Pervine Elrefaei | Cairo University (original) (raw)
Papers by Pervine Elrefaei
Cairo Studies in English : Journal of Research in Literature, Linguistics and Translation Studies, Jul 1, 2024
The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a ... more The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a few of her selected writings within a historical perspective. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, gender and border studies, I argue that the Syrian American novelist, poet and activist Mohja Kahf (1967- ) locates woman’s body, labeled as ‘Muslim’ by the West, at the crux of her works to interrogate body politics and negotiate gender and rights. Depicting the life of Arab American immigrants from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahf delineates the macro and micro politics hegemonizing that body, subverted by its agency and counter-hegemonic voice. Taking Indianapolis, the city at the crossroads, as her space of departure that witnesses her coming of age, in her narrative, Kahf deconstructs temporal, spatial, cultural, and gender borders, creating a liberating transcultural/transnational path. Written at the intersection of history and fiction, the stories of Muslim women’s bodies as cultural products are stories of power relations that are anchored in patriarchal, colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial discourses. Through the Muslim woman’s body, Kahf creates awareness of the threatening role of knowledge production embodied by such discourses as the real terror that has colonized minds and constructed borders. Appropriating selected Western feminist tactics, intertwined with the Muslim feminist concept of “mujadila,” Kahf introduces a protagonist who embarks on a journey of consecutive conflict with all discourses of othering, silencing, negation and appropriation through a constant process of re-visioning, deciphering, healing, and re-inscribing of Muslim women’s bodies.
Voices from Nubia: Critical Essays on Contemporary Nubian Literature from Egypt. Dotawo Monographs 5. , 2024
Cairo Studies in English, The Imaginaire and Reshaping the World, 2024
This issue of Cairo Studies in English (CSE), entitled The Imaginaire and (Re)Shaping the World, ... more This issue of Cairo Studies in English (CSE), entitled The Imaginaire and
(Re)Shaping the World, is divided into two sections. The first section encompasses a number of articles on linguistics and literature that were presented at the 15th International Symposium on Comparative Literature, held under the same title by the Department of English Language and Literature at Cairo University (14-16 November 2023). Propelled by the unprecedented historical moments that witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza, following October 7, 2023, the second section, entitled “Palestine and the Imaginaire,” comprises contributions by scholars who were invited by the guest editors of this issue to write about Palestinian history of
resistance as depicted in different genres of Palestinian literature."
Front Matter". Cairo Studies in English, 2024, 1, 2024, -.
Cairo Studies In English, The Imaginaire and Reshaping the World, 2024
The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a ... more The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a few of her selected writings within a historical perspective. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, gender and border studies, I argue that the Syrian American novelist, poet and activist Mohja Kahf (1967- ) locates woman’s body, labeled as ‘Muslim’ by the West, at the crux of her works to interrogate body politics and negotiate gender and rights. Depicting the life of Arab American immigrants from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahf delineates the macro and micro politics hegemonizing that body, subverted by its agency and counter-hegemonic voice. Taking Indianapolis, the city at the crossroads, as her space of departure that witnesses her coming of age, in her narrative, Kahf deconstructs temporal, spatial, cultural, and gender borders, creating a liberating transcultural/transnational path. Written at the intersection of history and fiction, the stories of Muslim women’s bodies as cultural products are stories of power relations that are anchored in patriarchal, colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial discourses. Through the Muslim woman’s body, Kahf creates awareness of the threatening role of knowledge production embodied by such discourses as the real terror that has colonized minds and constructed borders. Appropriating selected Western feminist tactics, intertwined with the Muslim feminist concept of “mujadila,” Kahf introduces a protagonist who embarks on a journey of consecutive conflict with all discourses of othering, silencing, negation and appropriation through a constant process of re-visioning, deciphering, healing, and re-inscribing of Muslim women’s bodies.
Routledge, 2021
The ongoing fragmentation of Syria by sectarianism is the culmination of a civil war in which ext... more The ongoing fragmentation of Syria by sectarianism is the culmination of a civil war in which extremists like The Free Syrian Army, al-Nusra Front, Jaysh al-Islam, al-Qa‘eda, and ISIS have played major roles. Consequently, national identity crisis has become a focal theme for many Syrian writers. This chapter examines selected Arabic literary articles by the Syrian writer Tamara al-Refai published in the Egyptian newspaper Elshorouk and translated here by the present researcher. Drawing on memory studies, food studies, gender studies, and the field of feminist geopolitics, the study argues that the articles are basically centered on identity, cultural trauma, and memory, interlaced with Syrian women’s resilience and pivotal roles as “cultural transmitters” and “cultural signifers of the national collectivity” (Yuval-Davis 621) during traumatic displacement and cultural threat. al-Refai utilizes female storytelling that is anchored in the Arabian Nights and the Scheherazade motif as an empowering tactic of survival and resistance to threatening Islamism, authoritarianism, and Western imperialism.
Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature , 2022
This chapter argues for the need to revisit Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist app... more This chapter argues for the need to revisit Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist approach for an insightful rereading of its environmental politics. The chapter examines the intersection of the woman–nature patriarchal paradigm and the Western imperial exploitation of the natural resources of the Arab world as a gendered “geopolitical periphery” as an archival discourse in Arabic literature that highlights the Arab world’s sociopolitical, cultural transformations across colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial times. Following the literary trajectory of such ambivalent discourse from the early and mid-twentieth century to the present, the chapter concludes that rooted in power structures, gendered, dualistic hierarchies are either perpetuated or interrogatively dismantled through the “feminine principle” as a counter-hegemonic discourse that is promulgated by writers, acting as “ecological agents” of sustainability. Harnessing their ecoenergies, writers transform the woman–nature paradigm into an empowering discourse. Hence, contemporary literary discourses of endangered, exploited ecosystems, and exilic nomadism run alongside counter-discourses that resist environmental imperialism/racism/degradation, foregrounding sustainability, despite deracination, and demanding sovereignty and environmental justice.
Routledge eBooks, Aug 12, 2022
Memory, Voice, and Identity
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2021
This article focuses on the role of food as a cultural/political marker in selected Egyptian film... more This article focuses on the role of food as a cultural/political marker in selected Egyptian films. The study argues that food is intertwined with power relations and socio-economic political transformations; hence, food studies can constitute a cultural, historical document that unravels personal and collective, political history. The paper examines food discourse in the post-2011 period as depicted in two award-winning films that represented Egypt in a number of international film festivals, mainly, the 2013 documentary film “OM Amira” by Nagi Ismail (1983-) , and the 2016 feature film “Nawara” by Hala Khalil (1967-) . As food for thought, the selected films depict the plight of Egyptian working class women as representative of a whole downtrodden social class. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the study raises a number of questions to which it attempts to provide answers. What is the role of food in films? How do both films represent the relation between food and classes? ...
This paper aims at examining the dialectics of power relations in postcolonial Egypt, culminating... more This paper aims at examining the dialectics of power relations in
postcolonial Egypt, culminating in the 2011 revolution. The paper
attempts to provide answers to the following questions: How can we
scrutinize the mechanisms of power permeating the Egyptian carceral
society in light of Foucault's book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (1977) and surveillance theories? How can a utopian light at the
end of the tunnel be perceived vis-a-vis Foucault's dystopian metaphor of
the panopticon and Mathiesen's concept of the synopticon? What are the
channels of resistance offered by surveillance theories? Taking these questions as points of departure, the paper aims at scrutinizing the depiction of Egypt as a prison under the surveillance of a police state, and its battle for freedom and democracy in two different areas: Radwa Ashour‟s 2008 novel Farag (Release) and Youssef Chahin and Khaled Youssef‟s 2007 film Heya Fawda (Chaos) . My choice of the novel and the film is triggered by their delineation of the regime‟s hegemonic and subjugating tactics, intricately intertwined with escalating resistance on the part of Egyptians, ushering the inevitability of revolution. The paper is divided into three major sections. The first section discusses Foucault's concept of the panopticon vis-a-vis new surveillance concepts. The second and third sections discuss Ashour's novel and Chahin and Youssef's film as exemplary works of prophetic resistance art in light of the theories of surveillance.
The present article aims at conducting a comparative study of Ahdaf Soueif’s 2012 memoir Cairo: M... more The present article aims at conducting a comparative study of Ahdaf Soueif’s 2012 memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, entitled Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed in the 2014 edition, and Radwa Ashour’s 2013 autobiography: Athqal min Radwā, (Heavier than Radwa: Excerpts from an Autobiography). The works that document the 2010-2013 state of flux from the perspective and experiences of both writers, interwoven with various recollected historical periods, are examined in the light of an interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural studies, postcolonial
and autobiography theories. Scrutinized within the scope of the intellectuals’ other writings and interviews, I argue that the selected texts that depict the issues of identity, the self and nationalism as pivotal points can be regarded as acts of literary activism or textual spaces of resistance. First, in delineating the history of the nation, intertwined with the cartography of the self, the works unmask the history of oppression to which the individual and public self/identity have been subjected.
Second, they document the intellectuals’ resistance to the ongoing
counterrevolutionary discourse in the post 2011 period. Third, they interrogate and condemn the human rights’ violations, and concomitantly extol their anxiety about an authoritarian future. Fourth, in portraying the gradual fragmentation of the previously homogeneous nationalist discourse characteristic of the first eighteen days of the revolution, the works depict the intellectuals’ gradual detachment from
the prevalent nationalist discourse they critique as hegemonic.
Initiated by E. Said’s legacy, this paper endeavors to unravel the Zionist rhetoric as a discours... more Initiated by E. Said’s legacy, this paper endeavors to unravel the Zionist rhetoric as a discourse of power that aims at historicizing, authenticating and legitimizing the acquisition of Palestine. In 1876 George Eliot published her ideologically impregnated novel Daniel Deronda that caused much controversy in Victorian society. In 2002 the BBC TV produced the novel that was broadcast in Britain and the USA in the same year. Bearing in mind the historical gap between the publication and the TV production, besides the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Eliot’s proto-Zionist novel Daniel Deronda calls for an investigation of its hegemonic discourse as part of the vibrant Zionist propaganda.
The present paper aims at examining the power structures related to borderlands and their inhabit... more The present paper aims at examining the power structures related
to borderlands and their inhabitants, highlighting the processes of
inclusion and exclusion, through examining the interconnectedness
between space, time and identity. Scrutinizing the array of Sinai and Nubian characters enmeshed in peripheral spaces as represented in their literature, the paper studies how the liminal identities of those marginalized communities who become politically aware of their inequality, exclusion and otherness are gradually transformed from the agonistic to the antagonistic. Seen in this light, to construct a better and more stable future for Egypt, the spatial dynamics' problematic should be taken seriously by the state.
This paper examines the representations of Egyptian women and the Egyptian nation in the cartoons... more This paper examines the representations of Egyptian women and the
Egyptian nation in the cartoons and graffiti of the January 2011 revolution and its aftermath. The paper aims at providing answers to a number of questions. Can graffiti and cartoon play an intrinsic role in historically documenting the 2011 January revolution and its aftermath? What is the relation between gender and nation? How does the fluidity of the images of Egypt in relation to the images of women bear witness to the nationalist narrative and the evolving historical events? How does the socio-political graphic discourse represent women and their role in the revolution and the post revolution period? How far is the escalating oppression against women in the post revolution period related to the suppression of the revolution and the spirit of the nation? How do male and female graphic artists differ in their depiction of the gendered nationalist discourse? Do those circulated images consolidate or resist dictatorial patriarchal culture?
Cairo Studies in English : Journal of Research in Literature, Linguistics and Translation Studies, Jul 1, 2024
The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a ... more The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a few of her selected writings within a historical perspective. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, gender and border studies, I argue that the Syrian American novelist, poet and activist Mohja Kahf (1967- ) locates woman’s body, labeled as ‘Muslim’ by the West, at the crux of her works to interrogate body politics and negotiate gender and rights. Depicting the life of Arab American immigrants from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahf delineates the macro and micro politics hegemonizing that body, subverted by its agency and counter-hegemonic voice. Taking Indianapolis, the city at the crossroads, as her space of departure that witnesses her coming of age, in her narrative, Kahf deconstructs temporal, spatial, cultural, and gender borders, creating a liberating transcultural/transnational path. Written at the intersection of history and fiction, the stories of Muslim women’s bodies as cultural products are stories of power relations that are anchored in patriarchal, colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial discourses. Through the Muslim woman’s body, Kahf creates awareness of the threatening role of knowledge production embodied by such discourses as the real terror that has colonized minds and constructed borders. Appropriating selected Western feminist tactics, intertwined with the Muslim feminist concept of “mujadila,” Kahf introduces a protagonist who embarks on a journey of consecutive conflict with all discourses of othering, silencing, negation and appropriation through a constant process of re-visioning, deciphering, healing, and re-inscribing of Muslim women’s bodies.
Voices from Nubia: Critical Essays on Contemporary Nubian Literature from Egypt. Dotawo Monographs 5. , 2024
Cairo Studies in English, The Imaginaire and Reshaping the World, 2024
This issue of Cairo Studies in English (CSE), entitled The Imaginaire and (Re)Shaping the World, ... more This issue of Cairo Studies in English (CSE), entitled The Imaginaire and
(Re)Shaping the World, is divided into two sections. The first section encompasses a number of articles on linguistics and literature that were presented at the 15th International Symposium on Comparative Literature, held under the same title by the Department of English Language and Literature at Cairo University (14-16 November 2023). Propelled by the unprecedented historical moments that witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza, following October 7, 2023, the second section, entitled “Palestine and the Imaginaire,” comprises contributions by scholars who were invited by the guest editors of this issue to write about Palestinian history of
resistance as depicted in different genres of Palestinian literature."
Front Matter". Cairo Studies in English, 2024, 1, 2024, -.
Cairo Studies In English, The Imaginaire and Reshaping the World, 2024
The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a ... more The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a few of her selected writings within a historical perspective. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, gender and border studies, I argue that the Syrian American novelist, poet and activist Mohja Kahf (1967- ) locates woman’s body, labeled as ‘Muslim’ by the West, at the crux of her works to interrogate body politics and negotiate gender and rights. Depicting the life of Arab American immigrants from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahf delineates the macro and micro politics hegemonizing that body, subverted by its agency and counter-hegemonic voice. Taking Indianapolis, the city at the crossroads, as her space of departure that witnesses her coming of age, in her narrative, Kahf deconstructs temporal, spatial, cultural, and gender borders, creating a liberating transcultural/transnational path. Written at the intersection of history and fiction, the stories of Muslim women’s bodies as cultural products are stories of power relations that are anchored in patriarchal, colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial discourses. Through the Muslim woman’s body, Kahf creates awareness of the threatening role of knowledge production embodied by such discourses as the real terror that has colonized minds and constructed borders. Appropriating selected Western feminist tactics, intertwined with the Muslim feminist concept of “mujadila,” Kahf introduces a protagonist who embarks on a journey of consecutive conflict with all discourses of othering, silencing, negation and appropriation through a constant process of re-visioning, deciphering, healing, and re-inscribing of Muslim women’s bodies.
Routledge, 2021
The ongoing fragmentation of Syria by sectarianism is the culmination of a civil war in which ext... more The ongoing fragmentation of Syria by sectarianism is the culmination of a civil war in which extremists like The Free Syrian Army, al-Nusra Front, Jaysh al-Islam, al-Qa‘eda, and ISIS have played major roles. Consequently, national identity crisis has become a focal theme for many Syrian writers. This chapter examines selected Arabic literary articles by the Syrian writer Tamara al-Refai published in the Egyptian newspaper Elshorouk and translated here by the present researcher. Drawing on memory studies, food studies, gender studies, and the field of feminist geopolitics, the study argues that the articles are basically centered on identity, cultural trauma, and memory, interlaced with Syrian women’s resilience and pivotal roles as “cultural transmitters” and “cultural signifers of the national collectivity” (Yuval-Davis 621) during traumatic displacement and cultural threat. al-Refai utilizes female storytelling that is anchored in the Arabian Nights and the Scheherazade motif as an empowering tactic of survival and resistance to threatening Islamism, authoritarianism, and Western imperialism.
Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature , 2022
This chapter argues for the need to revisit Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist app... more This chapter argues for the need to revisit Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist approach for an insightful rereading of its environmental politics. The chapter examines the intersection of the woman–nature patriarchal paradigm and the Western imperial exploitation of the natural resources of the Arab world as a gendered “geopolitical periphery” as an archival discourse in Arabic literature that highlights the Arab world’s sociopolitical, cultural transformations across colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial times. Following the literary trajectory of such ambivalent discourse from the early and mid-twentieth century to the present, the chapter concludes that rooted in power structures, gendered, dualistic hierarchies are either perpetuated or interrogatively dismantled through the “feminine principle” as a counter-hegemonic discourse that is promulgated by writers, acting as “ecological agents” of sustainability. Harnessing their ecoenergies, writers transform the woman–nature paradigm into an empowering discourse. Hence, contemporary literary discourses of endangered, exploited ecosystems, and exilic nomadism run alongside counter-discourses that resist environmental imperialism/racism/degradation, foregrounding sustainability, despite deracination, and demanding sovereignty and environmental justice.
Routledge eBooks, Aug 12, 2022
Memory, Voice, and Identity
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2021
This article focuses on the role of food as a cultural/political marker in selected Egyptian film... more This article focuses on the role of food as a cultural/political marker in selected Egyptian films. The study argues that food is intertwined with power relations and socio-economic political transformations; hence, food studies can constitute a cultural, historical document that unravels personal and collective, political history. The paper examines food discourse in the post-2011 period as depicted in two award-winning films that represented Egypt in a number of international film festivals, mainly, the 2013 documentary film “OM Amira” by Nagi Ismail (1983-) , and the 2016 feature film “Nawara” by Hala Khalil (1967-) . As food for thought, the selected films depict the plight of Egyptian working class women as representative of a whole downtrodden social class. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the study raises a number of questions to which it attempts to provide answers. What is the role of food in films? How do both films represent the relation between food and classes? ...
This paper aims at examining the dialectics of power relations in postcolonial Egypt, culminating... more This paper aims at examining the dialectics of power relations in
postcolonial Egypt, culminating in the 2011 revolution. The paper
attempts to provide answers to the following questions: How can we
scrutinize the mechanisms of power permeating the Egyptian carceral
society in light of Foucault's book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (1977) and surveillance theories? How can a utopian light at the
end of the tunnel be perceived vis-a-vis Foucault's dystopian metaphor of
the panopticon and Mathiesen's concept of the synopticon? What are the
channels of resistance offered by surveillance theories? Taking these questions as points of departure, the paper aims at scrutinizing the depiction of Egypt as a prison under the surveillance of a police state, and its battle for freedom and democracy in two different areas: Radwa Ashour‟s 2008 novel Farag (Release) and Youssef Chahin and Khaled Youssef‟s 2007 film Heya Fawda (Chaos) . My choice of the novel and the film is triggered by their delineation of the regime‟s hegemonic and subjugating tactics, intricately intertwined with escalating resistance on the part of Egyptians, ushering the inevitability of revolution. The paper is divided into three major sections. The first section discusses Foucault's concept of the panopticon vis-a-vis new surveillance concepts. The second and third sections discuss Ashour's novel and Chahin and Youssef's film as exemplary works of prophetic resistance art in light of the theories of surveillance.
The present article aims at conducting a comparative study of Ahdaf Soueif’s 2012 memoir Cairo: M... more The present article aims at conducting a comparative study of Ahdaf Soueif’s 2012 memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, entitled Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed in the 2014 edition, and Radwa Ashour’s 2013 autobiography: Athqal min Radwā, (Heavier than Radwa: Excerpts from an Autobiography). The works that document the 2010-2013 state of flux from the perspective and experiences of both writers, interwoven with various recollected historical periods, are examined in the light of an interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural studies, postcolonial
and autobiography theories. Scrutinized within the scope of the intellectuals’ other writings and interviews, I argue that the selected texts that depict the issues of identity, the self and nationalism as pivotal points can be regarded as acts of literary activism or textual spaces of resistance. First, in delineating the history of the nation, intertwined with the cartography of the self, the works unmask the history of oppression to which the individual and public self/identity have been subjected.
Second, they document the intellectuals’ resistance to the ongoing
counterrevolutionary discourse in the post 2011 period. Third, they interrogate and condemn the human rights’ violations, and concomitantly extol their anxiety about an authoritarian future. Fourth, in portraying the gradual fragmentation of the previously homogeneous nationalist discourse characteristic of the first eighteen days of the revolution, the works depict the intellectuals’ gradual detachment from
the prevalent nationalist discourse they critique as hegemonic.
Initiated by E. Said’s legacy, this paper endeavors to unravel the Zionist rhetoric as a discours... more Initiated by E. Said’s legacy, this paper endeavors to unravel the Zionist rhetoric as a discourse of power that aims at historicizing, authenticating and legitimizing the acquisition of Palestine. In 1876 George Eliot published her ideologically impregnated novel Daniel Deronda that caused much controversy in Victorian society. In 2002 the BBC TV produced the novel that was broadcast in Britain and the USA in the same year. Bearing in mind the historical gap between the publication and the TV production, besides the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Eliot’s proto-Zionist novel Daniel Deronda calls for an investigation of its hegemonic discourse as part of the vibrant Zionist propaganda.
The present paper aims at examining the power structures related to borderlands and their inhabit... more The present paper aims at examining the power structures related
to borderlands and their inhabitants, highlighting the processes of
inclusion and exclusion, through examining the interconnectedness
between space, time and identity. Scrutinizing the array of Sinai and Nubian characters enmeshed in peripheral spaces as represented in their literature, the paper studies how the liminal identities of those marginalized communities who become politically aware of their inequality, exclusion and otherness are gradually transformed from the agonistic to the antagonistic. Seen in this light, to construct a better and more stable future for Egypt, the spatial dynamics' problematic should be taken seriously by the state.
This paper examines the representations of Egyptian women and the Egyptian nation in the cartoons... more This paper examines the representations of Egyptian women and the
Egyptian nation in the cartoons and graffiti of the January 2011 revolution and its aftermath. The paper aims at providing answers to a number of questions. Can graffiti and cartoon play an intrinsic role in historically documenting the 2011 January revolution and its aftermath? What is the relation between gender and nation? How does the fluidity of the images of Egypt in relation to the images of women bear witness to the nationalist narrative and the evolving historical events? How does the socio-political graphic discourse represent women and their role in the revolution and the post revolution period? How far is the escalating oppression against women in the post revolution period related to the suppression of the revolution and the spirit of the nation? How do male and female graphic artists differ in their depiction of the gendered nationalist discourse? Do those circulated images consolidate or resist dictatorial patriarchal culture?