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Papers in Refereed Journals and Edited Volumes by Ghazouane Arslane
Journal of Arabic Literature, 2024
This paper foregrounds the ways in which Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān represents and addresses the projec... more This paper foregrounds the ways in which Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān represents and addresses the project and concept of the Nahḍah. It demonstrates how the Arab renaissance is represented and engaged in Jubrān’s work as a polyvocal and contested space in which the particular and the universal dialectically and creatively intersect. Equally, it argues that a constant emphasis on individual and collective moral autonomy (al-istiqlāl al-maʿnawī) undergirds Jubrān’s Nahḍawī vision. Serving as the premise of creative aesthetic production, moral autonomy transforms the role of the poet from a crafter (ṣāniʿ) into a creator of a new mode of thinking/being in the world. It also functions as the sine qua non of original national and civilizational awakening, which is conceived of beyond traditionalism and westernization. This Nahḍawī engagement at once underlies and straddles poetics and politics, forcing us to re-evaluate Jubran’s role as a renaissance intellectual within and beyond the frameworks of literary Romanticism and postcolonialism.
Tihanov, Galin. Universal Localities: The Languages of World Literature. Schriften zur Weltliteratur/Studies on World Literature, vol 13. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2022
The essay engages with the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Kahlil Gibran by undersco... more The essay engages with the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Kahlil Gibran by underscoring the bilingualism of his enterprise and the problem of reception it has generated. Adopting what Edward Said calls a worldly attitude to texts, the essay argues that Gibran’s bilingual work must be first located within the intellectual context of the Nahda or Arab renaissance/awakening in the nineteenth century, so as to qualify Gibran’s contribution to Arabic literature and, in particular, what I consider the post-religious vision of his poetic enterprise. The essay goes on to examine the translational reconfiguration of this poetic vision when it travels across language, culture and location, in light of Gibran’s rather anxious switch from Arabic into English. This travelling entails attention to the initial reception of his work in the United States – a reception that often deemed his texts Oriental and spiritual in a monolithic and unexamined manner – and to the later reception of his English work in the Arab world, where it is “Arabized” and given another hermeneutic life and value. A rounded and more complex picture of “Gibran” therefore emerges, one that derives from the methodological necessity to look at “world literature” beyond English and Euro-America as linguistic and epistemic norms, respectively.
Life Writing, 2022
This essay is a reflection on the ways in which my turning and being bilingual (living in two lan... more This essay is a reflection on the ways in which my turning and being bilingual (living in two languages) as an Algerian student who lived in the UK has been affected by, and has affected my understanding of, literature, place, and identity. It recounts and discusses influential episodes and fragments in my life, which pertain to the role that literary and bilingual literacy played in my self-cultivation as a person, in my imagination of places like London and Lake District in the UK and my hometown Tebessa in Algeria, and in my understanding of identity in relation to belonging and faith. This life-experience has enabled me to escape the politics of language in Algeria and to follow a trajectory of self-formation which has been both enriching and unsettling. More precisely, the essay demonstrates how an enriched sense of identity unsettles its association with the conception of one language-place-culture, therefore upsetting the familiar experience of belonging and altering its meaning. More generally, it illustrates the ways in which being bilingual at once produces anxieties about language and articulation and reconfigures how the self collects and recollects itself across different places and cultures.
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.2, 2020
This paper argues that an essential aspect of the bilingual oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), ... more This paper argues that an essential aspect of the bilingual oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), the eminent Arab-American writer, lies in reinventing the religious in and against modernity by reclaiming its Abrahamic, prophetic mode of speech as a poetic form of enunciation. This literary and ethical enterprise is at once post-religious and post-Nietzschean in that it re-imagines the notion of God, in evolutionist terms, as a horizontal form of transcendence beyond the vertical metaphysics of creation, fatherhood and morality. This horizontalization of transcendence reclaims religion, with a particular focus on Islamic-Sufi concepts, beyond monotheism's worldview and eschatology. Hence the post in post-religious. Gibran's re-imagining, with and "after" Nietzsche, of God, the self and the world is much occasioned by modernity as it seeks to interrogate and disrupt its calculative and identitarian reason. Ultimately, this Gibranian prophetic vision is a poetic attempt to posit the impossible-not the nonpossible, but the utmost horizon of the possible-as an ethical alternative both to traditional morality and to modernity's calculative and rationalist reason.
Translations by Ghazouane Arslane
“Borges and the Blind” is an essay by Abdelfattah Kilito, originally titled in Arabic “العميان” (... more “Borges and the Blind” is an essay by Abdelfattah Kilito, originally titled in Arabic “العميان” (The Blind). It is published in his book في جو من النَّدَم الفكريّ (In a Spirit of Intellectual Repentance; Al-Mutawassit Books, 2020, pp. 27-33). The essay revolves around Jorge Luis Borges’s well-known story “Averroës’ Search”, which explains my choice of title—Averroës, or Ibn Rushd, was a twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher who, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics could not find Arabic equivalents to “tragedy” and “comedy”. The main idea here is that underlying Averroes’ search—or any search for that matter—is a staggering blindness to the obvious, which Kilito relates to Kafka’s statement that “[u]sually the one whom you are looking for lives next door.” Kilito’s essay is an erudite and incisive reflection on a circular and contagious kind of blindness—both physical and conceptual—which connects seemingly unrelated authors and disparate reflections across time and place.
Philosophy East and West, 2022
This essay juxtaposes the death of the moral god in Christian Europe (Nietzsche) with the demise ... more This essay juxtaposes the death of the moral god in Christian Europe (Nietzsche) with the demise of al-millah or the theologico-political community in Islam. This comparative engagement allows for a local (Arab Muslim) and universal rethinking of, inter alia, faith, freedom, and transcendence beyond terrorism and methodological atheism.
Journalistic Writing by Ghazouane Arslane
Asymptote, 2022
A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages ... more A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages an erudite inquiry into the classical Arabic underpinnings of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous “Averroës’s Search,” traversing the proximities and distances that triangulate between writers, readers, and texts across disparate literary traditions. As a reflection on the innumerable angles from which one might approach—with varying degrees of blindness and insight—the mirror of the text, Kilito’s essay is nothing if not a testament to the fundamental questions of translation that mediate each of our relationships to language and culture. Ghazouane Arslane’s English translation interposes yet another layer in this mise en abyme, deftly capturing the labyrinthine turns of Kilito’s thought. I had the honor of corresponding with Ghazouane over email; our conversation ranged over vast swathes of terrain, from the difficulties of rendering the polysemy of Arabic literature, the ethics and politics of the “original copy,” the hospitality involved in any act of translation, to more specific (but no less essential) lingerings over the evocative scene of prayer in Borges’s story alongside Kilito’s singular talent for discerning “the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.”
Africa Is a Country, 2019
Books by Ghazouane Arslane
The monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by ex... more The monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. It situates Gibran within his worldly contexts to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in the nahda or Arab renaissance. In its situated close readings of Gibran’s work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception, demonstrating that there is much more to Gibran than his famous book The Prophet. It also probes this reception alongside its Arabic counterpart, highlighting and interrogating the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of Gibran.
Journal of Arabic Literature, 2024
This paper foregrounds the ways in which Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān represents and addresses the projec... more This paper foregrounds the ways in which Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān represents and addresses the project and concept of the Nahḍah. It demonstrates how the Arab renaissance is represented and engaged in Jubrān’s work as a polyvocal and contested space in which the particular and the universal dialectically and creatively intersect. Equally, it argues that a constant emphasis on individual and collective moral autonomy (al-istiqlāl al-maʿnawī) undergirds Jubrān’s Nahḍawī vision. Serving as the premise of creative aesthetic production, moral autonomy transforms the role of the poet from a crafter (ṣāniʿ) into a creator of a new mode of thinking/being in the world. It also functions as the sine qua non of original national and civilizational awakening, which is conceived of beyond traditionalism and westernization. This Nahḍawī engagement at once underlies and straddles poetics and politics, forcing us to re-evaluate Jubran’s role as a renaissance intellectual within and beyond the frameworks of literary Romanticism and postcolonialism.
Tihanov, Galin. Universal Localities: The Languages of World Literature. Schriften zur Weltliteratur/Studies on World Literature, vol 13. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2022
The essay engages with the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Kahlil Gibran by undersco... more The essay engages with the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Kahlil Gibran by underscoring the bilingualism of his enterprise and the problem of reception it has generated. Adopting what Edward Said calls a worldly attitude to texts, the essay argues that Gibran’s bilingual work must be first located within the intellectual context of the Nahda or Arab renaissance/awakening in the nineteenth century, so as to qualify Gibran’s contribution to Arabic literature and, in particular, what I consider the post-religious vision of his poetic enterprise. The essay goes on to examine the translational reconfiguration of this poetic vision when it travels across language, culture and location, in light of Gibran’s rather anxious switch from Arabic into English. This travelling entails attention to the initial reception of his work in the United States – a reception that often deemed his texts Oriental and spiritual in a monolithic and unexamined manner – and to the later reception of his English work in the Arab world, where it is “Arabized” and given another hermeneutic life and value. A rounded and more complex picture of “Gibran” therefore emerges, one that derives from the methodological necessity to look at “world literature” beyond English and Euro-America as linguistic and epistemic norms, respectively.
Life Writing, 2022
This essay is a reflection on the ways in which my turning and being bilingual (living in two lan... more This essay is a reflection on the ways in which my turning and being bilingual (living in two languages) as an Algerian student who lived in the UK has been affected by, and has affected my understanding of, literature, place, and identity. It recounts and discusses influential episodes and fragments in my life, which pertain to the role that literary and bilingual literacy played in my self-cultivation as a person, in my imagination of places like London and Lake District in the UK and my hometown Tebessa in Algeria, and in my understanding of identity in relation to belonging and faith. This life-experience has enabled me to escape the politics of language in Algeria and to follow a trajectory of self-formation which has been both enriching and unsettling. More precisely, the essay demonstrates how an enriched sense of identity unsettles its association with the conception of one language-place-culture, therefore upsetting the familiar experience of belonging and altering its meaning. More generally, it illustrates the ways in which being bilingual at once produces anxieties about language and articulation and reconfigures how the self collects and recollects itself across different places and cultures.
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.2, 2020
This paper argues that an essential aspect of the bilingual oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), ... more This paper argues that an essential aspect of the bilingual oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), the eminent Arab-American writer, lies in reinventing the religious in and against modernity by reclaiming its Abrahamic, prophetic mode of speech as a poetic form of enunciation. This literary and ethical enterprise is at once post-religious and post-Nietzschean in that it re-imagines the notion of God, in evolutionist terms, as a horizontal form of transcendence beyond the vertical metaphysics of creation, fatherhood and morality. This horizontalization of transcendence reclaims religion, with a particular focus on Islamic-Sufi concepts, beyond monotheism's worldview and eschatology. Hence the post in post-religious. Gibran's re-imagining, with and "after" Nietzsche, of God, the self and the world is much occasioned by modernity as it seeks to interrogate and disrupt its calculative and identitarian reason. Ultimately, this Gibranian prophetic vision is a poetic attempt to posit the impossible-not the nonpossible, but the utmost horizon of the possible-as an ethical alternative both to traditional morality and to modernity's calculative and rationalist reason.
“Borges and the Blind” is an essay by Abdelfattah Kilito, originally titled in Arabic “العميان” (... more “Borges and the Blind” is an essay by Abdelfattah Kilito, originally titled in Arabic “العميان” (The Blind). It is published in his book في جو من النَّدَم الفكريّ (In a Spirit of Intellectual Repentance; Al-Mutawassit Books, 2020, pp. 27-33). The essay revolves around Jorge Luis Borges’s well-known story “Averroës’ Search”, which explains my choice of title—Averroës, or Ibn Rushd, was a twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher who, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics could not find Arabic equivalents to “tragedy” and “comedy”. The main idea here is that underlying Averroes’ search—or any search for that matter—is a staggering blindness to the obvious, which Kilito relates to Kafka’s statement that “[u]sually the one whom you are looking for lives next door.” Kilito’s essay is an erudite and incisive reflection on a circular and contagious kind of blindness—both physical and conceptual—which connects seemingly unrelated authors and disparate reflections across time and place.
Philosophy East and West, 2022
This essay juxtaposes the death of the moral god in Christian Europe (Nietzsche) with the demise ... more This essay juxtaposes the death of the moral god in Christian Europe (Nietzsche) with the demise of al-millah or the theologico-political community in Islam. This comparative engagement allows for a local (Arab Muslim) and universal rethinking of, inter alia, faith, freedom, and transcendence beyond terrorism and methodological atheism.
Asymptote, 2022
A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages ... more A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages an erudite inquiry into the classical Arabic underpinnings of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous “Averroës’s Search,” traversing the proximities and distances that triangulate between writers, readers, and texts across disparate literary traditions. As a reflection on the innumerable angles from which one might approach—with varying degrees of blindness and insight—the mirror of the text, Kilito’s essay is nothing if not a testament to the fundamental questions of translation that mediate each of our relationships to language and culture. Ghazouane Arslane’s English translation interposes yet another layer in this mise en abyme, deftly capturing the labyrinthine turns of Kilito’s thought. I had the honor of corresponding with Ghazouane over email; our conversation ranged over vast swathes of terrain, from the difficulties of rendering the polysemy of Arabic literature, the ethics and politics of the “original copy,” the hospitality involved in any act of translation, to more specific (but no less essential) lingerings over the evocative scene of prayer in Borges’s story alongside Kilito’s singular talent for discerning “the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.”
Africa Is a Country, 2019
The monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by ex... more The monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. It situates Gibran within his worldly contexts to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in the nahda or Arab renaissance. In its situated close readings of Gibran’s work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception, demonstrating that there is much more to Gibran than his famous book The Prophet. It also probes this reception alongside its Arabic counterpart, highlighting and interrogating the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of Gibran.