Race and Blackness in Premodern Arabic Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Schine
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
New Race ◽  
Context Specific

The signal works of poetry that prominently feature racialized Blackness in early Arabic literature (c. ad 500–1250) include works composed by authors of Afro-Arab heritage as well as by Arab authors who satirized and panegyrized Black subjects. These poets include the pre-Islamic author ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād and the ʿAbbasid-era figures al-Mutanabbī and Ibn al-Rūmī, and thus reflect the shift, across an extensive timeline, from a local, Bedouin poetics to a self-styled cosmopolitan, courtly aesthetic characterized as muḥdath, or modernist. The works are situated not only within the changing conventions of genre, but also within an arc that traces the emergence of new race concepts and racialized social institutions in the transition from the pre-Islamic era to Islam and from the early conquests to ʿAbbasid imperialization. Critical instances of these works’ intertextual movements demonstrate how racial logic accretes in various Arab-Muslim textual traditions, showing how poetry intersects with popular epic as well as high literary geographical, ethnological, and commentarial corpuses. As verse moves across a myriad of later literary forms, its context-specific representations of racial difference are recontextualized and received in ways that contribute to a broader transregional and transtemporal discourse of racialized Blackness.

The city in modern Arabic literature

1986 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Ostle
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Implicit Contract ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
The City

A superficial consideration of the history of Arabic literature impresses one by the remarkable longevity of literary forms: a qaṣīda written by the pre-Islamic poet Imru'l-Qays and many of those written by Aḥmad Shawqī who died in 1932 are eminently recognizable members of the same species. The system of prosody as codified by Khalīl b. Ahmad (d. A.D. 791) was still very much in force, and the thematic divisions into nasīb, wasf, and madīḥ or hijā' still had much in common. Similarly the maqāma form with its or ornate rhyming prose and limited range of stock characters was still being produced in Arabic at the turn of this century, and the links with the works of al-Hamadhānī (d. A.D. 1008) and al-Harīrī (d. A.D. 1122) are plain to behold and to hear. As with much world literature which is the product of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ societies (for want of better terms), style is all. In thematic terms there is an implicit contract of understanding between the writer and the small, rarefied, élitist public. They know what to expect and the writer or performer delivers. The language, both in its form and its content, is a vehicle through which the relationships between writer or performer, and public or audience, are expressed.

Genre as Telescopic Method

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Cross Section ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Social Logic ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Genre Study

One of the virtues, indeed the pleasures, of genre study is the fact that it allows for telescoping between levels of analysis. Genre study endeavors like much historicist and sociological literary scholarship to tease out the relations between literary forms and broader social and cultural phenomena. This book has argued for a triple-stranded approach to studying genre, as it sits at the intersection of form, history, and the workings of social institutions. Analyzing the variations on the formula or recipe that constitute a genre aims to elucidate the transformations and adaptability of a literary form. The conventions that appear across a cross-section of a genre communicate a common set of assumptions, a shared social logic that helps explain why a succession of writers gravitate to a generic technique at a particular historical moment. And genres serve institutional and marketplace functions, helping producers target audiences and gain strategic advantages in the market, and providing satisfactions for readers. But because any text that utilizes a genre shares features with a wider corpus of texts while departing from them in other ways, genre study allows scholars to strive for claims about a genre’s greater social significance while remaining sensitive to the innovative or idiosyncratic features of individual texts. Genre, that is, appeals to the scholar who wants to reach for the breadth of social significance without abandoning the nuance of close reading. One can zoom in on a novel such as ...

SULIMAN BASHEAR, Arabs and Others in Early Islam, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 8 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1997). Pp. 169. $32 cloth.

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-279
Author(s):  
Jamsheed K. Choksy
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Narrative Reconstruction ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Contextual Framework ◽  
Great Complexity

The earliest period of Islamic thought has emerged as a major focus of contemporary scholarship during the past few decades, with a variety of techniques—ranging from historical documentation and historiographical analysis to narrative reconstruction and source criticism—being applied to comprehend more accurately the ideas and events that fueled the rise of Muslim societies in the Middle East. Suliman Bashear has made a fascinating addition to the writing that has emerged from this scholarly quest to configure the Middle Eastern Muslim past. The book under review probes available early Arabic literature, largely on its own terms and occasionally in relation to later Arabic writings, to determine the great complexity of Arab, Muslim, and Arab–Muslim views about themselves and about members of other communities during and shortly after the 7th century. Bashear's work also endeavors to trace how such views changed over the next few centuries. At the same time, however, the book is difficult to appreciate fully. Each chapter involves mainly the analysis of a series of hadith (and, to a lesser extent, tafsir and akhbar) linked together by general themes, with little contextual framework or broader discussion of the issues' significance. As a result, the considerable erudition and informative detail that permeates this book provide disparate nuggets of knowledge that, when taken together, fall short of providing the reader with a clear overall notion of how and why the earliest Muslims perceived themselves and others in particular ways.

scholarly journals Group farming in France: Why do some regions have more cooperative ventures than others?

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 781-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bina Agarwal ◽  
Bruno Dorin
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Farming Systems ◽  
Family Farms ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Agricultural Census ◽  
Commercial Farms ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Local Ecology ◽  
Ecologically Sustainable

The global debate on food security and the kinds of farming systems that could prove economically and ecologically sustainable has focused overwhelmingly on small family farms versus large commercial farms, with little attention being given to alternative models based on farmer cooperation. France offers a significant but under-researched and internationally little-recognized model of group farming – the GAEC ( Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun) – based on farmers pooling land, labour and capital. This model is of considerable contemporary interest for both France and other countries. Catalysed by a 1962 law, GAECs accounted for 7.6% of farms and 15% of agricultural adult work units in 2010, but their incidence varied greatly across regions. Using data from the French agricultural census and other sources, this paper identifies the factors – economic, ecological, social and demographic – underlying this regionally uneven development of GAECs (and comparatively of EARLs – Exploitations Agricoles à Responsabilité Limitée – another type of group farm introduced in 1985). Regions with a higher incidence of group farms are found to be those that were historically dominated by middle-sized farms, had a local ecology favouring labour-intensive animal breeding, especially pastures, a higher proportion of agricultural graduates, greater economic equality and social institutions that promote community cohesion, among other factors. These results illuminate not only the conditions favourable to the emergence of group farming in France, but also the conditions under which such farmer cooperation could take root in other (including developing) countries, subject to context-specific modifications of the French model.

Pacifist Invasions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Elhariry
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Francophone Literature ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Francophone Studies ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Original Language ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Edmond Jabes ◽  
Classical Arabic

Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, and the Postfrancophone Lyric is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in poetry by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys comparative side-by-side close readings of classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic commentary traditions in the original language, against the landscape of contemporary Francophone literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French lyric. The book analyzes how poets writing in French pacifically invade the language by engaging in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature. Pacifist Invasions reveals the central importance of translational and intertextual poetics after colonialism, as they pacifically invade and denature the monolingual fabric of French. It recasts the field of Francophone Studies to account for transversal and transhistorical transmissions of literary forms and languages in Arabic, and offers fresh insight into the question of writing in the colonizer’s language. The study shifts the focus to the context of Arabic and Islamic literary cultures, demonstrating how they pacifically invade French from within, rather than writing back from the margins of empire. Through close readings of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a rereading of Francophone literature in relation to the translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics, offering a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of Francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis.

scholarly journals And That’s Not All: (Sur)Faces of Justice in Philosophy of Education

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Marianna Papastephanou
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Or Education ◽  
Related Research ◽  
The Many ◽  
Context Specific

Adjectives such as “environmental”, “social”, “cosmopolitan”, “relational”, “distributive”, etc. reflect how scholars discern the many faces of justice and put several claims to, and claimants of, justice in perspective. They have also helped related research to focus on some surfaces of justice, that is, on spaces that invite justice, localities and formations, such as the state, social policies, social institutions, etc. within which ethical-political challenges unravel. Diverse philosophical perspectives enable context-specific explorations of (sur)faces of justice. However, I argue, there is more to the concept of justice than what perspectives (considered alone or in their sum total) allow us to view. To theorize how this surplus may be more discernible through stereoscopic rather than perspectival optics I first describe how educational-philosophical perspectives, old and new, discuss just education or education for justice; and then I critique the very notion of perspective on which scholarly work relies. Despite their merits, perspectival framings of justice fail to address the interconnectivity of various (sur)faces of justice.

Validation of the Procrastination at Work Scale

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 767-776
Author(s):  
U. Baran Metin ◽  
Toon W. Taris ◽  
Maria C. W. Peeters ◽  
Max Korpinen ◽  
Urška Smrke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Work Engagement ◽  
Discriminant Validity ◽  
Psychometric Characteristics ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Confirmatory Factor ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Negative Links ◽  
Office Employees

Abstract. Procrastination at work has been examined relatively scarcely, partly due to the lack of a globally validated and context-specific workplace procrastination scale. This study investigates the psychometric characteristics of the Procrastination at Work Scale (PAWS) among 1,028 office employees from seven countries, namely, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Specifically, it was aimed to test the measurement invariance of the PAWS and explore its discriminant validity by examining its relationships with work engagement and performance. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis shows that the basic factor structure and item loadings of the PAWS are invariant across countries. Furthermore, the two subdimensions of procrastination at work exhibited different patterns of relationships with work engagement and performance. Whereas soldiering was negatively related to work engagement and task performance, cyberslacking was unrelated to engagement and performance. These results indicate further validity evidence for the PAWS and the psychometric characteristics show invariance across various countries/languages. Moreover, workplace procrastination, especially soldiering, is a problematic behavior that shows negative links with work engagement and performance.

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