Download or read book Black Arab Encounters in Literature and Film written by Touria Khannous and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-27 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how representations of Black Africans have been negotiated over time in Arabic literature and film. The book offers direct readings of a representative selection of primary texts, shedding light on the divergent ways these authors understood race across different genres, including pre-Islamic classical poetry, polemical essays, travel narratives, novels, and films. Starting with the first recognized Black-Arab poet Antara Ibn Shaddad (580 C.E.) and extending right up to the present day, the works examined illuminate the changes in consciousness that attended Black Africans as they negotiated their position in Arab society. In a twist to Edward Said’s Orientalism, the book argues that scholars in the Middle East and North Africa generated a hierarchical representational discourse themselves, one equally predicated on the Self-Other binary. However, it also demonstrates that Arab racial discourse is not a linear rhetoric but changes according to history, political circumstances, and ideologies such as tribal politics, the Shu’ubiyya movement, nationalism, and imperialism. Blacks and Arabs have had tangled relationships that are based not only on race but also on kinship and solidarity due to trade and other types of connections. Challenging fundamental assumptions of Black Diaspora studies and postcolonial studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of the African diaspora, Arabic literature, Middle East studies, and critical race studies.

Download or read book Black Arab Encounters in Literature and Film written by Touria Khannous and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-27 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how representations of Black Africans have been negotiated over time in Arabic literature and film. The book offers direct readings of a representative selection of primary texts, shedding light on the divergent ways these authors understood race across different genres, including pre-Islamic classical poetry, polemical essays, travel narratives, novels, and films. Starting with the first recognized Black-Arab poet Antara Ibn Shaddad (580 C.E.) and extending right up to the present day, the works examined illuminate the changes in consciousness that attended Black Africans as they negotiated their position in Arab society. In a twist to Edward Said’s Orientalism, the book argues that scholars in the Middle East and North Africa generated a hierarchical representational discourse themselves, one equally predicated on the Self-Other binary. However, it also demonstrates that Arab racial discourse is not a linear rhetoric but changes according to history, political circumstances, and ideologies such as tribal politics, the Shu’ubiyya movement, nationalism, and imperialism. Blacks and Arabs have had tangled relationships that are based not only on race but also on kinship and solidarity due to trade and other types of connections. Challenging fundamental assumptions of Black Diaspora studies and postcolonial studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of the African diaspora, Arabic literature, Middle East studies, and critical race studies.

Download or read book Rosa Damascena written by Barbara Michalak-Pikulska and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Due to the diversity of perspectives and methodologies within the relative uniformity of the subject, this collection of papers offers a rich overview of the multidisciplinary research on Arabic literature. The book includes two thematic parts. The first of them pertains to studies on Arabic literature, more precisely, on historical chronicles concerning the First Crusade, one of al-Ğāḥiẓ's Treatise and also Modern Egyptian, Moroccan and Omani literary production. The second section of the volume contains papers on Semitic languages: Modern Hebrew, Maltese, Classical, Modern Standard, Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. The volume is devoted to Elżbieta Gorska.

Download or read book Black Thought written by Victor Peterson II and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-27 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uncovers a logical fallacy underlying Afro-Pessimism and provides a formal theory of Articulation, teasing out new reflections on race and Blackness. Afro-Pessimism maintains that Blacks, subject to a subordinate position in society, suffer a cultural death. In this monograph, Victor Peterson rejects this theory, demonstrating that Black subjectivity is inherently multiple, articulating identities appropriate to the contexts in which it finds itself and yet remaining continuous across its individual but not mutually exclusive instantiations. Peterson argues that we should consider the mechanisms that produce the conditions under which individuals obtain positions of either dominance or subordination. By providing a working logical foundation for Articulation theory within cultural studies, Peterson encourages us to rethink the politics of racial identity and subjectivity in contemporary social life. Encouraging critical thought about the arbitrarily determined but instrumentally objective of our global racial order, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Black Studies, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Download or read book Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline written by Benjamin Anderson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-05-26 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline? Rather than provide a definitive answer to this question, this book defines the parameters of the debate and proposes ways of thinking about what it would mean to engage seriously with the field’s political and intellectual genealogies, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion. In this volume, scholars of art, history, and literature address the entanglements, past and present, among the academic discipline of Byzantine Studies and the practice and legacies of European colonialism. Starting with the premise that Byzantium and the field of Byzantine studies are simultaneously colonial and colonized, the chapters address topics ranging from the material basis of philological scholarship and its uses in modern politics to the colonial plunder of art and its consequences for curatorial practice in the present. The book concludes with a bibliography that serves as a foundation for a coherent and systematic critical historiography. Bringing together insights from scholars working in different disciplines, regions, and institutions, Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? urges practitioners to reckon with the discipline’s colonialist, imperialist, and white supremacist history. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Andrea Myers Achi, Nathanael Aschenbrenner, Bahattin Bayram, Averil Cameron, Stephanie R. Caruso, Şebnem Dönbekci, Hugh G. Jeffery, Anthony Kaldellis, Matthew Kinloch, Nicholas S. M. Matheou, Maria Mavroudi, Zeynep Olgun, Arietta Papaconstantinou, Jake Ransohoff, Alexandra Vukovich, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, and Arielle Winnik.

Download or read book The Pan African Imperative written by Michael Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-14 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the principles of Pan-Africanism are more important than ever in ensuring the liberation of the people Africa, those at home and abroad, and the rapid development of the African continent. The writings and practice of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence prime minister and president, were key in laying out a vision for post-independence Africa. Now, in an effort to counter the deluge of neo-liberal thinking that has engulfed so much of the debate on African development in recent decades, Michael Williams illuminates just how important a role an Nkrumaist intellectual framework can play in providing an accurate diagnosis of, and effective solution to, Africa’s development crisis. This is done by examining Nkrumah’s vision of the critical role Pan-Africanism must play in the development of the continent. Raising vitally important questions about Africa’s development and the quality of life of its populations, this book will be a key text for researchers of African politics, development studies, and the Pan-African movement.

Download or read book The De Africanization of African Art written by Denis Ekpo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa’s creative heritage. Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa. With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies.

Download or read book History Below the Global written by Lorenzo Kamel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History Below the Global aims to foster an entangled knowledge of global history, and to place "others" at the centre stage, to better understand the fluid world which we inhabit. Relying on primary sources in seven languages and books written by hundreds of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and South American scholars, Lorenzo Kamel examines the coloniality of power in historical research and sheds light on the largely neglected roles of the "others" and their modernities in history. The book provides three elements combined. Firstly, a thorough analysis of the process of accumulation (“knowledge piece by piece”) which underpins some of the major achievements in human history. Secondly, a view on pre-colonial perspectives and the process through which the latter have been swallowed up by Eurocentric and solipsistic perceptions. Lastly, a study of the roots and outcomes of colonialisms and their echoes in our present. These three elements are addressed by combining multiple methodologies and approaches, in the awareness that the history analysed, as well as the historiographical trajectories that underlie it, are ultimately inter-penetrable, as well as themselves the result of a process of accumulation. History Below the Global challenges the view that, first and foremost, the “West”, for bad and for good, is and was the centre: the proactive actor which did and undid. This volume will be of value to all those interested in global history, the history of colonialism, post-colonial studies, modern and contemporary history.

Download or read book Memories of Violence in Peru and the Congo written by Gilbert Shang Ndi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents an intertextual and comparative analysis of memories of violence in Peruvian and Congolese Literature. Examining a variety of novels that offer insightful representations of violence in their respective historical settings, the author argues that similar historical experiences between Latin America and Africa engender ethical/aesthetic responses and enhance trans-continental critical dialogues in comparative literary studies. In the same way that the drama of the Congo has become the symbolic open wound of (post)colonial dispensation in Africa, Spanish conquest in Latin America also produced spaces where the legacy of colonialism is strongly visible and memorable, providing fertile ground for the reproduction of violence. This book explores the concept and reality of violence beyond its most obvious manifestations, demonstrating how in the colonial contexts of Peru and the Congo, violence was a function of (post)colonial power dynamics and deeply engrained socio-political, economic and cultural ordering and othering. From this perspective, the work considers and re-examines theoretical contributions from authors such as John Galtung, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Wallerstein, Anibal Quijano, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Eboussi Boulaga, Pierre Nora, Susan Sontag, Stevan Weine, Cathy Caruth and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. This book will be of interest for scholars working on how violence is explored and represented in literature and other art forms.

Download or read book Ren and Postcolonial Seychelles written by Ashton Robinson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-19 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robinson details the life and times of France-Albert René (1935–2019), the second post-independence leader of Seychelles who oversaw the nation’s transition to democracy after over a decade of his brutal dictatorship. René’s career was Seychelles’ history over the forty-three years from independence in 1976 until his peaceful death. Having seized power in a violent coup he presented himself as a socialist in the Cold War but transitioned to build Africa’s most successful relationship with international lenders and developed Seychelles as a major offshore tax haven. He also sustained and cultivated Seychelles’ position as a Western tourism-based economy. Robinson outlines not only René’s use of political violence and extrajudicial killing but also his unique relationship with transnational, organised crime including his links with the New York mafia, Italian organised crime interests and even helping to arm the Rwandan genocide. Nevertheless, René – a white leader of an African nation – avoided the self-isolation of Rhodesia and South Africa; endowed racial harmony; enabled women to advance politically and socially; and left Seychelles with high incomes, currency convertibility, and robust human and physical infrastructure. This is an essential read for anyone with an interest in the history of Seychelles, which will also be of great value to scholars of postcolonial states, African studies, microstates and the Indian Ocean region.

Download or read book The Diaspora of the Comoros in France written by Katharina Fritsch and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an ethnographic study of mobilisations of the Comorian diaspora in Marseille during political and cultural events, the book examines communitarisation in relation to three thematic areas, namely spaces, cultural markets and local politics. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, the author analyses mobilisations of postcolonial diaspora as part of a dispositif of communitarisation, that is, a set of discourses, practices, institutions and subjectivations of diasporic community. She argues that constructions of ‘community’ are both shaped by and shape ethnicised biopolitics, expressed by modes of governing diasporic groups along ethnicised divisions and a marking of ethnicised communities as the Other of the French Republic. The performativity of a Comorian community brought into being through political, cultural, economic and customary practices also shows how Comorian communities govern themselves along ethnicised categories, at the intersection with generation, gender, age classes, locality and class. Communitarisation processes as part of ethnicised (self-)governing reveal postcolonial power relations in France as well as practices of negotiation and contestation on the part of Comorian communities. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of critical diaspora studies, critical ethnography, discourse and dispositif analysis, postcolonial politics, and the African diaspora.

Download or read book Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual written by Zeina G. Halabi and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zeina G. Halabi examines the unmaking of the intellectual as prophetic figure, national icon, and exile in Arabic literature and film from the 1990s onwards. She comparatively explores how contemporary writers and film directors such as Rabee Jaber, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, Seba al-Herz and Elia Suleiman have displaced the archetype of the intellectual as it appears in writings by Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan and Mahmoud Darwish. In so doing, Halabi identifies and theorises alternative articulations of political commitment, displacement, and loss in the wake of unfulfilled prophecies of emancipation and national liberation. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual offers critical tools to understand the evolving relations between aesthetics and politics in the alleged post-political era of Arabic literature and culture. --

Download or read book Seeing the Unseen written by Kholoud Baher Samir Hussein and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Seeing the Unseen: Encounters with the (In)Visible in Arabic Literature, Film and Culture' is a study on invisible things being made visible. More specifically, I consider visual encounters with invisible things - from 'spirits', to 'time', to 'meanings' - by drawing on Ibn Arabi's theories on the Imagination: as place, process and faculty of perception. A medieval Sufi philosopher, poet, theologian and mystic born in the twelfth century, Ibn Arabi's theories on the Imagination are supplemented and read alongside a chorus of perspectives, ranging from classical Arabic and Greek philosophies of the imagination, art and dream-theory, to modern-day visual studies, and ethnographies of folklore and popular, lived religion. Meanwhile, my primary case studies, which serve as the focus of each chapter, are drawn from contemporary Egyptian literature and film. In an attempt to explore the relevance of the trope of Ibn Arabi's Imagination to modern Egyptian literature, film and culture, I focus, in my case studies, on moments of encounter with the image. In this instance, as an interpretation of Ibn Arabi's theories, the term 'image' is used to encompass things which are suspended in moments of in-between-ness: between body and spirit, materiality and immateriality and, of course, visibility and invisibility. While the study considers political, aesthetic and moral stakes in each of the individual chapters, the project more broadly seeks to engage the fields of literature, film, religion, and visual studies. More specifically, Seeing the Unseen is an interdisciplinary enterprise, aiming to use literature and film as vehicles through which to engage with conversations started by ethnographers, art scholars and cultural historians of Islam and lived religion, specifically in Egypt. In particular, Seeing the Unseen aims to make a case for the complex role of the 'image' and visual experience in Islamic history and culture. I use literature and film to continue to challenge the orthodox notion within Islamic and non-Islamic circles that, after the destruction of the idols of the Ka_ba in 630 C.E., there is no longer a place for the mediating 'image' in Islam's relationship to the divine.

Download or read book African Pasts Presents and Futures written by Touria Khannous and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women's Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse, by Touria Khannous, provides a history of African women’s cultural production, as well as an alternative approach to the arguments that have traditionally dominated post-colonial studies in general, and African and gender studies in particular. It examines some of the more overarching questions that are prevalent in the works of African women authors, who position themselves within the contexts of Islam, feminism, nationalism, modernity, and global and postcolonial politics, thus engaging in the construction of socio-political platforms for reform in their home countries. The book explores different aspects of women’s agency at the political, cultural, social, religious and aesthetic level, and highlights their civil society activism and push for legal reform. It also traces their opinions on a range of social and political questions and underscores fundamental shifts in their positions and concerns through the different generations.

Download or read book Mobile Identities written by Kamal Sbiri and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-18 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobility has become one of the most exciting factors shaping our transnational and transcultural world today. However, the variety of approaches and stimulating debates it has engendered in geopolitics and sociology make it challenging for literary and cultural critics to establish solid approaches and own vocabularies. Through a variety of case studies written by international contributors, this volume addresses emerging topics by using the tools of border studies, postcolonial discourse, and globalization theory. The multiple perspectives provided here emphasize the interaction between migrants and hosts as material, discursive, and historical. The chapters in this volume view identities as mobile and in constant flux, constructed and reconstructed repeatedly in historical and cultural encounters with several others. As a result of this dynamic, established stereotypes and images are challenged and revised in the analyses here. The book concludes that cultural identities are increasingly visible as results of large-scale global mobility. In so doing, it challenges views that address ethnicity as an unambiguous category and reveals that the making of such identities is contradictory and even conflicting.

Download or read book Guide to African Cinema written by Sharon A. Russell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1998-02-18 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended as a guide to the filmmakers and films of the African cinema, this reference book also provides the framework for understanding the history and development of African film with respect to its situation in world cinema. The goals and achievements of African film are studied with respect to the forces that impact it, such as colonialism and racism. The importance of the creative efforts of African filmmakers and the diversity of their approaches to cinema are explored. Examined as well are the views of Africa presented by European colonial filmmakers, views often contested in contemporary African film. The listings include critical analysis, bio-bibliography, and filmographies. Both Saharan and sub-Saharan films are included. As an important reference to African film, the information outlined is valuable due to the current lack of researched data on African cinema, in part as a result of postcolonial attitudes on production and distribution. The book concentrates on films and directors who work toward defining a unique, African perspective without compromising thematic concerns due to commercial considerations. The research detailed in this text should encourage a wider appreciation of the film work being done in Africa, especially to those without the benefit of access to specialized libraries and collections.

Download or read book Twenty First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain Portugal and Latin America written by Cristián H. Ricci and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.