Amina ElHalawani | Alexandria University ,Egypt (original) (raw)

Papers by Amina ElHalawani

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Dec 17, 2023

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (Print), Sep 25, 2023

Zeitschrift Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, Mar 1, 2023

Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this arti... more Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this article looks into the fragmentation and instability of the notion of home for refugees, highlighting the resort of the characters to a notion of homing as a practice of planetary dimensions. By looking at the role of bees and beekeeping in The Beekeeper of Aleppo and the Macedonian documentary Honeyland home is explored as a ‘verb’ rather than a static location. Moreover, this article also reflects on human and non-human kin, to use Donna Haraway’s term, in the creation of home spaces and relations. I would like to express my gratitude for the support I have received as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry while working on this paper.

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (Print), Mar 30, 2023

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this arti... more Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this article looks into the fragmentation and instability of the notion of home for refugees, highlighting the resort of the characters to a notion of homing as a practice of planetary dimensions. By looking at the role of bees and beekeeping in The Beekeeper of Aleppo and the Macedonian documentary Honeyland home is explored as a ‘verb’ rather than a static location. Moreover, this article also reflects on human and non-human kin, to use Donna Haraway’s term, in the creation of home spaces and relations. I would like to express my gratitude for the support I have received as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry while working on this paper.

Interdisciplinary & transcultural topics in Humanities & social sciences 1 ranscultural Journal f... more Interdisciplinary & transcultural topics in Humanities & social sciences 1 ranscultural Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences (TJHSS) is a journal committed to disseminate a new range of interdisciplinary and transcultural topics in Humanities and social sciences. It is an open access, peer reviewed and refereed journal, published by Badr University in Cairo, BUC, to provide original and updated knowledge platform of international scholars interested in multi-inter disciplinary researches in all languages and from the widest range of world cultures. It's an online academic journal that offers print on demand services. TJHSS Aims and Objectives: To promote interdisciplinary studies in the fields of Languages, Humanities and Social Sciences and provide a reliable academically trusted and approved venue of publishing Language and culture research.

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Revista Ao Largo, 2022

Em 1962, o teatro de Beckett estreou no Egito e, desde então, tem servido de inspiração para dram... more Em 1962, o teatro de Beckett estreou no Egito e, desde então, tem servido de inspiração para dramaturgos no país. Este ensaio examina como dois escritores egípcios desenvolveram a obra de Beckett Esperando Godot, como um exemplo do trabalho de Beckett e do chamado "Teatro do Absurdo", revelando que essa obra tem um potencial maior para gerar engajamento político e social do que é compreendido tradicionalmente. Masir Sursar [O Destino De Uma Barata] de Tawfiq Al-Hakim e Musafir Layl [O Passageiro Noturno] de Salah Abdul Saboor juntos fornecem bons materiais de análise sobre esse efeito.

The Case for Reduction, 2022

The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not si... more The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not simply point to just a location. This chapter thus utilizes what I call the trope of the ‘vignette’ to look at the concept of home in order to identify some aspects of what constitutes and/or (re)creates it for displaced individuals. It does so by performing a close reading of key moments in the film Salt of this Sea by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays The Idea of Home by John Hughes.

KWI-Blog, 2022

In the preface to his book, The Idea of Home, John Hughes reflects on storytelling and its relati... more In the preface to his book, The Idea of Home, John Hughes reflects on storytelling and its relation to home. In his reflection, he thinks through Walter Benjamin's categories of two kinds of storytellers: the traveler and the tiller of the land. For Hughes, both traveler and tiller of the land seem stuck in their pursuit. They are haunted by "dissatisfaction" as their attempts of return to a supposed fixed location or some distant temporal past collapse; they are "haunted by the same ghost" and that ghost is "home".

Samuel Beckett Today - Aujourd hui 31(2):219-233, 2019

In 1962, Beckett’s theatre debuted in Egypt and, ever since, it has inspired Egyptian play- wrigh... more In 1962, Beckett’s theatre debuted in Egypt and, ever since, it has inspired Egyptian play- wrights. This paper examines how two Egyptian writers engaged with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an example of both Beckett’s work and so-named absurdist theater, reveal- ing it to have more potential for political and social engagement than traditionally understood. Masir Sursar [Fate of a Cockroach] by Tawfiq Al-Hakim and Musafir Layl [Night Traveller] by Salah Abdul Saboor make a good case study of these effects.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2016

‘All the world’s a stage …’ tells us the Bard of Avon. Goffman’s application of Shakespeare’s age... more ‘All the world’s a stage …’ tells us the Bard of Avon. Goffman’s application of Shakespeare’s age-old metaphor to our everyday practices helps us understand the complexity of social interaction. His dramaturgical sociology allows us to engage better with the frames of repeated behaviors that we ‘perform’ in social contexts. However, emphasizing the theatricality of action and interaction, especially for problems at the macro-level like acts of revolution, is crucial to make sense of the form of spectacle that results in popular demonstrations, sit-ins etc., in which everyone contributes as actors/spectators to imagine and/or negotiate a different way of being or governance. This paper aims to study the active dynamics of turning an everyday locale such as Midan al-Tahrir into a liminal space in which staged performances on political and artistic levels take place in an attempt to shed light on the inseparability of the political and the aesthetic, the event and the performance. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 highlights the public’s awareness of the symbolic and performative importance of occupying a space, and the creative power that both nurtures and feeds on this liminal experience. In this very example, the Arabic word midan is helpful because of its dynamic connotations as opposed to the static English ‘square’, as this paper examines the experience of Tahrir as a ‘Midan’ where the real, the ritualistic and the playful actively coexist.

Conference Presentations by Amina ElHalawani

In answer to the question “Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?” during an interview with a Frenc... more In answer to the question “Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?” during an interview with a French journalist, the Irish playwright responded, “Au contraire”. Where does Beckett’s “Au contraire” place him or his country of birth then? This paper aims to extend the notion of the Global South to locations that seem to share a “mode” of being elsewhere, of being “otherwise”, even if they lie in the northern part of the map. By focusing on the Irish playwright Brian Friel’s invented town “Ballybeg” [Little Town] as a setting for many of his plays this paper explores notions of space and place, and their importance in an anti-colonial context.

Friel’s imagined “Ballybeg” is in County Donegal, a contested space in itself as it lies in the north of Ireland and yet belongs to the Republic. In his plays, Ballybeg becomes a metonym for Ireland with its historical, cultural, social and political narratives. This paper, thus, focuses on Ballybeg as an invented space as well as a premise for engaging in discussions of mapping geographies, and the narratives of place evident in many of his works, most visibly in Translations. In this play, Friel stages the process of the remapping and renaming of Irish locales which took place during the British Ordnance Survey, highlighting how remapping changes the cultural topography of a nation, while his very Ballybeg itself being fictional becomes a place somewhere, everywhere and nowhere.

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Dec 17, 2023

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (Print), Sep 25, 2023

Zeitschrift Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, Mar 1, 2023

Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this arti... more Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this article looks into the fragmentation and instability of the notion of home for refugees, highlighting the resort of the characters to a notion of homing as a practice of planetary dimensions. By looking at the role of bees and beekeeping in The Beekeeper of Aleppo and the Macedonian documentary Honeyland home is explored as a ‘verb’ rather than a static location. Moreover, this article also reflects on human and non-human kin, to use Donna Haraway’s term, in the creation of home spaces and relations. I would like to express my gratitude for the support I have received as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry while working on this paper.

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (Print), Mar 30, 2023

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this arti... more Starting with a reading of Christy Lefteri’s refugee narrative The Beekeeper of Aleppo, this article looks into the fragmentation and instability of the notion of home for refugees, highlighting the resort of the characters to a notion of homing as a practice of planetary dimensions. By looking at the role of bees and beekeeping in The Beekeeper of Aleppo and the Macedonian documentary Honeyland home is explored as a ‘verb’ rather than a static location. Moreover, this article also reflects on human and non-human kin, to use Donna Haraway’s term, in the creation of home spaces and relations. I would like to express my gratitude for the support I have received as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry while working on this paper.

Interdisciplinary & transcultural topics in Humanities & social sciences 1 ranscultural Journal f... more Interdisciplinary & transcultural topics in Humanities & social sciences 1 ranscultural Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences (TJHSS) is a journal committed to disseminate a new range of interdisciplinary and transcultural topics in Humanities and social sciences. It is an open access, peer reviewed and refereed journal, published by Badr University in Cairo, BUC, to provide original and updated knowledge platform of international scholars interested in multi-inter disciplinary researches in all languages and from the widest range of world cultures. It's an online academic journal that offers print on demand services. TJHSS Aims and Objectives: To promote interdisciplinary studies in the fields of Languages, Humanities and Social Sciences and provide a reliable academically trusted and approved venue of publishing Language and culture research.

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Revista Ao Largo, 2022

Em 1962, o teatro de Beckett estreou no Egito e, desde então, tem servido de inspiração para dram... more Em 1962, o teatro de Beckett estreou no Egito e, desde então, tem servido de inspiração para dramaturgos no país. Este ensaio examina como dois escritores egípcios desenvolveram a obra de Beckett Esperando Godot, como um exemplo do trabalho de Beckett e do chamado "Teatro do Absurdo", revelando que essa obra tem um potencial maior para gerar engajamento político e social do que é compreendido tradicionalmente. Masir Sursar [O Destino De Uma Barata] de Tawfiq Al-Hakim e Musafir Layl [O Passageiro Noturno] de Salah Abdul Saboor juntos fornecem bons materiais de análise sobre esse efeito.

The Case for Reduction, 2022

The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not si... more The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not simply point to just a location. This chapter thus utilizes what I call the trope of the ‘vignette’ to look at the concept of home in order to identify some aspects of what constitutes and/or (re)creates it for displaced individuals. It does so by performing a close reading of key moments in the film Salt of this Sea by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays The Idea of Home by John Hughes.

KWI-Blog, 2022

In the preface to his book, The Idea of Home, John Hughes reflects on storytelling and its relati... more In the preface to his book, The Idea of Home, John Hughes reflects on storytelling and its relation to home. In his reflection, he thinks through Walter Benjamin's categories of two kinds of storytellers: the traveler and the tiller of the land. For Hughes, both traveler and tiller of the land seem stuck in their pursuit. They are haunted by "dissatisfaction" as their attempts of return to a supposed fixed location or some distant temporal past collapse; they are "haunted by the same ghost" and that ghost is "home".

Samuel Beckett Today - Aujourd hui 31(2):219-233, 2019

In 1962, Beckett’s theatre debuted in Egypt and, ever since, it has inspired Egyptian play- wrigh... more In 1962, Beckett’s theatre debuted in Egypt and, ever since, it has inspired Egyptian play- wrights. This paper examines how two Egyptian writers engaged with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an example of both Beckett’s work and so-named absurdist theater, reveal- ing it to have more potential for political and social engagement than traditionally understood. Masir Sursar [Fate of a Cockroach] by Tawfiq Al-Hakim and Musafir Layl [Night Traveller] by Salah Abdul Saboor make a good case study of these effects.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2016

‘All the world’s a stage …’ tells us the Bard of Avon. Goffman’s application of Shakespeare’s age... more ‘All the world’s a stage …’ tells us the Bard of Avon. Goffman’s application of Shakespeare’s age-old metaphor to our everyday practices helps us understand the complexity of social interaction. His dramaturgical sociology allows us to engage better with the frames of repeated behaviors that we ‘perform’ in social contexts. However, emphasizing the theatricality of action and interaction, especially for problems at the macro-level like acts of revolution, is crucial to make sense of the form of spectacle that results in popular demonstrations, sit-ins etc., in which everyone contributes as actors/spectators to imagine and/or negotiate a different way of being or governance. This paper aims to study the active dynamics of turning an everyday locale such as Midan al-Tahrir into a liminal space in which staged performances on political and artistic levels take place in an attempt to shed light on the inseparability of the political and the aesthetic, the event and the performance. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 highlights the public’s awareness of the symbolic and performative importance of occupying a space, and the creative power that both nurtures and feeds on this liminal experience. In this very example, the Arabic word midan is helpful because of its dynamic connotations as opposed to the static English ‘square’, as this paper examines the experience of Tahrir as a ‘Midan’ where the real, the ritualistic and the playful actively coexist.

In answer to the question “Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?” during an interview with a Frenc... more In answer to the question “Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?” during an interview with a French journalist, the Irish playwright responded, “Au contraire”. Where does Beckett’s “Au contraire” place him or his country of birth then? This paper aims to extend the notion of the Global South to locations that seem to share a “mode” of being elsewhere, of being “otherwise”, even if they lie in the northern part of the map. By focusing on the Irish playwright Brian Friel’s invented town “Ballybeg” [Little Town] as a setting for many of his plays this paper explores notions of space and place, and their importance in an anti-colonial context.

Friel’s imagined “Ballybeg” is in County Donegal, a contested space in itself as it lies in the north of Ireland and yet belongs to the Republic. In his plays, Ballybeg becomes a metonym for Ireland with its historical, cultural, social and political narratives. This paper, thus, focuses on Ballybeg as an invented space as well as a premise for engaging in discussions of mapping geographies, and the narratives of place evident in many of his works, most visibly in Translations. In this play, Friel stages the process of the remapping and renaming of Irish locales which took place during the British Ordnance Survey, highlighting how remapping changes the cultural topography of a nation, while his very Ballybeg itself being fictional becomes a place somewhere, everywhere and nowhere.

23rd AISNA Biennial Conference “Harbors: Flows and Migrations of Peoples, Cultures, and Ideas. The U.S.A. in/and the World”

Conference: Other Spaces: Framing the Study of Literary Cultures of the Global South

The book explores how theatre, with its performative capacity, has the power to engage with and a... more The book explores how theatre, with its performative capacity, has the power to engage with and affect the politics of its day. It sets the stage for the reader to discover the revolutionary traditions of Egyptian and Irish theatre, very distinct in their histories and cultures, and understand their enduring relevance in today’s world. The volume takes Ireland as a case study of the interplay between cultural nationalism and politically engaged theatre and compares it to the role of the theatre in Egypt during its Golden era in the 1960s.

Through a selection of Egyptian plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman, Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor, alongside Irish plays by Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Reid, and Samuel Beckett, it maps the political aesthetics of unsteady times and seemingly disparate places to reflect on the dynamics of revolt as a staged act in and of itself. Further, the book examines how playwrights from both nations have engaged with theatre as a medium, focusing on how their contemplations, hesitations, frustrations, and protest have been translated onto the stage in their various plays, and comprehends the transformative role the theatre has always played in politics in shaping history across time and space.

Bridging together discussions on transnational modernisms with nuanced cultural histories of protest, this critical work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary studies, identity politics, cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, and political studies.

Media and the Global South: Narrative Territorialities, Cross-Cultural Currents, 2019

Kinship and Collective Action in Literature and Culture, 2020