The "Motherland": An Archetypal and Postcolonial Reading of Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad

Working at the intersection of postcolonial and archetypal criticism, this article investigates the role of women in resistance literature by looking at a piece of postcolonial Arabic fiction, Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad (1969). Rooted in Arab politics concerning land rights and anti-Zionist struggle, the text offers a related archetypal approach to the depiction of women in politicized literature. Umm Saad allegorizes the struggles of Palestinians to reclaim their land. A poor peasant woman, the titular heroine embodies the intimate connection between Palestinians and their land, acting as a helper to combative men and a primal symbol for attachment to the enduring land. Umm Saad is a personal mother and a trope for a feminized colonized territory, metaphorically representing the Palestinian nation and assuming mythological features enabling her to identify with the Earth Mother to send a message against dispossession. Since she embodies positive mother archetype symbolism (the personal mother and the Earth Mother), she acts as a source of fertility and protection. Expressing a political statement via the mother archetype, Kanafani appeals to a basic human need, i.e. the need to settle down in one’s land, which makes woman an indispensible part of the collective unconscious of any nation. Keywords: Archetypal Criticism; Kanafani; Mother(land); Postcolonial Arabic Fiction; Umm Saad.

Semiotic alteration in translation. Othering, stereotyping and hybridization in contemporary translations from Arabic into Spanish and Catalan

It is already widely recognized that ‘foreignization’ is a cover word which stands for many different processes of cultural translation, from a problematic literalism which tends to exoticism, to a welcome but rarely achieved ‘othering’ understood as an ethical act of respect for the other ’s specificity. Seen from a pragmatic perspective, what still needs to be assessed are the reasons behind a hypothetic threshold of acceptability and the extent of the unstable and risky space where source culture expectations are challenged as a result of the translator ’s management of socio-cultural biases. Starting from the assumption that cultural translation implies a metonymical move by which key textual elements stand as symbols representing the foreign culture, the proposed article will present a scheme of the pragmatic and semiotic processes at work in translations from Arabic into Spanish and Catalan. A review of recent Spanish translations of contemporary Arabic fiction and the muchacclaimed Catalan translation of the Qur ’an will try to show that instances of hybridization and ambivalent readings occur foremost when semiotic categories are altered as a result of the familiarization of unexpected cultural referents. However, semiotic alteration only happens in the narrow margin allowed by the threshold of acceptability, which is the site of ambivalence.

Video as a Canonization Channel for Contemporary Arabic Fiction

With the media transition from the paper to the digital, Arab writers’ interaction on the social media and book-related videos have become a central strategy of promotion. Besides book trailers produced by the publishers and the readers, the international literary prizes produce their own videos. One of the most important examples is the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) which releases videos with English subtitles for the shortlisted authors every year. Moreover, some writers and journalists have started TV programs or YouTube channels recommending books and interviewing their fellow authors. Engaging with literary history, politics of translation, and media studies, this paper discusses the contribution of videos to the contemporary Arabic novel’s canonization: how do the videos make the canon and its mechanisms visible? Which image of the intellectual do they shape globally and locally? Which linguistic varieties do they adopt? This paper compares two kinds of videos to encompass the global and local scale, with their respective canonizing institutions and mechanisms. On the one hand, it examines how IPAF videos (2012-2019) promote a very recent canon of novels on the global scale through the representation of space, language, and the Arab intellectual. On the other hand, it looks at two book-related TV programs by the Egyptian writers Bilāl Faḍl and ʿUmar Ṭāhir, selecting three episodes (Faḍl 2011, Faḍl 2018, and Ṭāhir 2018) featuring or devoted to Aḥmad Khālid Tawfīq (1962-2018), a successful author of science-fiction and thrillers. Debating non-canonical writings, these TV programs contribute to redefine the national canon focusing on the reading practices and literary criticism. Keywords: Canon building, contemporary Arabic literature, literary prizes, IPAF, TV programs, Aḥmad Khālid Tawfīq

Evolution of Creation from Mythology to Reality: A Multidisciplinary Study into the Roots of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ahmed Sa’adawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Shelley’s Frankenstein has been considered a literary masterpiece since its publication. Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is similarly a work of great significance that won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014. Since its release, the name ‘Frankenstein’ attached to Baghdad, as a novel title in the mid of the American occupation of Iraq (2005) and its connection to a universal Frankenstein, has been inspiring to the Iraqis and world fiction lovers. What remains essential about this fascination among the readers is in the questions of how and what is the connection between both works. Therefore, this paper attempts to discover the roots of the concept of creation behind Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad in 2013 from mythology, theology, science, and political reality of Iraq. Besides, the linear evolution in the concept of creation throughout the mentioned areas will be displayed to unfold the origins that lie behind these colossal novels. Understanding that lineage development in the concept and the disputes around it is of great significance to the reader which can empower them to contextualize the novels since apprehending new context is a vital factor for appropriation and intertexuality. As long as there are creators and creatures as the two sides of the same process of creation, therefore, the mentioned concepts will always be discussed throughout this work; including the punishment that both protagonists suffer from as one common consequence.

Evolution of Creation from Mythology to Reality: A Multidisciplinary Study into the Roots of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ahmed Sa’adawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Shelley’s Frankenstein has been considered a literary masterpiece since its publication. Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is similarly a work of great significance that won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014. Since its release, the name ‘Frankenstein’ attached to Baghdad, as a novel title in the mid of the American occupation of Iraq (2005) and its connection to a universal Frankenstein, has been inspiring to the Iraqis and world fiction lovers. What remains essential about this fascination among the readers is in the questions of how and what is the connection between both works. Therefore, this paper attempts to discover the roots of the concept of creation behind Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad in 2013 from mythology, theology, science, and political reality of Iraq. Besides, the linear evolution in the concept of creation throughout the mentioned areas will be displayed to unfold the origins that lie behind these colossal novels. Understanding that lineage development in the concept and the disputes around it is of great significance to the reader which can empower them to contextualize the novels since apprehending new context is a vital factor for appropriation and intertexuality. As long as there are creators and creatures as the two sides of the same process of creation, therefore, the mentioned concepts will always be discussed throughout this work; including the punishment that both protagonists suffer from as one common consequence.

Fictions of Connectivity

This chapter discusses the Arabic translation of Alexander Dumas's Count of Monte Crist. The Arabic translations of Cristo demonstrate that what Holt calls the “thick nexus of global finance and Arabic fiction” manifests itself above all as a problem of translation. Scenes of exchange necessarily invoke problems of translation, which in the context of nahḍa debates about the relative benefits of Arab and European cultures and economies puts special emphasis on what Lydia Liu has called “the meaning-value” of the sign. Especially in systems of exchange like global markets and literary translations, neither meaning nor value are intrinsic but are what Gayatri Spivak has called textual, in that they have no adequate literal referent. Fictions of connectivity like Monte Cristo, which focus on the global mobility of capital and bodies, are ideal places to see this instability in meaning-value. The Count is never only the Count, even in French. He is a vanishing semblance, always appearing in translation: Dantès, an English lord, and Sindbad the Sailor — himself an avatar of circulation — too. That Monte Cristo is a novel-length exploration of transnational circulation explains its singular popularity during the nahḍa's own world-making projects. The translations of Monte Cristo embed the economics of their literary relation with Europe into their techniques.