Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

scholarly journals «Немецкая Казань»: имагологический анализ художественных произведений Гузель Яхиной

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Michael Kuhn
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Analysis Of The Images ◽  
The City

German Kazan”: Imagological Analysis of Guzel Yakhina’s Literary Works| The capital of the Republic of Tatarstan is a multicultural city. It is a combination of “Russian,” “Tatar” and, not least, “German elements”. The writer Guzel Yakhina has repeatedly addressed this cultural diversity in her literary works. In them a native of Kazan explores the past and present of the city. Excellent knowledge of German language and culture allows her to study in detail the “German trace” in the history of the capital of Tatarstan to determine its status. The article offers a brief imagological analysis of the images of “German Kazan” presented in the novel Zuleikha and the essay Garden on the Border, or the Garden “Russian Switzerland”. The imagological study conducted at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels shows that in Yakhina’s literary works the images of “German Kazan” are equivalent to the images of “Russian Kazan” or “Tatar Kazan.” The “German elements” are firmly rooted inthe texture of the city and have been an integral part of its cultural code for several centuries. At the same time, following the novel and the essay, they do not have the status of an exotic “foreign,” but a familiar “other.” „Niemiecki Kazań”: imagologiczna analiza utworów Guzel Jachiny Stolica Republiki Tatarstanu to miasto wielokulturowe. To połączenie „rosyjskiego”, „tatarskiego” i, co nie mniej ważne, „niemieckiego” pierwiastka. Pisarka Guzel Jachina wielokrotnie odnosiła się do tej różnorodności kulturowej w swoich tekstach literackich. Rdzenny mieszkaniec Kazania odkrywa w nich przeszłość i teraźniejszość miasta. Doskonała znajomość języka i kultury niemieckiej pozwala autorce na szczegółowe zbadanie „niemieckiego śladu” w historii stolicy Tatarstanu w celu określenia jego statusu. Artykuł zawiera krótką analizę imagologiczną obrazów „niemieckiego Kazania”, przedstawionych w powieści Zulejkaotwiera oczy i eseju Ogród na granicy, czyli Ogród „Rosyjska Szwajcaria”. Badania imago-logiczne, przeprowadzone na poziomach makro-, mezo- i mikro-, pokazują, że w dziełach literackich Jachiny obrazy „niemieckiego Kazania” są równoważne obrazom „rosyjskiego Kazania” czy „tatarskiego Kazania”. „Elementy niemieckie” są mocno zakorzenione w strukturze miasta i od kilku stuleci stanowią integralną część jego kodu kulturowego. Jednocześnie, w powieści i eseju, nie mają one statusu egzotycznego Obcego, ale znajomego Innego.

scholarly journals Teju Cole's Nigeria and the open cities of New York and Brussels

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Igor Maver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
The City

The novel Open City (2011) by the Nigerian-born and raised author Teju Cole isset in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. The narrator and protagonist of the book, the young Nigerian doctor Julius in is a veritable flâneur in the Big Apple, who is observing the rapidly changing multiethnic character of the city and meditating on (his) history and culture, identity and solitude, and the world beyond the United States, with which it is interconnected through the global history of violence and pain. He is juxtaposing the past and the present, the seemingly borderless open city of New York, Nigeria, and the various European locales, particularly Brussels.Thenovel, although set in the United States, is constantly interspersed with his recollections of his past experiences conditioned by hiscomplex hybrid Nigerian-European-American identity.

scholarly journals “Sarajevo. Plan grada”: the specifics of the chronotope

2020 ◽  
pp. 412-422
Author(s):  
Evgeniia V. Shatko
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Key Space ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kingdom Of Yugoslavia ◽  
The City

The scene of the novel written by M. Jergović “Sarajevo. Plan grada” (2015) — the writer’s hometown, the key space for all his writing. It’s some sort of a fl uid romanized map. The novel describes several cultural and historical Sarajevoes at the same time, such as an Ottoman city, and Austro-Hungarian, and Sarajevo during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and a city of the Tito era, and then Sarajevo before and after the war of the 1990s. in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The space of the city in the novel is the past of the today’s city, marked for the author by political and ideological attempts to recode and even erase the historical memory. The fragmented text of the novel consists of personal memories, literary plots, the history of the city, refl ections on memory and obliteration — it is a monument dedicated to the old, disappearing or even already dis-appeared Sarajevo. According to E. Kazas, Jergović created the most voluminous, comprehensive and most reliable image of Sarajevo in Bos-nian literature.

scholarly journals Korzenie pamięci. O Mirabelce Cezarego Harasimowicza

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kwiatkowska
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Space ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The City ◽  
Plum Tree

The article attempts to interpret the novel Mirabelle in the light of hauntology, taken from Jacques Derrida’s works, existing in the Polish literary studies first and foremost thanks to the works of Jakub Momro and Andrzej Marzec. Harasimowicz’s novel recounts the history of Warsaw from the 1920s until the present-day period. The mirabelle plum tree growing on one of the backyards in Warsaw tells the story of the following generations of the city dwellers who fade away and fall into oblivion. The Holocaust, depicted in the beginning of the novel, does not, however, become the past. The recollection of the genocide is inscribed in contemporary Warsaw, in the city space and the consciousness of its inhabitants. The phantoms of the former dwellers of Nalewki, the Jewish district in Warsaw, visit their homes, little stores, and workshops, trying to end unfinished businesses and engaging with the representatives of the present-day citizens. The gesture of remembrance, which is the replanting and redeveloping a new mirabelle tree in the place of the damaged one, gives people hope for the restoration of balance and strengthens the bonds between the living and the dead.

Современный образ войны и проблема ее трасформации

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
D. A. Abgadzhava ◽  
A. S. Vlaskina
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Advanced Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Modern War

War is an essential part of the social reality inherent in all stages of human development: from the primitive communal system to the present, where advanced technologies and social progress prevail. However, these characteristics do not make our society more peaceful, on the contrary, according to recent research and reality, now the number of wars and armed conflicts have increased, and most of the conflicts have a pronounced local intra-state character. Thus, wars in the classical sense of them go back to the past, giving way to military and armed conflicts. Now the number of soldiers and the big army doesn’t show the opponents strength. What is more important is the fact that people can use technology, the ideological and informational base to win the war. According to the history, «weak» opponent can be more successful in conflict if he has greater cohesion and ideological unity. Modern wars have already transcended the political boundaries of states, under the pressure of certain trends, they are transformed into transnational wars, that based on privatization, commercialization and obtaining revenue. Thus, the present paper will show a difference in understanding of terms such as «war», «military conflict» and «armed conflict». And also the auteurs will tell about the image of modern war and forecasts for its future transformation.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

Women, Violence, and Gender Dynamics during and after the Five Patani-Siam Wars, 1785–1838

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Francis R. Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Gender Dynamics ◽  
Southern Thailand ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Women Violence

Abstract This article examines five wars that occurred on the Malay-Thai Peninsula in the period 1785–1838 and the deep impact they had upon women's lives during and after the conflicts. Constituting the majority of surviving refugees, women rebuilt their lives in the wake of war through business and trade in Malaya, as Islamic teachers in Mecca and Southeast Asia, and as servants and slaves in Bangkok. In each of these settings, women encountered new forms of agency and newfound challenges, shifting cultural values that regulated decisions and actions, and evolving perceptions of the qualifications for leadership. Focused upon the political demise of the Patani Sultanate, a state with a long history of female rule, this study is of particular relevance to scholarly debates concerning women in contemporary warfare because of its transnational focus with keen attention to women in a variety of Islamic spaces and contexts, its aim of dispelling the pervasive notion of Muslim women as lacking agency, and as a point of comparison for the present armed conflict still raging in Southern Thailand that has claimed more than five thousand and continues to impact women and gender dynamics in the region.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

scholarly journals A new myth regarding the Great Trek: Reinvention of identity in Die pad na skuilhoek [The path toSkuilhoek] by Hans du Plessis.

Literator ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlies Taljard
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Myth ◽  
The Way

This article aims to illustrate how Hans du Plessis, in his novel Die pad na Skuilhoek [The path to Skuilhoek] (a place of shelter), subverts the way in which history had been presented in historical novels in the past by addressing social issues that contemporary readers find relevant. The first part of the article deals with the social codes that shape the identities of the main characters and how these identities are relevant in terms of the social framework within which the novel is received. In the second place the focus will shift towards Du Plessis’s representation of cultural and national identities. The question: ‘Who were the Afrikaners at the time of the Great Trek?’ will be answered with reference to these identities. In conclusion it will be pointed out how Du Plessis avoids dated practices of historical interpretation by choosing ecocrticism as the ideological framework for his novel and is, in this way, constructing a new social myth about the Great Trek.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document