Poetic Justice

Poetic Justice
Author: Deborah Kapchan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1477318518

Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The work is primarily composed of poets who began writing after Moroccan independence in 1956 and includes work written in Moroccan Arabic (darija), classical Arabic, French, and Tamazight. Why Poetic Justice? Moroccan poetry (and especially zajal, oral poetry now written in Moroccan Arabic) is often published in newspapers and journals and is thus a vibrant form of social commentary; what’s more, there is a law, a justice, in the aesthetic act that speaks back to the law of the land. Poetic Justice because literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways. Reading this oeuvre from independence until the new millennium and beyond, it is clear that what poet Driss Mesnaoui calls the “letters of time” have long been in the hands of Moroccan poets, as they write their ethics, their aesthetics, as well as their gendered and political lives into poetic being.

The Algerian New Novel

The Algerian New Novel
Author: Valérie K. Orlando
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2017-05-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813939631

Disputing the claim that Algerian writing during the struggle against French colonial rule dealt almost exclusively with revolutionary themes, The Algerian New Novel shows how Algerian authors writing in French actively contributed to the experimental forms of the period, expressing a new age literarily as well as politically and culturally. Looking at canonical Algerian literature as part of the larger literary production in French during decolonization, Valérie K. Orlando considers how novels by Rachid Boudjedra, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Nabile Farès, Yamina Mechakra, and Kateb Yacine both influenced and were reflectors of the sociopolitical and cultural transformation that took place during this period in Algeria. Although their themes were rooted in Algeria, the avant-garde writing styles of these authors were influenced by early twentieth-century American modernists, the New Novelists of 1940s–50s France, and African American authors of the 1950s–60s. This complex mix of influences led Algerian writers to develop a unique modern literary aesthetic to express their world, a tradition of experimentation and fragmentation that still characterizes the work of contemporary Algerian francophone writers.

Moroccan Other-Archives

Moroccan Other-Archives
Author: Brahim El Guabli
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 153150146X

Moroccan Other-Archives investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners. The book shows how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-archive: a set of textual, sonic, embodied, and visual sites that recover real or reimagined voices of these formerly suppressed and silenced constituencies of Moroccan society. Combining theoretical discussions with close reading of literary works, the book reenvisions both archives and the nation in postcolonial Morocco. By producing other-archives, Moroccan cultural creators transform the losses state violence inflicted on society during the years of lead into a source of civic engagement and historiographical agency, enabling the writing of histories about those Moroccans who have been excluded from official documentation and state-sanctioned histories. The book is multilingual and interdisciplinary, examining primary sources in Amazigh/Berber, Arabic, Darija, and French, and drawing on memory studies, literary theory, archival studies, anthropology, and historiography. In addition to showing how other-archives are created and operate, El Guabli elaborates how language, gender, class, race, and geographical distribution are co-constitutive of a historical and archival unsilencing that is foundational to citizenship in Morocco today.

Libyan Novel

Libyan Novel
Author: Charis Olszok
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474457479

Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhluqat) in which they are framed.

In the Net

In the Net
Author: Mahmoudan Hawad
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2022-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 149622969X

In the face of amnesia, how does one exist? In this poem, Hawad speaks directly to Azawad, a silent figure whose name designates a portion of Tuareg lands divided among five nation-states created in the 1960s. This evanescent being, situated on the edge of the abyss and deprived of speech, space, and the right to exist, has reached such a stage of suffering, misery, and oppression that it acquiesces to the erasure implicit in the labels attached to it. Through an avalanche of words, sounds, and gestures, Hawad attempts to free this creature from the net that ensnares it, to patch together a silhouette that is capable of standing up again, to transform pain into a breeding ground for resistance—a resistance requiring a return to the self, the imagination, and ways of thinking about the world differently. The road will be long. Hawad uses poetry, “cartridges of old words, / a thousand and one misfires, botched, reloaded,” as a weapon of resistance.

The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature

The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature
Author: Praseeda Gopinath
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 639
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040097200

Working within a global frame, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature considers postcolonial and decolonial literary works across multiple genres, languages, and both regional and transnational networks. The Companion extends beyond the entrenched hegemony of the postcolonial or Anglophone novel to explore other literary formations and vernacular exchanges. It foregrounds questions of language and circulation by emphasizing translation, vernacularity, and world literature. This text expands the linguistic, regional, and critical foci of the emergent field of decolonial studies, pushing against the normative currents of postcolonial literary studies, and offers a critical consideration of both. The volume prioritizes new literatures and critical theories of diasporas, borderlands, detentions, and forced migrations in the face of environmental catastrophe and political authoritarianism, reframing postcolonial/decolonial literary studies through an emphasis on multilingual literatures. This will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students of postcolonial and decolonial studies.

Moroccan Feminist Discourses

Moroccan Feminist Discourses
Author: F. Sadiqi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2014-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137455098

Both a scholarly and personal critique of current feminist Moroccan discourses, this book is a call for a larger-than-Islam framework that accommodates the Berber dimension. Sadiqi argues that current feminist discourse, both secular and Islamic ones, are not only divergent but limit the rich heritage, knowledge, and art of Berber women.

Negotiating Self-determination

Negotiating Self-determination
Author: Hurst Hannum
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780739114339

Living in the age of American 'hyperpower' the relevance of both international law and conflict resolution have been called into question. Hannum and Babbitt, highly respected practitioners in these respective fields, have collected a series of experts to examine the relationship between these two disciplines. Focusing on self-determination, a particularly thorny issue of international law, Negotiating Self-Determination takes an in-depth look at what an understanding of conflict analysis can bring to this field and the impact that international legal norms could potentially have on the work of conflict resolvers in self-determination conflicts. Allen Buchanan's philosophical writings consider the goals of secessionists, Erin Jenne uses quantitative analysis to explain the conditions under which secessionist movements come into existence, and Anke Hoeffler and Paul Collier study the economic basis for secessionist movements. This well-researched volume looks beyond the international law and policy fields of the editors to philosophy, anthropology, political science, and economy to assist in gaining a more complete understanding of self-determination and conflict prevention.

From Dust to Digital

From Dust to Digital
Author: Maja Kominko
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2015-02-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1783740620

Much of world’s documentary heritage rests in vulnerable, little-known and often inaccessible archives. Many of these archives preserve information that may cast new light on historical phenomena and lead to their reinterpretation. But such rich collections are often at risk of being lost before the history they capture is recorded. This volume celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, established to document and publish online formerly inaccessible and neglected archives from across the globe. From Dust to Digital showcases the historical significance of the collections identified, catalogued and digitised through the Programme, bringing together articles on 19 of the 244 projects supported since its inception. These contributions demonstrate the range of materials documented — including rock inscriptions, manuscripts, archival records, newspapers, photographs and sound archives — and the wide geographical scope of the Programme. Many of the documents are published here for the first time, illustrating the potential these collections have to further our understanding of history.

The Tuaregs

The Tuaregs
Author: Karl-G. Prasse
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Total Pages: 118
Release: 1995
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN: 9788772893136

As a minority in these two countries, the Tuaregs have come into a difficult situation and today they are in heavy troubles. Since independence in 1960, the Tuaregs have been ignored constantly by the different governments. Today the consequences of this are visible in their areas which are underdeveloped and the Young Tuaregs are mostly illiterate and untrained and with no hope in the future.