Hannah Scott Deuchar | Queen Mary, University of London (original) (raw)

Published Papers by Hannah Scott Deuchar

Comparative Literature, 2024

Through comparative readings of a single violent event, this article argues that translation func... more Through comparative readings of a single violent event, this article argues that translation functions simultaneously as a technology of imperial governance, a ground for the critique of legal justice, and a practice through which to theorize alternative forms of redress. The Dinshaway affair was a 1906 court case in which four Egyptians were hanged and seventeen were flogged or imprisoned for the death of one British soldier. It became a global symbol of injustice and a spark for anti-imperial activism. The author places the British trial documents in conversation with a contemporaneous Arabic novelization of the event. Reading across these divergent texts, the author investigates how translation shaped Dinshaway, and how Dinshaway might yet reshape conceptions of justice. In the archive, British officials use untranslatability to justify delay, absence, and fatal error. Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī’s novel The Maiden of Dinshaway dramatizes this, turning on instances of miscommunication in the colonial courtroom. The novel’s own mis/translation of Victor Hugo ultimately rejects legal justice (‘adl) in favor of a violent, divine, disproportionate compassion (raḥma). The author ends by asking whether raḥma might inform reparative modes of comparison and translation today.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2023

Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical l... more Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history-one that is itself uncanny and estranged.

Comparative Literature Studies , 2020

Book Reviews by Hannah Scott Deuchar

Middle Eastern Literatures , 2024

Comparative Literature Studies, 2023

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2020

In May 1881, a historian and newspaper editor named Muhammad ʿAbduh published an article in Egypt... more In May 1881, a historian and newspaper editor named Muhammad ʿAbduh published an article in Egypt's national gazette, al-Waqaʾi al-Misriyya, on the subject of books. As the publishing industry in Egypt flourished, the future Grand Mufti took it upon himself to teach readers how to distinguish between the texts now on offer in the literary market. In particular, he was at pains to differentiate between, on the one hand, edifying literature (from Fénelon's Télémaque to the Arabic fable collection Kalila wa Dimna) and on the other, a dangerous new wave of meretricious and superstitious texts (including folk histories about pre-Islamic figures such as ʿAntara al-ʿAbbasi and dubiously scientific studies of evil spirits and jinn). These ambiguous boundaries between "good" and "bad" books, as erected by ʿAbduh and others during the 19th and early 20th-century period known as the Arab Nahda or "awakening," take center stage in Samah Selim's powerful and richly comprehensive Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt. Reading translated fiction from the journal Musamarat al-Shaʿb (The People's Entertainments) alongside a wide array of additional sources, Selim sidelines the realist national novel whose origin-story once dominated modern Arabic literary studies. Instead, she presents a corpus of translated or, to use her term, "adapted" popular fiction as the forgotten prehistory of modern Arabic literature. Through acute analysis of "non-elite" translation practices, which Selim argues subverted the liberal reformist and proto-nationalist discourses that coalesced in the Nahda period and have become synonymous with it, Popular Fiction proposes a profound re-assessment of the category "nahd  a" itself. Central to Selim's argument is the definition of two terms that sometimes seem inescapable in discussions of the Nahda: "modernity" and "translation." For Selim, these terms are inextricably linked. She proposes that Nahda reformist discourses mobilized a concept of translation rooted in Romantic distinctions between originals and copies to portray modernity as a cultural problem, articulated as a binary of authenticity versus imitation or Westernization. By focusing only on the cultural dimensions of imperialism, such paradigms masked the massive transformation in social relations taking place as Egypt was incorporated into a capitalist world economy. Scholars such as Stephen Sheehi, Elizabeth Holt, and Nadia Bou Ali have in recent years called attention to the ways in which capitalist economic transformations shaped Nahda literary production, and Selim's intervention affirms what might be considered a materialist turn in Nahda studies. However, Popular Fiction resists the temptation to render the period's often-contradictory texts and voices too coherent, drawing attention to spaces of challenge, subversion, and play carved out beneath the dominant discourses. Although the "popular" translated fictions on which the book focuses are identified as a product of 19th-century commodity or mass culture, and their thematization of juridical discourses or new financial institutions is discussed in detail, Selim insists on these texts' capacity not only to reproduce but also to reveal and to critique the material circumstances shaping them. She therefore develops a case for expanding the study of modern Arabic literary production to encompass not only a neglected corpus of translated texts, but also new approaches to translation itself. Translation's role in the origin-story of the realist Arabic novel has, she argues, either been strategically neglected in order to foreground the genre's indigeneity or treated as a "symptom" of colonial trauma (p. 25). Meanwhile, European genre fiction (crime, romance, etc.)-which Selim, carefully distinguishing it from other popular cultural practices, here refers to as "popular" literature-was historically dismissed in Arabic as lowbrow and excessively Western and has also been sidelined in literary scholarship. In fact, scholarly attention to serialized and translated Arabic genre fiction has increased in recent years, but certainly no systematic survey of these texts and journals has yet been produced. Selim therefore provides a detailed overview of key texts, authors, and journals before elucidating some of the differences she proposes between "elite" translation practices of the time, and the creative, flexible, non-official "adaptations" with which she is concerned.

Papers by Hannah Scott Deuchar

Journal of Arabic Literature