Book 3: Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (2024) by Tarek El-Ariss
In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his chil... more In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire.
Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.
Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
Book 2: Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals (2018) by Tarek El-Ariss
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13293.html
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted a... more https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13293.html
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models.
Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate.
Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal.
Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.
Anthology: The Arab Renaissance (2018) by Tarek El-Ariss
https://www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/MLA-Texts-and-Translations/The-Arab-Renaissance-A-Bilingual-Anthology-of-the-Nahda, 2018
The Nahda (“awakening”) designates the project of Arab cultural and political modernity from the ... more The Nahda (“awakening”) designates the project of Arab cultural and political modernity from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Arab models of nationalism and secularism, as well as Islamic revival, spring from Nahda thought and its attendant developments, such as linguistic reform; translation; the emergence of new literary genres, such as the novel; the creation of periodicals, journalism, and a new publishing industry; professional associations and salons; a new education system; and an overall Enlightenment ideal of knowledge. The Nahda ushered in innovative modes of reading and writing along with new social practices of knowledge transmission, transnational connections, and new political ideas. Collected in this anthology are texts by intellectuals, writers, members of the clergy, and political figures. The authors discuss authority, social norms, conventions and practices both secular and religious, gender roles, class, travel, and technology. Presented in the original Arabic and in English translation, the texts will be of interest to students of the Arabic language and culture, history, cultural studies, gender studies, and other disciplines.
Book 1: Trials of Arab Modernity (2013) by Tarek El-Ariss
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for th... more Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation, translation, and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. Trials of Arab Modernity traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth-century to the present. Tarek El-Ariss thus reframes Arab modernity [ḥadātha] as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events [aḥdāth] emerging in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse. This study challenges the prevalent conceptualizations of modernity, both those that treat it as a Western ideological project imposed by colonialism, and others that understand it as a universal narrative of progress and innovation. Instead, El-Ariss offers a close reading of the simultaneous performances and contestations—or trials—of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, this book reveals the unfolding of these trials as a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity, decentering yet also redefining and producing it. El-Ariss’s theoretical and comparative approach offers a new configuration of Arab modernity at the intersection of historical, cultural, and aesthetic frameworks. The first study of its kind to bridge the gap between Nahda or the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment, or Renaissance, and postcolonial and postmodern fiction, this work is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Islamic Studies, Intellectual History, and Anthropology.
Articles by Tarek El-Ariss
World Humanities Report, 2023
The World Humanities Report is a project of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (... more The World Humanities Report is a project of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), in collaboration with the International Council for Philosophy
Routledge Companion to World Literature (2nd Edition), Eds. David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and Djelal Kadir, 2022
CARGC, 2022
Originally delivered as the 2021 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper... more Originally delivered as the 2021 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 17 historicizes and situates theory in a global context, approaching it as an intellectual tradition that has produced powerful critiques of normativity and decentered text, image, and genealogy. In this paper, Professor Tarek El-Ariss revisits his intellectual trajectory and scrutinizes his engagement with critical theory. Reflecting on his personal journey as a scholar, writer, and critic in this article, he delineates five stages of critical practice in his encounters with theory, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern studies. These five stages are: a critique of representation, occupy the canon, impasse and breakdown, cross-disciplinary sublime, and new writing genres. By offering a wide-ranging and insightful overview of the five-stage theoretical practice in this paper, Professor El-Ariss addresses some of the questions and ethical imperatives that we need to raise as an intellectual community today in order to develop new critical practices, writing genres, and forms of communication that operate at both local and global levels.
(Oxford Research Encyclopedia--Literary Theory), 2020
What does scandal designate? Is it a narrative of moral outrage, a titillating spectacle of shame... more What does scandal designate? Is it a narrative of moral outrage, a titillating spectacle of shame, or a violation that simultaneously unsettles and consolidates norms and traditions? Scandal as a phenomenon, event, and analytical category has been the focus of de bates and representations in works by Kant, Heidegger, Rousseau, Sade, and Mme de Sévigné, as well as in The Arabian Nights. These engagements with scandal in philosophy, literature, and media constitute a genealogy if not a tradition that emphasizes the relations between scandal and the body, gender, story-telling, visuality, marginality, and pow er. From the body of Aphrodite that frames scandal in the Greek mythological context to the body of Egyptian activist and nude blogger Alyaa Elmahdi, adulterous affairs and fantasies of debauchery particularly have been used as instruments to critique the rich and powerful but also to oppress women and sexual minorities. What becomes of scandal in the age of the Internet, apps, and social media? The article examines whether the digital is bringing about the demise of scandal as an affective scene that generates outrage and condemnation but also as a model of telling and representing tied to antiquated re portage genres, gossip scenes, and fictional models. Genealogy The word "scandal" comes from the Greek word skandalon, which means moral stumble and trap. 1 One of the most famous scandals in antiquity is the one generated by the adul terous relation between the god of war, Ares (Mars), and the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite (Venus) or Cypris, as she comes from the eastern part of the Greek world (the island of Cyprus). Homer tells us that when Ares stayed in Aphrodite's bed into dawn, Helios, the sun god, making his journey from east to west, saw the lovers in bed. Helios, best known as the gossiper among the gods as he sees everything, told Aphrodite's husband Hephaistos, thereby setting the scene of scandal on Mount Olympus. 2 Following Helios's "seeing" and "gossiping," Hephaistos, the blacksmith who works in the forge all night, laid a "trap" for the lovers: an invisible chain net that would fall and immobilize them when set. A revealer, a whistleblower, and artificer, Helios sets the stage for the scene of scandal.
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Book 3: Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (2024) by Tarek El-Ariss
Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.
Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
Book 2: Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals (2018) by Tarek El-Ariss
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models.
Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate.
Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal.
Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.
Anthology: The Arab Renaissance (2018) by Tarek El-Ariss
Book 1: Trials of Arab Modernity (2013) by Tarek El-Ariss
Articles by Tarek El-Ariss
Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.
Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models.
Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate.
Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal.
Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.
(Technoutopias exhibition run from September 24 - November 17, 2019 in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery and Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, USA).
Essays:
Pedro Gadanho. The Return to Techné as Micro-Utopia.
Tarek El-Ariss. Portals of Life: Reflections on Zenovia Toloudi’s Technoutopias