Download or read book The Journey of Little Gandhi written by Elias Khoury and published by Picador. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."--Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times From the author of Gate of the Sun and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" (The Washington Post Book World) comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice. Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, Little Gandhi becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in Harper's Magazine, Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."
Download or read book Gandhi Before India written by Ramachandra Guha and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history. Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s contemporaries and co-workers; contemporary newspapers and court documents; the writings of Gandhi’s children; and secret files kept by British Empire functionaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: “Great Soul.” And, more clearly than ever before, he elucidates how Gandhi’s work in South Africa—far from being a mere prelude to his accomplishments in India—was profoundly influential in his evolution as a family man, political thinker, social reformer and, ultimately, beloved leader. In 1893, when Gandhi set sail for South Africa, he was a twenty-three-year-old lawyer who had failed to establish himself in India. In this remarkable biography, the author makes clear the fundamental ways in which Gandhi’s ideas were shaped before his return to India in 1915. It was during his years in England and South Africa, Guha shows us, that Gandhi came to understand the nature of imperialism and racism; and in South Africa that he forged the philosophy and techniques that would undermine and eventually overthrow the British Raj. Gandhi Before India gives us equally vivid portraits of the man and the world he lived in: a world of sharp contrasts among the coastal culture of his birthplace, High Victorian London, and colonial South Africa. It explores in abundant detail Gandhi’s experiments with dissident cults such as the Tolstoyans; his friendships with radical Jews, heterodox Christians and devout Muslims; his enmities and rivalries; and his often overlooked failures as a husband and father. It tells the dramatic, profoundly moving story of how Gandhi inspired the devotion of thousands of followers in South Africa as he mobilized a cross-class and inter-religious coalition, pledged to non-violence in their battle against a brutally racist regime. Researched with unequaled depth and breadth, and written with extraordinary grace and clarity, Gandhi Before India is, on every level, fully commensurate with its subject. It will radically alter our understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century India’s greatest man.
Download or read book The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction written by Denys Johnson-Davies and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dazzling anthology features the work of seventy-nine outstanding writers from all over the Arab-speaking world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies, called by Edward Said “the leading Arabic-to-English translator of our time,” this treasury of Arab voices is diverse in styles and concerns, but united by a common language. It spans the full history of modern Arabic literature, from its roots in western cultural influence at the end of the nineteenth century to the present-day flowering of Naguib Mahfouz’s literary sons and daughters. Among the Egyptian writers who laid the foundation for the Arabic literary renaissance are the great Tawfik al-Hakim; the short story pioneer Mahmoud Teymour; and Yusuf Idris, who embraced Egypt’s vibrant spoken vernacular. An excerpt from the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, one of the Arab world’s finest, appears alongside the Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s tales of the Tuaregs of North Africa, the Iraqi writer Mohamed Khudayir’s masterly story “Clocks Like Horses,” and the work of such women writers as Lebanon’s Hanan al-Shaykh and Morocco’s Leila Abouzeid.
Download or read book From Damascus to Beirut written by Hazem Fadel and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notably, studies on the Arabic novel tend to focus on canonical writers, like the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), and leave out or just mention en passant the work of others. This book is not concerned with the ways in which the Arabic novel breaks away from or reproduces Mahfouz’s approach and techniques, but focuses instead on the way in which the authors in question engage with the phenomena of nationalism, feminism, post- and neo-colonialism, civil war, and social change in the Arab world using an urban scenario as their privileged point of observation. The Arabic city is privileged as a focal point because it is the space where the struggles over issues of nation-building, gender, religion, and class, as well as the patriarchal, colonialist, Zionist, and sectarian violence linked to these issues, manifest themselves most evidently. To this end, From Damascus to Beirut: Contested Cities in Arab Writing brings together four novels published between 1969 and 1989, which have never been approached from this perspective nor put in this kind of dialogue before. Ulfat Idilbi’s Damascus, Ghassan Kanafani’s Haifa, Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Constantine, and Elias Khoury’s Beirut are social and historical products, and, as such, as Henri Lefebvre maintains, are deeply rooted in politics and affected by ideology. The cities discussed here, in fact, display the ebbs and flows of political and social life in their respective countries and in the Arab world in general. Each city stands at a crucial point in the history of the Arab world, and the way in which they are represented by their respective authors sets the stage for, and sometimes even foreshadows, an upcoming defeat or disappointment. Albeit for different reasons, Damascus, Haifa, Constantine and Beirut are all expressions of failures either on national, political, social, or economic levels. Paradoxically, however, they are also the repositories of their people’s hopes and aspirations, as well as of their disappointments. Analysing these novels as such, this book will be of particular interest to postcolonial readers and, more importantly, to English-speaking readers who are interested in the study of modern Arabic literature. Its close textual analysis offers the reader new tools not only for understanding themes and narrative techniques pertaining to the Arabic novel, but also the contemporary political, cultural and social issues that produced them.
Download or read book Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies written by Markus Schmitz and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the formative correlations and inventive transmissions of Anglophone Arab representations ranging from early 20th century Mahjar writings to contemporary transnational Palestinian resistance art. Tracing multiple beginnings and seminal intertexts, the comparative study of dissonant truth-making presents critical readings in which the notion of cross-cultural translation gets displaced and strategic unreliability, representational opacity, or matters of act advance to essential qualities of the discussed works' aesthetic devices and ethical concerns. Questioning conventional interpretive approaches, Markus Schmitz shows what Anglophone Arab studies are and what they can become from a radically decentered relational point of view. Among the writers and artists discussed are such diverse figures as Rabih Alameddine, William Blatty, Kahlil Gibran, Ihab Hassan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Ameen Rihani, Edward Said, Larissa Sansour, and Raja Shehadeh.
Download or read book City Gates written by Elias Khoury and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City Gates was first published in Arabic in 1981, and in English in 1993. It is a further exploration of the themes of exile, dislocation, and identity. Elias Khoury's early works show him finding the distinctive voice that explodes in his epic Gate of the Sun. A stranger arrives at the gates of a city from which everyone appears to have fled. The once besieged and now deserted city is Beirut. City Gates is a fable of displacement and a visionary tale about the consequences of civil war in the Middle East.
Download or read book Pretty Liar written by Natalie Khazaal and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a new, irresistible brand of television emerge from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91) to conquer the Arab region in the satellite era? What role did seductive news anchors, cool language teachers, superheroes, and gossip magazines play in negotiating a modern relationship between television and audiences? How did the government lose its television monopoly to sectarian militias? Pretty Liar tells the untold story of the coevolution of Lebanese television and its audience, and the ways in which the Civil War of 1975–91 influenced that transformation. Based on empirical data, Khazaal explores the rise of language and gender politics in Lebanese television and the storm of controversy during which these issues became a referendum on television’s relevance. This groundbreaking book challenges the narrow focus on present-day satellite television and social media, offering the first account of how broadcast television transformed media legitimacy in the Arab world. With its analysis of news, entertainment, and educational shows from Télé Liban and LBC, novels, periodicals, and popular culture, Pretty Liar demonstrates how television became a site for politics and political resistance, feminism, and the cradle of the postwar Lebanese culture. The history of television in Lebanon is not merely a record of corporate technology but the saga of a people and their continuing demand for responsive media during times of civil unrest.
Download or read book States of Emergency written by Stephen Morton and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States of Emergency examines how violent anticolonial struggles and the legal, military, and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in both literary and legal narratives. Through a series of case studies, Stephen Morton considers how colonial states of emergency have been defined and represented in the contexts of Ireland, India, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, and Israel- Palestine, concluding with a compelling assessment of the continuities between colonial states of emergency and the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Download or read book Beirut Imagining the City written by Ghenwa Hayek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beirut is the cultural, commercial and economic hub of Lebanon. But to what extent has the city affected and shaped the formation and perceptions of Lebanese national identity? Ghenwa Hayek here explores how anxieties over the past, present and future of Beirut have been articulated through a sense of dislocation present in Lebanese writing since the 1960s. Drawing on theories of cultural studies, geography and history, the author uses an interdisciplinary framework to explore the role that spaces - from rural to urban - have played and continue to play in the defining, and re-defining, of national identity in the seventy years since the creation of the Lebanese nation state. This theoretical perspective coupled with a close reading of little-explored contemporary writings lead Hayek to question the predominant assumption that Lebanese novelists only became engaged in discourses about place identity and individual and social belonging with the start of the fifteen-year civil war and the destruction of Beirut's city centre. Instead, the book shows that particular geographical imaginaries have been mobilized to describe, question and debate Lebanese identity since the 1960s and that some go back even further into the late nineteenth century. This re-reading calls for a re-evaluation of some of the most predominant assumptions about Lebanon and the processes of Lebanese identity formation across the country's modern history. Examining a wide range of modern and contemporary literature, Hayek charts the rise to cultural prominence of the city of Beirut as a significant player in shaping perceptions of Lebanese culture and identity.
Download or read book The Experimental Arabic Novel written by Stefan G. Meyer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of the modern Arabic novel from the 1960s to the present.
Download or read book Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring written by Adam Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a lively and scholarly illustrated account of the tumultuous events in key countries in the Middle East and North Africa during and since the period of the Arab Spring that began in December 2010.
Download or read book Contemporary Arab Fiction written by Fabio Caiani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces Western readers to some of the most significant novels written in Arabic since 1979. Relying on literary theory and referring to comparative examples from other literatures, this study places its findings within a wider framework, defining what is meant by innovation in the Arabic novel, and the particular socio-political context in which it appears.
Download or read book Contemporary World Fiction written by Juris Dilevko and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This much-needed guide to translated literature offers readers the opportunity to hear from, learn about, and perhaps better understand our shrinking world from the perspective of insiders from many cultures and traditions. In a globalized world, knowledge about non-North American societies and cultures is a must. Contemporary World Fiction: A Guide to Literature in Translation provides an overview of the tremendous range and scope of translated world fiction available in English. In so doing, it will help readers get a sense of the vast world beyond North America that is conveyed by fiction titles from dozens of countries and language traditions. Within the guide, approximately 1,000 contemporary non-English-language fiction titles are fully annotated and thousands of others are listed. Organization is primarily by language, as language often reflects cultural cohesion better than national borders or geographies, but also by country and culture. In addition to contemporary titles, each chapter features a brief overview of earlier translated fiction from the group. The guide also provides in-depth bibliographic essays for each chapter that will enable librarians and library users to further explore the literature of numerous languages and cultural traditions.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of the Arab Israeli Conflict 4 volumes 4 volumes written by Spencer C. Tucker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-05-12 with total page 1741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exhaustive work offers readers at multiple levels key insights into the military, political, social, cultural, and religious origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Political, Social, and Military History is the first comprehensive general reference encompassing all aspects of the contentious Arab-Israeli relationship from biblical times to the present, with an emphasis on the era beginning with World War I. The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict goes beyond simply recapping military engagements. In four volumes, with more than 750 alphabetically organized entries, plus a separate documents volume, it provides a wide-ranging introduction to the distinct yet inextricably linked Arab and Israeli worlds and worldviews, exploring all aspects of the conflict. The objective analysis will help readers understand the dramatic events that have impacted the entire world, from the founding of modern Israel to the building of the Suez Canal; from the Six-Day War to the Camp David Accords; from the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin to the rise and fall of Yasser Arafat, the 2006 Palestinian elections, and the Israeli-Hezbollah War in Lebanon.
Download or read book Arab Liberal Thought after 1967 written by Meir Hatina and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims at confronting the image of the Middle East as a region that is fraught with totalitarian ideologies, authoritarianism and conflict. It gives voice and space to other, more liberal and adaptive narratives and discourses that endorse the right to dissent, question the status quo, and offer alternative visions for society.
Download or read book The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth Century Fiction written by Richard van Leeuwen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is gradually being acknowledged that the Arabic story-collection Thousand and One Nights has had a major influence on European and world literature. This study analyses the influence of Thousand and One Nights, as an intertextual model, on 20th-century prose from all over the world. Works of approximately forty authors are examined: those who were crucial to the development of the main currents in 20th-century fiction, such as modernism, magical realism and post-modernism. The book contains six thematic sections divided into chapters discussing two or three authors/works, each from a narratological perspective and supplemented by references to the cultural and literary context. It is shown how Thousand and One Nights became deeply rooted in modern world literature especially in phases of renewal and experiment.
Download or read book Ways of Seeking written by Emily Drumsta and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.
