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Verschlagwortet: middle east

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

A Map Without Guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian Geographies

By Hashem Abushama. This essay was the winner of the inaugural Stuart Hall Essay Prize, a project initiated by the Stuart Hall Foundation. The award was presented at the 7th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in March 2024, also organised by the Foundation. The judges said: “We found it to be a powerful, politically important and theoretically nuanced piece of work written in lyrical prose. As a ‘theoretical diary’ that combines memoir, ethnography photography and critical analysis, it took us directly to particular places, evoking the author’s personal experience growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, carefully historicising the layers of colonial and settler colonialisms of this space, and theorising their relationships to different modes of capitalism.”

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities

By C. Ceyhun Arslan. This blog essay examines the relationship between medicine and modernity in three Middle Eastern narrative sources. The author argues that these texts depicted medicine as something that not only heals bodies but also reforms entire societies and brings modernity to their communities. They also emphasized that medical doctors should not only keep up with the Western science; they should also have a good understanding of the local customs.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

“As I Worked More in Academia, I Have Come to Realize that Each Methodology Has a Cost.” – 5in10 with C. Ceyhun Arslan

C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Saarland University. His first book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. He is working on his second book project entitled Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French, and Ottoman Literatures.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Domicide: Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria

In this article, Ammar Azzouz introduces his recently published book “Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria”. The deliberate destruction of peoples’ material, built and social environments have become to be known as domicide. Domicide is the deliberate killing of home. Focussing on the Syrian city of Homs, the author brings the mass destruction of cities during wars closer to the suffering of the people.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

The No-State Solution

In this article, the Palistinian sociologist Mohammed A. Bamyeh, outlines a “No-State Solution” to the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. This “No-State Solution” was discussed at an event on January 28, 2024, hosted by a number of local institutions in Victoria, Canada by the author and Israeli political scientist Uri Gordon. The idea of no-state was understood to foreground the virtues of free association, multiple loyalties, and uncoerced order — all as counterweights to centralized control, militarized states, fanatic loyalties, and permanent mobilization of populations.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Palestine and the Migrant Question in Postcolonial France

By Olivia C. Harrison. This article is a review of Olivia Harrison’s new book “Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France”. She examines the intersection of antiracist and pro-Palestinian activism in France from the 1970s to the present. Against the ubiquitous association of pro-Palestinianism with Islamism and anti-Semitism, she shows that the Palestinian question has served as a “rallying cry” for anti-colonial and antiracist activists for the past fifty years.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature – an Interview with Nahrain Al-Mousawi

Nahrain Al-Mousawi is a scholar of Arabic and Anglophone literature of the Middle East and North Africa, primarily dealing with postcolonial, migration, and Mediterranean literature. She is the author of The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature (Gorgias Press, 2021). A conversation with Alex Favalli.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Unearthing the Substrata of Images – Interview with Sanaz Sohrabi

In this piece, Nurçin Ileri interviewed Sanaz Sohrabi, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Montréal. Her doctoral project looks at how visual representations of oil have changed postcolonial sovereignty and resource nationalism in Iran over time. She is also an artist and filmmaker. In relation to her project, she prepares a trilogy of essay films

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Moving Through Space, Sheltering Across Time: Alternate Realities in Contemporary Arabic Fiction of (Forced) Displacement

Annamaria Bianco’s contribution aims to show how Arab migration writings and future writings have increasingly ended up overlapping, in the wake of the “speculative turn” taken by contemporary fiction. Through a review of a few novels published after the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and drawing on different studies as well as on the notion of “refugeedom”, the author will show how this literary genre juxtaposes the documentary function of prose with narrative strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization that aim to generate in the reader a desire to act on the present, to redeem the past and change the future of hospitality worldwide.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Reclaiming Spaces from the Streets to the Gutter: Sketching Feminisms in Contemporary Arab Graphic Narratives

In a region where authoritarian and patriarchal regimes have held the monopoly on what circulates publicly and where spaces of contestation are under scrutiny, graphic narratives or qisas musawwara as they are referred to in the Arabic language—alongside other popular arts such as graffiti or street art—have carved out a new arena of dissent that was made possible by the hopes for social and political changes instigated in the wave of the so-called Arab Spring.

TRAFO / Transregionale Studien

Kahramanmaraş Earthquake: How the Syrian Regime is Instrumentalising the Natural Catastrophe

By Elise Daniaud.
On February 6, the world started to witness some of the consequences of the tragic earthquake which hit the southeast of the Anatolian peninsula, close to the Syrian-Turkish border. Four weeks after the events, the death toll is estimated above 51.000. This article investigates the diplomatic action the Syrian government has taken since, in an attempt to secure its international recognition.