. Lynx Qualey reprints two recently translated poems by Mohab Nasr ("Please, God, give us books to read") and Abdel Moneim Ramadan ("Funeral for Walt Whitman"). She also links to a press release about Poets of Protest, a series of six documentaries about contemporary poets from around the Arab world, which aired in 2012 on Al Jazeera English (it's not clear whether all the episodes are still available for streaming on the website). And on another post, Qualey collects from around the web stories and poems for the holy month of Ramadan, which recently ended. Another post features excerpts from an interview with Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, along with a YouTube performance video and links to more of his poetry.
  • Meanwhile, Jadaliyya published a newly translated poem by the late, legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, "At the Station of a Train Which Fell Off the Map."
  • NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross recently re-ran an interview with Israeli (Jewish, leftwing) writer Etgar Keret, on the occasion of the publication of the paperback edition of his latest book, a collection of essays entitled The Seven Good Years. (Here's the original broadcast, which features additional links.)
  • The National Priorities Project's "Cost of War" page. And Dunya Mikhail's celebrated poem "The War Works Hard."
  • Finally: since one of topics we'll revisit throughout the semester is Western Images of Arab & Muslim women, and since several seaside towns in France have been in the news recently for banning the "burquini" on their beaches, you might be interested in this piece by Zainab Magdy for Open Democracy, "Undressing Um Ahmad: Egyptian women between the bikini and the burquaa'." (The debate in the comments section, which includes contributions from the noted American religious studies scholar Karen Armstrong, strikes me as pithy and fruitful.)

 
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