Tasnim Qutait | Uppsala University (original) (raw)

Papers by Tasnim Qutait

Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies, 2020

The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transport... more The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transportation networks. The current work investigates the spatial properties of congestion, that is, we aim to characterize the city areas where traffic bottlenecks occur. The analysis of a large amount of real road networks in previous works showed that congestion points experience spatial abrupt transitions, namely they shift away from the city center as larger urban areas are incorporated. The fundamental ingredient behind this effect is the entanglement of central and arterial roads, embedded in separated geographical regions. In this paper we extend the analysis of the conditions yielding abrupt transitions of congestion location. First, we look into the more realistic situation in which arterial and central roads, rather than lying on sharply separated regions, present spatial overlap. It results that this affects the position of bottlenecks and introduces new possible congestion areas. Secondly, we pay particular attention to the role played by the edge distribution, proving that it allows to smooth the transitions profile, and so to control the congestion displacement. Finally, we show that the aforementioned phenomenology may be recovered also as a consequence of a discontinuity in the node's density, in a domain with uniform connectivity. Our results provide useful insights for the design and optimization of urban road networks, and the management of the daily traffic.

Despite recent increased attention to the study of masculinities in the Middle East, discussions ... more Despite recent increased attention to the study of masculinities in the Middle East, discussions of gender and nationalism in the Arab world tend to focus on the impact of the patriarchal nation-state on women. This focus, in part reflecting the persistence of essentialist discourses about the disempowered Arab woman, elides the centrality of masculinity and patrilineality to the narratives of the nation-state. In this article, I consider the implications of patrilineality in the work of three Arab British authors, identifying the centrality of the absent or distant father to the examination of nationalism and exile in this emerging literature. The article examines two novels by Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (2006) and<br> Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), alongside Jamal Mahjoub's Travelling with Djinns (2003) and Robin Yassin- Kassab's The Road from Damascus (2008). Matar, Yassin-Kassab and Mahjoub are three writers settled in Britain and writing in English, w...

The Temporalities of Waste, 2020

Textual Practice, 2020

ABSTRACT The growing phenomenon of novels using ʿammiyya (Arabic dialects) has reignited debates ... more ABSTRACT The growing phenomenon of novels using ʿammiyya (Arabic dialects) has reignited debates on the impact of local language on the regional and global trajectories of Arabic literature. While there is a long history of novelists using dialect for dialogues alongside fuṣḥā (Modern Standard Arabic, henceforth MSA), increasingly elements of ʿammiyya are incorporated throughout. This trend has been a feature of recent Egyptian novels which have been translated and marketed under the global cache of the dystopia label. While the source texts strategically evoke ʿammiyya and MSA, in translation a tension emerges between the familiarity of the dystopia genre and an effort to reclaim a linguistic spectrum for literary Arabic. Examining how translators negotiate local languages in Egyptian dystopian novels reveals the parameters that shape the production, translation and reception of Arabic literature today.

Open Cultural Studies, 2018

In The Road from Damascus (2008), Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab’s debut novel, the pr... more In The Road from Damascus (2008), Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab’s debut novel, the protagonist describes “the opposing camps of [his] childhood,” as narratives of “Qabbani versus Qur’an” (56). While Sami’s father idolises the pan-Arabist poet Nizar Qabbani and supports the Syrian regime despite its repressive policies, Sami’s mother, disillusioned with nationalist ideology, turns instead to faith, offering her son a “different mythology” based on “the adventures of God’s messengers” (53). Tracing Sami’s negotiations of these seemingly opposed inherited narratives, Yassin-Kassab’s novel examines the lingering impact of pan-Arabism and the alternatives offered by Islamic frameworks. While critics have previously approached this novel as part of a growing corpus of British Muslim fiction, in this essay, I focus more closely on the novel’s interrogation of Arab nationalism. As I will show, Yassin-Kassab’s novel unfolds as a series of ideological disillusionments that chart t...

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 00393274 2015 1026143, Mar 30, 2015

Studia Neophilologica, 2015

The Temporalities of Waste : Out of Sight, Out of Time, 2020

Temporality has tended to be a secondary category in the conceptualisation of wasted, surplus, an... more Temporality has tended to be a secondary category in the conceptualisation of wasted, surplus, and disposable lives, speaking to a larger issue where the analysis of international politics has historically been “overtly pre-occupied with spatial rather than temporal relations” (Hutchings 2013: 11). This chapter argues that the production of temporality in fiction encourages a focus on the time-related aspects of wasted life, and thereby complicates metaphors which depict the movement of unwanted people as flows, tides or swarms invading secured privileged spaces. The chapter reads together novels which represent the permanent-temporary conditions of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the stalled journeys of illegalized travellers in North Africa, and the accumulating waste of war in a Jordanian border-town: Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun (2006), Abu Bakr Hamid Kahal’s African Titanics (2009) and Malu Halasa's Mother of All Pigs (2017). The works considered here reimagine the connections between the marginalised lives of refugees, migrants and disenfranchised citizens, connecting refused movement and the temporality of immobility with the ongoing processes of disposability consigning people to refuse.

Textual Practice , 2020

The growing phenomenon of novels using ʿammiyya (Arabic dialects) has reignited debates on the im... more The growing phenomenon of novels using ʿammiyya (Arabic dialects) has reignited debates on the impact of local language on the regional and global trajectories of Arabic literature. While there is a long history of novelists using dialect for dialogues alongside fuṣḥā (Modern Standard Arabic, henceforth MSA), increasingly elements of ʿammiyya are incorporated throughout. This trend has been a feature of recent Egyptian novels which have been translated and marketed under the global cache of the dystopia label. While the source texts strategically evoke ʿammiyya and MSA, in translation a tension emerges between the familiarity of the dystopia genre and an effort to reclaim a linguistic spectrum for literary Arabic. Examining how translators negotiate local languages in Egyptian dystopian novels reveals the parameters that shape the production, translation and reception of Arabic literature today.

Open Cultural Studies, 2018

Despite recent increased attention to the study of masculinities in the Middle East, discussions ... more Despite recent increased attention to the study of masculinities in the Middle East, discussions of gender and nationalism in the Arab world tend to focus on the impact of the patriarchal nation-state on women. This focus, in part reflecting the persistence of essentialist discourses about the disempowered Arab woman, elides the centrality of masculinity and patrilineality to the narratives of the nation-state. In this article, I consider the implications of patrilineality in the work of three Arab British authors, identifying the centrality of the absent or distant father to the examination of nationalism and exile in this emerging literature. The article examines two novels by Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (2006) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), alongside Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns (2003) and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008). Matar, Yassin-Kassab and Mahjoub are three writers settled in Britain and writing in English, with backgrounds in Libya, Syria and Sudan respectively. I argue that all three writers employ a narrative of failed filial relationships in order to dramatize a sense of distance from the post-independence generation, and the growing awareness of the discontinuities between an emancipatory national project and the reality of state violence.

Books by Tasnim Qutait

This study explores the theme of nostalgia in contemporary Anglo-Arab literature from the 1990s t... more This study explores the theme of nostalgia in contemporary Anglo-Arab literature from the 1990s to the present. Examining the implications of nostalgic tropes in Anglophone novels by Arab writers, the study makes the case that nostalgia is a key strategy used by these writers in their critical engagement with national historiographies and diasporic identities. Taking a comparative bilingual approach, the study relates particular nostalgic narratives that recur in Anglo-Arab writing to Arabic literary traditions. The opening chapter establishes that the “standing by the ruins” topos of classical Arabic poetics is used in Anglophone works to problematise a culturally pervasive nostalgia for an Islamic golden age. The second chapter reveals how novels set in the colonial era leverage the romanticisation of anticolonial nationalism to cast a critical light on the ideological functions of authenticity. The third chapter traces the ways in which Anglophone novels dramatise the failures of post-independence regimes through the interlinked nostalgic sites of childhood, home and family. Finally, the study focuses on Arab British novelists’ depiction of the diasporic site of ‘Arab London,’ and demonstrates that nostalgia is deployed as a performative mode in these texts, enabling the creation and revision of identities for migrant and second generation characters. The interconnections of identity and nostalgia are shown to be a recurring theme in the growing field of Anglophone Arab writing. This dissertation argues that nostalgic tropes are deployed in this literature in critical ways that challenge, rather than simply reiterate, nationalist and political ideologies. Utilising the nostalgic lens as an imaginative and critical form of engagement with history, Anglo-Arab writers insist on rendering visible the present repercussions of volatile histories, even as they challenge narratives that view the past not only as better than the uncertain present but, given that uncertainty, better than any imaginable future.

Conference Presentations by Tasnim Qutait

A renewed interest in writing using ʿammiyya, dialectal Arabic, has refocused debate on its polit... more A renewed interest in writing using ʿammiyya, dialectal Arabic, has refocused debate on its political effects as a literary language. Since ’ammiya is being increasingly used in digital communication and social media, its current presence in literature might be seen as part of what Tarek El Ariss has described as a new generation’s “techno-writing,” emerging from the “back and forth between virtuality and print, the novel and the blog, and Arabic and English”. The trend towards using ʿammiyya has been a dominant feature in the post-2011 wave of Egyptian dystopias, where the futures imagined are predicated on an increasingly globalized world, yet dramatize an ongoing failure to challenge the regime, contrasting technological and scientific change against the lack of political and economic development. Partaking in a wider dystopian cultural moment, these novels were hailed for their use of science fiction’s capacity for estrangement, and have been rapidly translated into English. This paper argues that the use of ʿammiya is central to Egyptian dystopian fiction, as they intertwine the sf plot with a literary language strategically blending ʿammiyya and fuṣḥā, as well as mixing Arabic with English loanwords and neologisms. These aesthetic and literary transformations do more than envision an imagined future Arabic; often framed as the natural language of a globalized generation, they also inevitably involve reflecting on the place of Arabic literature on the global stage and the reshaping of Arabic literary production under the dynamics of globalization.

In ”Dialogue with the Arabic language,” Palestinian poet Farah Chamma begins in English with a re... more In ”Dialogue with the Arabic language,” Palestinian poet Farah Chamma begins in English with a refrain line addressing the Arabic language: ”I apologise/this poem is in English/I didn’t know you were beautiful.” The poet then switches to Arabic to define what she sees as beautiful language, distancing herself from formal registers to instead declare that she will take the Arabic letter ط (ṭa) as her ship, using the letter’s shape to represent her freedom of movement across the seas of language. Chamma is among a growing number of Arabic-speaking poets who move between Arabic and English in their works, including Suheir Hammad, Zeina Hashem Beck and Rafeef Ziadah. Their works borrow from slam poetry conventions but also from Arabic oration traditions, performing their multilingual migrant identities in a mode which brings together the notion of moving as emotion and moving as mobility. Drawing on Thomas Nial’s work on the figure of the migrant, I argue that these poets dramatise a reorienting of migration from the perspective of the migrant and movement rather than from the perspective of states and stasis. In doing so, they react against current discourses which securitise movement, in particular to and from the Middle East.

In her project ”Paint a Vulgar Picture, Bordering and Othering in the Arab world” the artist Don... more In her project ”Paint a Vulgar Picture, Bordering and Othering in the Arab world” the artist Dona Timani highlights “the politics of exclusion and alienation across the geographical space labeled the Arab world.” Timani draws our attention to how countries in the Arab world are not only points of departure but also destinations for refugees as well as economic migrants and domestic workers. Timani is one of a growing number of artists and writers today who are turning their attention to the role Arab states play in controlling and profiting from migration movements. This paper focuses on representations of detention sites and refugee camps on the borderlands of Arab countries, preventing access both to Europe and to safer, wealthier states in the Arabic-speaking world. Drawing on critical work about the securatisation of migration, I argue that increasingly Arabic migrant narratives are shifting from a focus on the journey to narrating immobility, dramatising life in the systems of limbo and containment which coexist with increasing interconnectivity and population mobility. The paper focuses in particular on Eriterian author Abu Bakr Hamid Khaal’s Taytānīkāt Afrīqīyah (2008, African Titanics, 2009), which is not a narrative about a doomed sea journey towards safer shores, as its title suggests, but rather about migrants repeatedly captured and kept in detention sites in North African countries. Khaal’s novel speaks to the processes by which migrant lives are rendered as the 'human waste' of globalisation, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words. As such, it dramatises the relationship between the proliferation and naturalisation of spaces of detention and discourses which represent migrants in terms of human detritus to be managed and contained.

Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies, 2020

The Temporalities of Waste, 2020

Textual Practice, 2020

Open Cultural Studies, 2018

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 00393274 2015 1026143, Mar 30, 2015

Studia Neophilologica, 2015

The Temporalities of Waste : Out of Sight, Out of Time, 2020

Textual Practice , 2020

Open Cultural Studies, 2018

Despite recent increased attention to the study of masculinities in the Middle East, discussions ... more Despite recent increased attention to the study of masculinities in the Middle East, discussions of gender and nationalism in the Arab world tend to focus on the impact of the patriarchal nation-state on women. This focus, in part reflecting the persistence of essentialist discourses about the disempowered Arab woman, elides the centrality of masculinity and patrilineality to the narratives of the nation-state. In this article, I consider the implications of patrilineality in the work of three Arab British authors, identifying the centrality of the absent or distant father to the examination of nationalism and exile in this emerging literature. The article examines two novels by Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (2006) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), alongside Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns (2003) and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008). Matar, Yassin-Kassab and Mahjoub are three writers settled in Britain and writing in English, with backgrounds in Libya, Syria and Sudan respectively. I argue that all three writers employ a narrative of failed filial relationships in order to dramatize a sense of distance from the post-independence generation, and the growing awareness of the discontinuities between an emancipatory national project and the reality of state violence.

The field of security studies has been subject to rapid change in the past decades, expanding bey... more The field of security studies has been subject to rapid change in the past decades, expanding beyond international relations and political science to form interdisciplinary connections. A growing body of scholarship has analysed media and popular culture representations of threat and security in order to examine how security practises come to be normalised. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how securitization is represented in literature from the Arabic-speaking world, despite the fact that current security discourses seem inextricable from protracted conflicts in this region. This speaks to larger issues relating to the norms of how security is defined and for whom.
In this paper, I argue that focusing on literature as an object of analysis offers a textured approach towards questioning the norms of security, since literary texts invite processes of self-reflection even as they represent and respond to security policies. The paper analyses contemporary Arabic fiction such as Nihad Sirwees’ The Silence and the Roar (2004) and Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s Where Pigeons Don’t Fly (2009), in order to examine how these writers engage with and seek to reorient security discourses fueled by fear that are perpetuated by the state, specifically in relation to the control of movement. As this paper will show, Arabic literary texts offer a complex nexus for the mediation of how imagination both influences, and is influenced by, discourses of threat and security in the region.

The recent popularity of Egyptian texts using ʿammiyya (dialectal Arabic) has refocused debate on... more The recent popularity of Egyptian texts using ʿammiyya (dialectal Arabic) has refocused debate on its effects as a literary language. With ʿammiyya being used in digital communication, its incorporation in literature aligns with what Tarek El-Ariss has described as a form of ‘techno-writing,’ from the ‘back and forth between virtuality and print, the novel and the blog, and Arabic and English.’ This more polyphonic language has been a feature in a wave of Egyptian dystopia texts which gained a wide readership in Egypt and were soon translated into English, such as Nael Eltoukhy’s Nisāʾ al-Karantīna (2012, Women of Karantina, 2014) and Ahmed Naji’s Using Life (2014, Istikhdām al-ḥayāh, 2017). In this paper I examine how writers strategically blend ʿammiyya and fuṣḥā. I argue that rather than representing a turn towards ‘ammiyya, writers such as Naji and Eltoukhy seek to reclaim a spectrum of language varieties to write literary Arabic, moving between and across notions of spoken and written, authentic and hybrid. While critics have observed the trend towards dialectal writing, this paper extends the discussion to consider the implications of this linguistic experimentation for translation and for the position of Arabic literature on the global stage.

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/lamma-a-journal-of-libyan-studies-1/ CONTENTS Adam Benkato ... more https://punctumbooks.com/titles/lamma-a-journal-of-libyan-studies-1/

CONTENTS

Adam Benkato – “A Gathering”

Jakob Krais – “Re-Centering Libya’s History: Mediterranean Bulwark, Defender of Africa, or Bridge between Continents?”

Christophe Pereira – “The Construction of Virility and Performance of Masculinities in the Language Practices of Young Men in Tripoli”

Tasnim Qutait – “Retracing a Disappearing Landscape: On Libyan Cultural Memory”

Hadia Gana – “Building Bayt Ali Gana”

André Naffis-Sahely – “‘The Whole Shadow of Man’: Alessandro Spina’s Libyan Epic”

Alessandro Spina – “Excerpts from The Fourth Shore, translated by André Naffis- Sahely”

Lisa Anderson – “A Pool of Water: Perspectives on the Libyan Revolution”

Afifa Ltifi – “Review of The Slave Pens by Najwa Bin Shatwan”

Najat Abdulhaq – “Review of Jewish Libya: Memory & Identity in Text & Image, edited by Jacques Roumani, David Meghnagi, & Judith Roumani”