Hala Halim - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Hala Halim
California Italian studies, 2010
Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted... more Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: "I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase. I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines." 1 (see fig. ) The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion. Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist -that and his city, Alexandria. Whereas identification with one's city, especially one as freighted with mythological and literary associations as Alexandria, is not uncommon, identification with Levantinism would seem to be less obvious. Geographically speaking, Alexandria is not located in the Levant, a term associated with the East Mediterranean. Warranted, perhaps, by de Zogheb's descent from a family, long resident in Alexandria, of predominantly Syro-Lebanese origin? But would that not make him shami, the Egyptian Arabic term for one who hails from the Arab East Mediterranean? And what if one recalls the colonial genealogy of the adjective "Levantine," and the fact that the borrowing "lifantini" 2 barely exists in Arabic, unlike the loan word from cosmopolitan, "kuzmubulitani"? What would be the connection between identifying as Levantine and Alexandria's enduring association with cosmopolitanism? How do such issues play out in de Zogheb's libretti, most of which remain unpublished, written in pidginized Italian? The surviving corpus of ten libretti was written between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postcolonial period. The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of de Zogheb's immediate formation, I argue, was the product of a Eurocentric discourse that precariously perched it between "quasi" and "pseudo," multiply Europeanizing the city's heterogeneity while ambivalently placing it under the sign of "Levantine" to impute a shifty derivativeness. Born to the manner of an Alexandrian-Levantine elite that would lose ground, the librettist's grappling with that formation gained complexity from his queer orientation. The performativity of the libretti, as the discussion demonstrates, is instantiated in a parodic Camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. In this sense, the libretti undertake a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian-Levantine cosmopolitanism. But a reading of four libretti that represent signal points in de Zogheb's operatic output reveals the limitations of this aesthetic project. The anti-essentialism that valorizes the hybridity of the Levantines to bring it in line with a queer sensibility falls short of including other ethnicities and less privileged classes. The libretti's extraordinary exploits of pastiche and macaronics ultimately betray an undertow of interpellation that prevents them from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South. 1 Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entry of November 3, 1957, in English. De Zogheb papers, Centre d'Études Alexandrines; all material in this center will be hereafter cited as CEAlex. 2 The only example of that usage in Arabic I know of is by Yusuf Idris in which he associates it with fraudulence; see his "Nahwa Masrah Misri," a set of articles first published in 1964, reprinted in Yusuf Idris, al-Farafir (Cairo: Maktabat Gharib, 1977), 23. The same text, 24, contains one of the earlier instances in Arabic of the loan word kuzmubulitaniyya (cosmopolitanism), which has gained currency in recent years; on this see Hala Halim, "The Alexandria Archive:
Routledge eBooks, Jun 19, 2019
Arguably the product of comparative literature, Euro-American postcolonial theory is largely in t... more Arguably the product of comparative literature, Euro-American postcolonial theory is largely in the process of being superseded by Global South studies in the same discipline. Thus far, Global South studies, for the purposes of comparatists, remains undefined, beyond gesturing towards the task of South-South comparatism, a gesture in and of itself premised on postcolonial theory's critique of Eurocentrism. "I think global South is a reverse racist term, one that ignores the daunting diversity outside Europe and the United States," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently written. "We decide to define what we are not by a bit of academic tourism," she continues, "choosing academics to represent the global South at conferences and in journals from countries elsewhere who have class continuity with us and thus resolving our own sense of ourselves as democratic subjects resisting definition by race and gender" (Spivak 2018, 166). While the charge of "tokenization" (Spivak 2018, 167) has been leveled likewise against Euro-American postcolonial theory, my wager is twofold: Global South comparatism can and should find some of its conceptual bearings in postcolonial theory; and the postcolonial here is to be epistemologically and temporally extended to embrace its prehistory in the liberation moment and thus recoup its emphasis on social justice for the purposes of the "New International" (Derrida 1994). I demonstrate this wager through the writings of Edwar al-Kharrat about the Afro-Asian movement. It is of no small significance that the first of two explicit mentions of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Indonesia, or Bandung, as it came to be known, in Edward Said's Orientalism occurs in the context of a citation from Anouar Abdel-Malek's 1963 article "Orientalism in Crisis." Abdel-Malek, the Egyptian Leftist intellectual and political scientist, had argued that "the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations" was what it took to "provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance Afro-Asian variations in Edwar al-Kharrat's texts Hala Halim
Comparative Literature Studies, Feb 1, 2022
Delving into an ephemeral 1940s Cairene magazine and conducting oral history, this essay focalize... more Delving into an ephemeral 1940s Cairene magazine and conducting oral history, this essay focalizes an unrecorded Egyptian-Indian moment wedged between the two countries' anti-imperial cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s, and their postindependence solidarity most visible in the 1955 Bandung Conference. The textual material is in the nature of a representation of India, suffused with identification; the oral history yields a virtually unknown Egyptian-Indian solidarity among student networks. Far from claiming to cover any and all engagements with things Indian in 1940s Egypt, the essay argues that the supranationalism of the specific Egyptian dialogue with India tackled here, while squarely anti-imperial, acquires more pronounced socialist internationalist hues due to a much-invigorated stage in the Egyptian left. Recouping that moment enables us to form a more nuanced picture of the later, postindependence internationalism, attuning us to various precursor orientations that fed into it, if in unremarked ways. Dwelling on these instances of 1940s internationalism resists the tendency to subsume the later Third Worldist internationalisms under the shadow of the Cold War, notwithstanding their imbrication within it. And yet this intervention is non-teleological: the conclusion considers the implicationsthe continuities as much as the discontinuities-of the 1940s moment for the succeeding Afro-Asian Third Worldism.
Critical Times, Apr 1, 2020
| © HALA HALIM This is an open ac cess ar ti cle dis trib uted un der the terms of a Creative Com... more | © HALA HALIM This is an open ac cess ar ti cle dis trib uted un der the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East, Dec 1, 2012
As part of the endeavor to seek out nonmetropolitan forms of comparatism, this article addresses ... more As part of the endeavor to seek out nonmetropolitan forms of comparatism, this article addresses the trilingual periodical Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings that was published by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association from the late 1960s until the early 1990s. Lotus, the article argues, instantiates an antecedent of postcolonial critique and represents a decidedly anti-Eurocentric, internationalist project that held the promise of Global South comparatism. Halim’s article discusses selected issues raised in Lotus, considers the curtailment of its potential by the Cold War, and reflects on the implications of revisiting the journal in relation to contemporary geopolitical realities.
Literary Manifestos since the Seventies: Introduction and Translation/ ﺑﻴﺎﻧﺎﺕ ﺃﺩﺑﻴﺔ ﻣﻨﺬ ﺍﻟﺴﺒﻌﻴﻨﺎﺕ : ﻣﻘﺪﻣﺔ ﻭ ﺗﺮﺟﻤﺔ
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 1991
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
“The people’s wisdom” and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: folklore, colloquial poetry, and subalternity in Shaima’ al-Sabbagh’s praxis
Journal of the African Literature Association, Jul 26, 2021
Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) ... more Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) documents and analyzes three areas of her production in relation to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. The argument is made that her colloquial poetry, folklore research and support of subalternity worked in synergy together. Foregrounding the folk imaginaries that the revolution drew on, al-Sabbagh identified a fundamental gap in that event between bourgeois intellectuals/activists and subalterns. Seminal pedagogies she was in the process of devising to close that gap and creative projects to empower labor actors are analyzed in relation to Antonio Gramsci’s views on folklore and his “philosophy of praxis.” These projects benefited from al-Sabbagh’s apprenticeship in the popular, at both the grassroots and academic levels, including her involvement in aragoz (hand-held puppet theater). Al-Sabbagh’s texts, among them manuscripts, as well as video and audio recordings of her, are cited; additionally, interviews about her have been conducted.
Scope for Comparatism: Internationalist and Surrealist Resonances in Idwār al-Kharrāṭ’s Resistant Literary Modernity
BRILL eBooks, 2017
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive
The Signs of Saladin: A Modern Cinematic Rendition of Medieval Heroism/ ﺭﻣﺰﻳﺔ ﺻﻼﺡ ﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ: ﺭﺅﻳﺔ ﺳﻴﻨﻤﺎﺋﻴﺔ ﻣﻌﺎﺻﺮﺓ ﻟﻠﺒﻄﻮﻟﺔ ﺍﻟﻮﺳﻴﻄﻴﺔ
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 1992
Produced in 1963, Youssef Chahine's historical epic film Saladin -- dealing as it does w... more Produced in 1963, Youssef Chahine's historical epic film Saladin -- dealing as it does with the Third Crusade from an Arab point of view -- is of great interest in many respects. For, not only does the portrayal of such a crucial stage in the relationship between East and West at ...
California Italian studies, 2010
Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted... more Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: "I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase. I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines." 1 (see fig. 1) The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion. Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist-that and his city, Alexandria. Whereas identification with one's city, especially one as freighted with mythological and literary associations as Alexandria, is not uncommon, identification with Levantinism would seem to be less obvious. Geographically speaking, Alexandria is not located in the Levant, a term associated with the East Mediterranean. Warranted, perhaps, by de Zogheb's descent from a family, long resident in Alexandria, of predominantly Syro-Lebanese origin? But would that not make him shami, the Egyptian Arabic term for one who hails from the Arab East Mediterranean? And what if one recalls the colonial genealogy of the adjective "Levantine," and the fact that the borrowing "lifantini" 2 barely exists in Arabic, unlike the loan word from cosmopolitan, "kuzmubulitani"? What would be the connection between identifying as Levantine and Alexandria's enduring association with cosmopolitanism? How do such issues play out in de Zogheb's libretti, most of which remain unpublished, written in pidginized Italian? The surviving corpus of ten libretti was written between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postcolonial period. The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of de Zogheb's immediate formation, I argue, was the product of a Eurocentric discourse that precariously perched it between "quasi" and "pseudo," multiply Europeanizing the city's heterogeneity while ambivalently placing it under the sign of "Levantine" to impute a shifty derivativeness. Born to the manner of an Alexandrian-Levantine elite that would lose ground, the librettist's grappling with that formation gained complexity from his queer orientation. The performativity of the libretti, as the discussion demonstrates, is instantiated in a parodic Camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. In this sense, the libretti undertake a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian-Levantine cosmopolitanism. But a reading of four libretti that represent signal points in de Zogheb's operatic output reveals the limitations of this aesthetic project. The anti-essentialism that valorizes the hybridity of the Levantines to bring it in line with a queer sensibility falls short of including other ethnicities and less privileged classes. The libretti's extraordinary exploits of pastiche and macaronics ultimately betray an undertow of interpellation that prevents them from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South. 1 Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entry of November 3, 1957, in English. De Zogheb papers, Centre d'Études Alexandrines; all material in this center will be hereafter cited as CEAlex. 2 The only example of that usage in Arabic I know of is by Yusuf Idris in which he associates it with fraudulence; see his "Nahwa Masrah Misri," a set of articles first published in 1964, reprinted in Yusuf Idris, al-Farafir (Cairo: Maktabat Gharib, 1977), 23. The same text, 24, contains one of the earlier instances in Arabic of the loan word kuzmubulitaniyya (cosmopolitanism), which has gained currency in recent years; on this see Hala Halim, "The Alexandria Archive:
Epilogue/Prologue
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, 2013
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
Global South/Global North Comparatism: The Case of the Refugee Crisis in the Mediterranean Hala H... more Global South/Global North Comparatism: The Case of the Refugee Crisis in the Mediterranean Hala Halim The text below is the abstract of a presentation given by Hala Halim, New York University, on the Presidential Panel at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on July 8, 2017. An intervention in the gestating project of South-South comparatism, the presentation made the argument that such comparative work, timely though it is, cannot afford to overlook the South's multiply overdetermined relations with the North. Granted, Third-Worldism must be recouped for a genealogy that undermines Eurocentrism, whether in the cultural sphere or in terms of international law. Scholarship on the contributions of Small States and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), particularly in the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was cited. The presentation went on to press the point that defaulting to an exclusive fo...
The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance
Postcolonialism Cross-Examined
Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb A page from Bernard de Zogheb's 1957 diary. Reproduced courtesy of the Centre d'Études Alexandrines. Bernard de Zogheb in Alexandria, April 1997. Photographed by the author. The jacket of the record of Bernard de Zogheb's...
Bernard de Zogheb waiting for the Zevudachis
Périodiques
“The people’s wisdom” and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: folklore, colloquial poetry, and subalternity in Shaima’ al-Sabbagh’s praxis
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2021
Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) ... more Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) documents and analyzes three areas of her production in relation to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. The argument is made that her colloquial poetry, folklore research and support of subalternity worked in synergy together. Foregrounding the folk imaginaries that the revolution drew on, al-Sabbagh identified a fundamental gap in that event between bourgeois intellectuals/activists and subalterns. Seminal pedagogies she was in the process of devising to close that gap and creative projects to empower labor actors are analyzed in relation to Antonio Gramsci’s views on folklore and his “philosophy of praxis.” These projects benefited from al-Sabbagh’s apprenticeship in the popular, at both the grassroots and academic levels, including her involvement in aragoz (hand-held puppet theater). Al-Sabbagh’s texts, among them manuscripts, as well as video and audio recordings of her, are cited; additionally, interviews about her have been conducted.
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
California Italian studies, 2010
Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted... more Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: "I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase. I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines." 1 (see fig. ) The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion. Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist -that and his city, Alexandria. Whereas identification with one's city, especially one as freighted with mythological and literary associations as Alexandria, is not uncommon, identification with Levantinism would seem to be less obvious. Geographically speaking, Alexandria is not located in the Levant, a term associated with the East Mediterranean. Warranted, perhaps, by de Zogheb's descent from a family, long resident in Alexandria, of predominantly Syro-Lebanese origin? But would that not make him shami, the Egyptian Arabic term for one who hails from the Arab East Mediterranean? And what if one recalls the colonial genealogy of the adjective "Levantine," and the fact that the borrowing "lifantini" 2 barely exists in Arabic, unlike the loan word from cosmopolitan, "kuzmubulitani"? What would be the connection between identifying as Levantine and Alexandria's enduring association with cosmopolitanism? How do such issues play out in de Zogheb's libretti, most of which remain unpublished, written in pidginized Italian? The surviving corpus of ten libretti was written between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postcolonial period. The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of de Zogheb's immediate formation, I argue, was the product of a Eurocentric discourse that precariously perched it between "quasi" and "pseudo," multiply Europeanizing the city's heterogeneity while ambivalently placing it under the sign of "Levantine" to impute a shifty derivativeness. Born to the manner of an Alexandrian-Levantine elite that would lose ground, the librettist's grappling with that formation gained complexity from his queer orientation. The performativity of the libretti, as the discussion demonstrates, is instantiated in a parodic Camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. In this sense, the libretti undertake a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian-Levantine cosmopolitanism. But a reading of four libretti that represent signal points in de Zogheb's operatic output reveals the limitations of this aesthetic project. The anti-essentialism that valorizes the hybridity of the Levantines to bring it in line with a queer sensibility falls short of including other ethnicities and less privileged classes. The libretti's extraordinary exploits of pastiche and macaronics ultimately betray an undertow of interpellation that prevents them from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South. 1 Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entry of November 3, 1957, in English. De Zogheb papers, Centre d'Études Alexandrines; all material in this center will be hereafter cited as CEAlex. 2 The only example of that usage in Arabic I know of is by Yusuf Idris in which he associates it with fraudulence; see his "Nahwa Masrah Misri," a set of articles first published in 1964, reprinted in Yusuf Idris, al-Farafir (Cairo: Maktabat Gharib, 1977), 23. The same text, 24, contains one of the earlier instances in Arabic of the loan word kuzmubulitaniyya (cosmopolitanism), which has gained currency in recent years; on this see Hala Halim, "The Alexandria Archive:
Routledge eBooks, Jun 19, 2019
Arguably the product of comparative literature, Euro-American postcolonial theory is largely in t... more Arguably the product of comparative literature, Euro-American postcolonial theory is largely in the process of being superseded by Global South studies in the same discipline. Thus far, Global South studies, for the purposes of comparatists, remains undefined, beyond gesturing towards the task of South-South comparatism, a gesture in and of itself premised on postcolonial theory's critique of Eurocentrism. "I think global South is a reverse racist term, one that ignores the daunting diversity outside Europe and the United States," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently written. "We decide to define what we are not by a bit of academic tourism," she continues, "choosing academics to represent the global South at conferences and in journals from countries elsewhere who have class continuity with us and thus resolving our own sense of ourselves as democratic subjects resisting definition by race and gender" (Spivak 2018, 166). While the charge of "tokenization" (Spivak 2018, 167) has been leveled likewise against Euro-American postcolonial theory, my wager is twofold: Global South comparatism can and should find some of its conceptual bearings in postcolonial theory; and the postcolonial here is to be epistemologically and temporally extended to embrace its prehistory in the liberation moment and thus recoup its emphasis on social justice for the purposes of the "New International" (Derrida 1994). I demonstrate this wager through the writings of Edwar al-Kharrat about the Afro-Asian movement. It is of no small significance that the first of two explicit mentions of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Indonesia, or Bandung, as it came to be known, in Edward Said's Orientalism occurs in the context of a citation from Anouar Abdel-Malek's 1963 article "Orientalism in Crisis." Abdel-Malek, the Egyptian Leftist intellectual and political scientist, had argued that "the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations" was what it took to "provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance Afro-Asian variations in Edwar al-Kharrat's texts Hala Halim
Comparative Literature Studies, Feb 1, 2022
Delving into an ephemeral 1940s Cairene magazine and conducting oral history, this essay focalize... more Delving into an ephemeral 1940s Cairene magazine and conducting oral history, this essay focalizes an unrecorded Egyptian-Indian moment wedged between the two countries' anti-imperial cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s, and their postindependence solidarity most visible in the 1955 Bandung Conference. The textual material is in the nature of a representation of India, suffused with identification; the oral history yields a virtually unknown Egyptian-Indian solidarity among student networks. Far from claiming to cover any and all engagements with things Indian in 1940s Egypt, the essay argues that the supranationalism of the specific Egyptian dialogue with India tackled here, while squarely anti-imperial, acquires more pronounced socialist internationalist hues due to a much-invigorated stage in the Egyptian left. Recouping that moment enables us to form a more nuanced picture of the later, postindependence internationalism, attuning us to various precursor orientations that fed into it, if in unremarked ways. Dwelling on these instances of 1940s internationalism resists the tendency to subsume the later Third Worldist internationalisms under the shadow of the Cold War, notwithstanding their imbrication within it. And yet this intervention is non-teleological: the conclusion considers the implicationsthe continuities as much as the discontinuities-of the 1940s moment for the succeeding Afro-Asian Third Worldism.
Critical Times, Apr 1, 2020
| © HALA HALIM This is an open ac cess ar ti cle dis trib uted un der the terms of a Creative Com... more | © HALA HALIM This is an open ac cess ar ti cle dis trib uted un der the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East, Dec 1, 2012
As part of the endeavor to seek out nonmetropolitan forms of comparatism, this article addresses ... more As part of the endeavor to seek out nonmetropolitan forms of comparatism, this article addresses the trilingual periodical Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings that was published by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association from the late 1960s until the early 1990s. Lotus, the article argues, instantiates an antecedent of postcolonial critique and represents a decidedly anti-Eurocentric, internationalist project that held the promise of Global South comparatism. Halim’s article discusses selected issues raised in Lotus, considers the curtailment of its potential by the Cold War, and reflects on the implications of revisiting the journal in relation to contemporary geopolitical realities.
Literary Manifestos since the Seventies: Introduction and Translation/ ﺑﻴﺎﻧﺎﺕ ﺃﺩﺑﻴﺔ ﻣﻨﺬ ﺍﻟﺴﺒﻌﻴﻨﺎﺕ : ﻣﻘﺪﻣﺔ ﻭ ﺗﺮﺟﻤﺔ
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 1991
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
“The people’s wisdom” and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: folklore, colloquial poetry, and subalternity in Shaima’ al-Sabbagh’s praxis
Journal of the African Literature Association, Jul 26, 2021
Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) ... more Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) documents and analyzes three areas of her production in relation to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. The argument is made that her colloquial poetry, folklore research and support of subalternity worked in synergy together. Foregrounding the folk imaginaries that the revolution drew on, al-Sabbagh identified a fundamental gap in that event between bourgeois intellectuals/activists and subalterns. Seminal pedagogies she was in the process of devising to close that gap and creative projects to empower labor actors are analyzed in relation to Antonio Gramsci’s views on folklore and his “philosophy of praxis.” These projects benefited from al-Sabbagh’s apprenticeship in the popular, at both the grassroots and academic levels, including her involvement in aragoz (hand-held puppet theater). Al-Sabbagh’s texts, among them manuscripts, as well as video and audio recordings of her, are cited; additionally, interviews about her have been conducted.
Scope for Comparatism: Internationalist and Surrealist Resonances in Idwār al-Kharrāṭ’s Resistant Literary Modernity
BRILL eBooks, 2017
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive
The Signs of Saladin: A Modern Cinematic Rendition of Medieval Heroism/ ﺭﻣﺰﻳﺔ ﺻﻼﺡ ﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ: ﺭﺅﻳﺔ ﺳﻴﻨﻤﺎﺋﻴﺔ ﻣﻌﺎﺻﺮﺓ ﻟﻠﺒﻄﻮﻟﺔ ﺍﻟﻮﺳﻴﻄﻴﺔ
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 1992
Produced in 1963, Youssef Chahine's historical epic film Saladin -- dealing as it does w... more Produced in 1963, Youssef Chahine's historical epic film Saladin -- dealing as it does with the Third Crusade from an Arab point of view -- is of great interest in many respects. For, not only does the portrayal of such a crucial stage in the relationship between East and West at ...
California Italian studies, 2010
Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted... more Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: "I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase. I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines." 1 (see fig. 1) The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion. Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist-that and his city, Alexandria. Whereas identification with one's city, especially one as freighted with mythological and literary associations as Alexandria, is not uncommon, identification with Levantinism would seem to be less obvious. Geographically speaking, Alexandria is not located in the Levant, a term associated with the East Mediterranean. Warranted, perhaps, by de Zogheb's descent from a family, long resident in Alexandria, of predominantly Syro-Lebanese origin? But would that not make him shami, the Egyptian Arabic term for one who hails from the Arab East Mediterranean? And what if one recalls the colonial genealogy of the adjective "Levantine," and the fact that the borrowing "lifantini" 2 barely exists in Arabic, unlike the loan word from cosmopolitan, "kuzmubulitani"? What would be the connection between identifying as Levantine and Alexandria's enduring association with cosmopolitanism? How do such issues play out in de Zogheb's libretti, most of which remain unpublished, written in pidginized Italian? The surviving corpus of ten libretti was written between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postcolonial period. The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of de Zogheb's immediate formation, I argue, was the product of a Eurocentric discourse that precariously perched it between "quasi" and "pseudo," multiply Europeanizing the city's heterogeneity while ambivalently placing it under the sign of "Levantine" to impute a shifty derivativeness. Born to the manner of an Alexandrian-Levantine elite that would lose ground, the librettist's grappling with that formation gained complexity from his queer orientation. The performativity of the libretti, as the discussion demonstrates, is instantiated in a parodic Camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. In this sense, the libretti undertake a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian-Levantine cosmopolitanism. But a reading of four libretti that represent signal points in de Zogheb's operatic output reveals the limitations of this aesthetic project. The anti-essentialism that valorizes the hybridity of the Levantines to bring it in line with a queer sensibility falls short of including other ethnicities and less privileged classes. The libretti's extraordinary exploits of pastiche and macaronics ultimately betray an undertow of interpellation that prevents them from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South. 1 Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entry of November 3, 1957, in English. De Zogheb papers, Centre d'Études Alexandrines; all material in this center will be hereafter cited as CEAlex. 2 The only example of that usage in Arabic I know of is by Yusuf Idris in which he associates it with fraudulence; see his "Nahwa Masrah Misri," a set of articles first published in 1964, reprinted in Yusuf Idris, al-Farafir (Cairo: Maktabat Gharib, 1977), 23. The same text, 24, contains one of the earlier instances in Arabic of the loan word kuzmubulitaniyya (cosmopolitanism), which has gained currency in recent years; on this see Hala Halim, "The Alexandria Archive:
Epilogue/Prologue
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, 2013
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
Global South/Global North Comparatism: The Case of the Refugee Crisis in the Mediterranean Hala H... more Global South/Global North Comparatism: The Case of the Refugee Crisis in the Mediterranean Hala Halim The text below is the abstract of a presentation given by Hala Halim, New York University, on the Presidential Panel at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on July 8, 2017. An intervention in the gestating project of South-South comparatism, the presentation made the argument that such comparative work, timely though it is, cannot afford to overlook the South's multiply overdetermined relations with the North. Granted, Third-Worldism must be recouped for a genealogy that undermines Eurocentrism, whether in the cultural sphere or in terms of international law. Scholarship on the contributions of Small States and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), particularly in the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was cited. The presentation went on to press the point that defaulting to an exclusive fo...
The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance
Postcolonialism Cross-Examined
Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb A page from Bernard de Zogheb's 1957 diary. Reproduced courtesy of the Centre d'Études Alexandrines. Bernard de Zogheb in Alexandria, April 1997. Photographed by the author. The jacket of the record of Bernard de Zogheb's...
Bernard de Zogheb waiting for the Zevudachis
Périodiques
“The people’s wisdom” and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: folklore, colloquial poetry, and subalternity in Shaima’ al-Sabbagh’s praxis
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2021
Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) ... more Abstract This virtually inaugural scholarly study of the activist Shaima’ al-Sabbagh (1983–2015) documents and analyzes three areas of her production in relation to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. The argument is made that her colloquial poetry, folklore research and support of subalternity worked in synergy together. Foregrounding the folk imaginaries that the revolution drew on, al-Sabbagh identified a fundamental gap in that event between bourgeois intellectuals/activists and subalterns. Seminal pedagogies she was in the process of devising to close that gap and creative projects to empower labor actors are analyzed in relation to Antonio Gramsci’s views on folklore and his “philosophy of praxis.” These projects benefited from al-Sabbagh’s apprenticeship in the popular, at both the grassroots and academic levels, including her involvement in aragoz (hand-held puppet theater). Al-Sabbagh’s texts, among them manuscripts, as well as video and audio recordings of her, are cited; additionally, interviews about her have been conducted.
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism