Shir Alon | University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (original) (raw)

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Papers by Shir Alon

Journal of Arabic Literature, 2024

Debates about the role of literature in postcolonial Egypt took place within a broader discourse ... more Debates about the role of literature in postcolonial Egypt took place within a broader discourse on the mobilization of labor and the creation of a national productive economy. Reading the archive of early issues of the pioneering journal Al-Ghad, this article shows that Egyptian progressive writers in the early 1950s strove to define themselves as workers and literature as a productive endeavor. The article then turns to Fatḥī Ghānim's 1957 novel al-Jabal, arguing that its depiction of a failed peasant reform project is a means of reflecting on the work of the writer and its productive ends. While nominally committed to a progressive ethos of productivity, the novel remains haunted by the specter of labor with no product, exertion that produces nothing, which endures as an alternative model for literary writing.

Cultural Critique, 2024

Review essay of Michael Rothberg's THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT: BEYOND VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2021

How to write a historical novel about a past that is not past at all? A reflection on writing the... more How to write a historical novel about a past that is not past at all? A reflection on writing the presentness of the past in Adania Shibli's Minor Detail and in the work of Saidiya Hartman.

Arab Studies Journal, 2019

This article analyzes the context and politics of practiced neutralization in Palestinian art of ... more This article analyzes the context and politics of practiced neutralization
in Palestinian art of the late 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on the works of Adania Shibli and Elia Suleiman. The paper identifies the "ongoing nakba" as a recently popularized historiographical framework (since 2008) to understand a Palestinian present conceived as stagnant or stuck. Works of aesthetic neutralization, both literary and cinematic, adopt the static temporality of the repetitive and minute everyday and its attendant emotional opacity as an aesthetic principle. Seeking a mode of action beyond the limits of power or agency, they turn to impassivity - an impasse to the proper flow of interpretation or narrative making.

Comparative Literature, 2019

Focusing on Hebrew writer Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City (1993), as well as on her short st... more Focusing on Hebrew writer Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City (1993), as well as on her short stories published in the same period, this essay analyzes how neoliberal principles of risk management, primarily risk privatization and speculation, shape postmodernist literary genres and techniques. It argues that Dolly City reflects, thematically and formally, a shift between two biopolitical models of governance: from a welfare model based on a calculable and statistical futurity and on communal sacrifice, to a neoliberal model grounded in a speculative futurity and a zero-risk principle of preemption. Dr. Dolly, the narrator of the novel, who suffers from the neoliberal “illness of improbable possibilities,” applies this preemptive principle to language itself, creating what this essay defines as “preemptive poetics:” a literalized and material approach to language that protects it from the infinite improbable possibilities of figurative expression. Dolly City traces the postmodernist problem of the destabilized text, detached from any knowable intention, to neoliberal political-economic principles of risk management.

Jewish Social Studies, 2019

Special issue on Feminism and Jewish Studies.

boundary 2, 2020

This essay assesses a series of art projects, festivals, and institutional spaces acknowledging P... more This essay assesses a series of art projects, festivals, and institutional spaces acknowledging Poland’s Jewish past that appeared in Poland during its first decade of EU membership. Identifying a recurring practice of making absence present and tangible, or more broadly a concern with Jewish ghosts, the essay examines how contemporary art practices peddle in nostalgia for a Jewish past as a mode of desiring a cosmopolitan European future. As “newly integrated” Europeans, Poles are caught in a double bind: on the one hand, their Jewish ghosts allow them to participate in European postimperial discourses of tolerance and multiculturalism; on the other, they remain haunted, continually eroticized and differentiated from the “real” Europe.