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A wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary collection of essays that decenter, critique, and problematize predominant notions of the meaning of mortality for human creativity
This issue of Alif explores the ways in which humans have come to confront their mortality across time and space. Contributions question the nature of loss, grief, and the possibility of an afterlife. Is death only an interlude? Perhaps simply the end? How have people used literature and the arts to conceptualize its relentless presence in our existence?
The articles in this issue decenter, critique, and problematize predominant notions of the meaning of mortality for human creativity. They provide a wide scope of responses to mortality, anthropologically, philosophically, and psychologically. They shed light on different cultural receptions of loss, annihilation, and mortality, ranging from India to Yemen, Palestine to Iraq, the Island of Lampedusa to the war-ravished city of Beirut, among many other locales. Death is dealt with in an intimate fashion through the exploration and reinterpretation of modern and classical elegiac poetry, children’s picturebooks, fictional accounts of war, grief, and displacement, and dramatic treatments of dying and the afterlife.
Contributors:
Hajjaj Abu Jabr, Egyptian Academy of Arts, Cairo, Egypt
Karam AbuSehly, Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt
Hala Amin, Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt
Shaimaa El-Ateek, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Mohamed Birairi, Beni-Suef University, Beni-Suef, Egypt, and American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Elliott Colla, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Saeed Elmasry, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
Shaimaa Gohar, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt
Walid El Khachab, York University, Toronto, Canada
Yasmine Motawy, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Dani Nassif, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
Andrea Maria Negri, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany
Marwa Ramadan, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt
Caroline Rooney, University of Kent, Kent, United Kingdom
Tania Al Saadi, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
May Telmissany, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Shahla Ujayli, American University of Madaba, Madaba, Jordan
English and French Section
Caroline Rooney: Shakespeare’s Hermetic Lampedusa: From Colonial Fantasies to the Afterlife in The Tempest
Andrea Maria Negri: Representations of Death in al-Maqāmāt al-Hindiyya
Shaimaa El-Ateek: Thanatogenos: Photographing Death and Writing Mourning in Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary
Elliott Colla: Elegy and Mobilization: Poetry, Mourning, and the Student Uprising of January 1972
Marwa Ramadan: On the Threshold of Death: Liminality and Transformation in Margaret Edson’s Wit
Tania Al Saadi: La mort dans la littérature irakienne de l’exil : L’exemple d’Inaam Kachachi
Shaimaa Gohar: Taming the Terror of Death in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo
Hala Amin: Frankenstein’s Monster, Past and Present: Writing Against Death in Frankenstein in Baghdad
Arabic Section
Saeed Elmasry: Cultural Approaches to Mortality: A Critical Overview of the Anthropology of Death
Mohamed Birairi: Confronting Annihilation: Readings in Pre-Islamic Poetry
Karam AbuSehly: Literature as Archive of Mortality: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Trauerspie
lMay Telmissany: Death and the Annihilation of History in Egyptian Surrealism
Hajjaj Abu Jabr: Death of God Theology: The Holocaust of Paul Celan and Mahmoud Darwish
Shahla Ujayli: ‘Abd al-Salām al-‘Ujaylī’s Stories of Illness between Culture and the Medical Institution
Walid El Khachab: Mystic Annihilation in Sufi Art: Death as a Form of Life
Dani Nassif: Traumatic Past and Fantasy: Testimonies of the Undead in Rabī‘ Jābir’s Bīrītūs
Yasmine Motawy: “Normal Grief”: Death in Children’s Picturebooks