Squares of Colour

This chapter explores the cultural position of two women artists, Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017) and Etel Adnan (b.1925) in the second half of the 20th century in Lebanon. The strong presence of abstraction in their work calls for a reflection on materiality and abstraction, and on form and anti–form. Choucair and Adnan pioneered new ways of seeing, of thinking about art and its physical relationship to it through abstract aesthetics. Born in Lebanon, they have become significant artists who trained and lived abroad, while always keeping strong links to Lebanon. Their oeuvres present a reflection on the conflicted Western and Islamic heritage in Lebanon and in the Middle East at large. Although abstraction is no clear representation of female subjectivity, the use of abstraction as lived experience in Choucair’s and Adnan’s works serve to explore gender in Lebanon as a subjective and social context.

Representation of Places in Etel Adnan’s In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country and Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)

This article will take a close look at two books of Etel Adnan which are strongly tied to the representation of places. References to nature found in both books link the places she is physically present in to her inner-spaces. Additionally, the people she encounters in these locations also become elements with which she weaves different places together. In Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz), the notion of place is particularly enriched by the different qualities of the women she finds in each location, comparing the situation of women in the Orient and the Occident. The shadow of recent wars hangs heavy in the memories of Adnan as she travels between these different places in both books – the thought of which never abandons her.

Levantinizing the Balkans: Outlines for a Literary Geography of Encounters

The debate on the ‘where’ of the Balkans seem to be stuck between national paradigms and a nostalgia for cosmopolitanism. This essay explores an alternative spatial mapping of the region, opening it up to the wider Eastern-Mediterranean, in particular the fuzzy and contested notion of the Levant. First, it looks into various instances of ‘the Levant’ and ‘the Levantine,’ ranging from Turkish and Greek to Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian examples – with a particular focus on the latter. Secondly, by then ‘levantinizing’ the Balkans, in an explicit analogy to Édouard Glissant’s understanding of ‘creolization’ in the Caribbean, it attempts to draw the outlines of a geography of encounters. Finally, it offers a sample of what such a geography might look like and what its literary-historical repercussions might be, bringing together the work of Semezdin Mehmedinović and Etel Adnan.

‘Fog is My Land’: A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan

In a 1989 essay titled “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Etel Adnan describes the trajectory of her relationship to Arabic, a language associated with shame and sin in the context of her French convent education in Beirut, but which her Syrian father had her copy by rote from an Arabic-Turkish grammar as a desperate means of recuperation. Her family’s common languages were Turkish and French; Adnan acquired knowledge of Arabic writing through a channel more somatic than semantic. During the Algerian war of independence, when a dream of Arab unity emerged, Adnan’s attitude to the languages of her inheritance changed: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” How does this dream constitute itself in Adnan’s poetry and painting? And how are readers to parse the sometimes unintelligible sign systems that result? This chapter will explore the geopolitical implications of Adnan’s “xenoglossic” poetics, which sporadically merges the mediums of writing and painting in folded leporello books, to contemplate how her practices of transcription and supralinguistic gesture enable us to revise reigning discursive categories of cultural nativity and solidarity, citizenship and statelessness.

Reading Experimental Writing

Bringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Etel Adnan, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Mobility and Identity in the Art and Literature of Etel Adnan

This article is based on a literary reading of two books by Etel Adnan: In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country and Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz), and on an interview that the author personally conducted with her in 2018. It examines Adnan’s sense of nomadism in her art and literature. She is born into a nomadic culture and moves as an intellectual nomad from Lebanon to Paris, and then to California, and finally returns to Lebanon before having to escape due to the civil war. Her nomadism gives her an inspiring openness, creating a state of béance – the freedom from borders postulated by Bouraoui.

Parallelotopia: Ottoman transcultural memory assemblages in contemporary art practices from the Middle East

This article engages with the conversations taking place in the photographic space between then and now, memory and photography, and with the symbiosis and ethnic violence between different ethnic communities in the ex-Ottoman Empire. It questions the role of photography and contemporary art in creating possibilities for coexistence within the mosaic formed by the various groups that made up the Ottoman Empire. The essay aims to create parallelotopia, spaces in the present that work in parallel with the past and which enable the dynamic exchange of transcultural memories. Drawing on memory theory, the article shifts these debates forward by adopting the concept of ‘assemblage’. The article concentrates on the aesthetics of photographs produced by Armenian photographic studios in Istanbul during the late nineteenth century and their relationship to the present through the work of contemporary artists Klitsa Antoniou, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige and Etel Adnan as well as photographic exhibitions organised by the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens, Greece.

The Museum as an Egalitarian Space?

This article discusses the role of the Sursock Museum as a platform for the emancipation of women, and to what extent the Museum’s Salon d’Automne constituted an egalitarian space. Etel Adnan took part in two Salons, in 1964 and 1974. This paper will provide some context for the Beirut art scene in which she worked. The general institutional framework for women artists is highlighted before discussing the situation of women artists in Beirut’s Sursock Museum exhibitions of the 1960s and 1970s, the years Etel Adnan participated in the Salon. Brief portraits of four women artists show us that women artists were neither considered alike nor singled out for their gender. They treated very diverse subjects and styles, came from different social backgrounds and generations, and were often pioneers in their fields.