I'm an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Program Faculty in Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. My research interests include postcolonial literature, literary theory, film and media studies, the anthropology of secularism, and African and Middle East studies. For more information, please see my faculty homepage at https://cas.uoregon.edu/directory/profiles/all/mallan Address: University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97401-5242
We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguis... more We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary traditions, levels differences between scripture, poetry, and prose, and fashions textual forms into a particular pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical practice.
In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide―from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes.
A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.
From _Politics of Piety_ through _Religious Difference in a Secular Age_, Saba Mahmood forged met... more From _Politics of Piety_ through _Religious Difference in a Secular Age_, Saba Mahmood forged methods that hit centrally on the analysis of politics, history, gender, and sexuality. She modeled both in her scholarship and teaching a commitment to pursuing questions deeply relevant to political sensibilities, and she demonstrated the importance of deep historical, cultural and linguistic knowledge. In her writings, theoretical concepts arise from the critical analysis of disciplines and practices situated in time and place, whether Egyptian social movements in the 1990s or the complexities of Ottoman legal traditions. The broad appeal of her seminars stemmed from her attention to contemporary fields of inquiry and from the critical engagement she offered, challenging us to reflect on our commitment to specific political imaginaries.
This special issue considers the place of religion and secularism in the field of literary study.... more This special issue considers the place of religion and secularism in the field of literary study. The authors draw from anthropology, history, philosophy, and law, and all share in a common effort to take the category of religion seriously—not necessarily as a term with a fixed descriptive meaning, but as a category that nonetheless has implications for what we do when we read. The six essays trace the interactions of religion, literature, and secularism at distinct historical moments—ranging from early modern Spain to the nineteenth-century United States and interwar Germany and Palestine. They also chart how literature inflects the sensibilities, behaviors, and attitudes of readers. Spanning regions, languages, and methods, the issue bridges questions about reading secularism with critical reflections on the disciplines undergirding its textual traditions.
This essay tracks Karl Marx’s famous line “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represe... more This essay tracks Karl Marx’s famous line “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” as it travels from a translated epigraph in Edward Said’s Orientalism to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” What follows from this minor textual detail is a broader exploration of how “other” languages take place in postcolonial theory—not only Said and Spivak’s German, but Abdelfattah Kilito’s Italian and Frantz Fanon’s Arabic. What is the place of translation in self representation? How do instances of textual citation complicate the self of self-representation? In the ricochet between citation and translation, language matters not necessarily as a sign of fluency, but as part of a pragmatics of critique, positionality, and ultimately solidarity. Each instance of language use (German, Italian, Arabic) highlights the potentials of reuse, citation, and re-imagination for consolidating the bonds of anticolonial struggle and a vision of a postcolonial future. Shifting from translation to resonance and from language to voice, the essay ultimately engages the poetic potentials of translation as part of a pragmatics of anticolonial solidarity, integral to and beyond the self at the heart of self representation.
Michael Allan and Gauri Viswanathan discuss connections among philology, literary history, and re... more Michael Allan and Gauri Viswanathan discuss connections among philology, literary history, and religion, drawing from writers such as Edward Said, B.R. Ambedkar, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Massignon, and Kumud Pawde.
To listen for the whisper is to be welcomed into the cacophony of enunciations and the seduction ... more To listen for the whisper is to be welcomed into the cacophony of enunciations and the seduction of possible meanings: waswasa. Caught between hearing and mishearing, the whisper is only partially spoken, partially disclosed, and only visible as a trace of the enunciating lips. An embodied utterance exceeding linguistic sense, the whisper emerges as a faint figuration of postlingualism—it is both in and of language, but it pushes us to listen and learn anew.
I choose my title “dying to read” for two reasons: first, to consider those lifeworlds—those ways... more I choose my title “dying to read” for two reasons: first, to consider those lifeworlds—those ways of experiencing, sensing, and being—seemingly eclipsed by the rise of modern conceptions of literacy; and second, to consider the relation between the novel and death itself—that is, death as a sort of literary limit, the horizon of the possible testimonial, and the experiential limit of what can be narrated. It is with this in mind that I address an alternate plotline for the history of the novel. At the boundary between literacy and illiteracy is the condition of the possibility of the novel itself. If we understand reading to be implicated in social transformations such as schooling, libraries, and print culture, then how might we understand the passing of forms eclipsed by a new literary regime? The essay here provides a reading of Taha Hussein's "Call of the Curlew" to consider narrational limits and unnovelizable lives. At the limits of novelization is a never-ending story of a persistent past with lingering forms of life and language that continue to haunt the supposedly modern present. It is this story that is of interest to me here, one that is refracted through the move from illiteracy to literacy—an inquiry into what we might call the horizon of the literary.
What is it to see a photograph of language? The essay draws together various semiological scenes ... more What is it to see a photograph of language? The essay draws together various semiological scenes (Barthes’ reflections on indexicality, Niépce’s early photograph at Le Gras, the Rosetta Stone, and William Henry Fox Talbot’s photograph of Egyptian hieroglyphics) to question the underlying relationship between philology and photography. At first glance philology and photography might appear to offer two distinct semiological regimes—one to be approached as a matter of languages, codes, and symbols, and the other as an ontological trace imprinted with light. To counter this seeming opposition, the essay focuses on Talbot’s brochure of Egyptian hieroglyphics as it reveals language anew: on its pages, the photographic trace of linguistic symbols. From this encounter between philology and photography—between Barthes, Niépce, Champollion, and Talbot—arises an entangled history connecting Orientalism, translation, and media theory.
How might we read, interpret, or understand Saba Mahmood’s use of the term hermeneutics? Does an ... more How might we read, interpret, or understand Saba Mahmood’s use of the term hermeneutics? Does an anthropologist read this term differently than a theologian, than a literary scholar, than an historian? The interpretative site in Mahmood’s work is less in the text (whether Azazeel or the Danish cartoons, for example) than the conditions of its reception, the terms of response, and competing frames of intelligibility. And one can see how Mahmood’s delicate engagement with body (situations, sensibilities, and conditions) and mind (interpretation, response, and critique) has especially critical implications for the place of thinking, interpretation, and ultimately, hermeneutics.
Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, 2019
Encyclopedia entry on Youssef Chahine's Iskandariyya...Leh? (Alexandria...Why?) with an analysis ... more Encyclopedia entry on Youssef Chahine's Iskandariyya...Leh? (Alexandria...Why?) with an analysis of the film in the context of a broader history of queer cinema in Egypt.
Where, as literary scholars, we often seek semiological ways to anchor our claims in language, Fa... more Where, as literary scholars, we often seek semiological ways to anchor our claims in language, Fanon’s radio chapter brings to light the importance of a robust media ecology informed by attention to transformations in sense perception. He both describes and inspires those who struggle for a future unlike the present, and in doing so he details the terms of reverberation within a revolutionary network. In “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” listening and reading come together beyond language, text, and format in the framework of a revolutionary reception that immediately resonates with those in the movement he describes. Fanon’s chapter thus suggests that learning to read may have less to do with discerning, deciphering, and interpreting than with attuning oneself to the imagined future of a transformed world.
The article focuses on a passage from Palace of Desire, a realist novel by the Egyptian writer, N... more The article focuses on a passage from Palace of Desire, a realist novel by the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and investigates how realism mediates the relation between scientific universalism and religious knowledge. While literary scholars have discussed realism in relation to what George Levine describes as "natural theology" or as part of a larger secularizing discourse of Victorian England, I consider how Mahfouz’s novel stages the tension between natural science and Islamic conceptions of the world's origin. My analysis addresses the terms of a tense debate within a family about how to understand the son's publication of an article on Darwin. This discussion highlights alternate conceptions of knowledge and authority, not all of which are based on an empirical observation of the world, and it questions not only how to read properly, but how to critique and correct what is supposedly misunderstood. The richly philosophical novel unravels the problem of understanding, torn between the authority of the Quran and the literacy of a modern education. Drawing from the 19th century Darwin debates in the Arabic-language journal, al-Muqtataf, I focus on Mahfouz's re-reading of these episodes in his novel. What are the philosophical presumptions of realism, and in what ways do religious frames complicate realism's transcendent mediation? The exploration of this problem ultimately draws me away from the framework of cultural identity and towards realism's relation to the dynamic interplay of secularization, modernization and religion.
In Assia Djebar's _Fantasia_, the narrator describes the linguistic resonance of her mother's cla... more In Assia Djebar's _Fantasia_, the narrator describes the linguistic resonance of her mother's claim that her daughter " reads " —by which she implies, via Arabic, that her daughter studies. The circularity of an Arabic expression spoken in French makes the scene both descriptive and performative of the sorts of migrations, displacements and appropriations at play in this Algerian novel. In what language ought such multilingual work be read? By looking at inter and intra-lingual travels, this article emphasizes slippages between texts and readers, French and Arabic, and postcolonial and world literature. We encounter here less a lingua franca—that is, a global French or francophone framework—than we do the fundamental instability of any particular language in this internally translating text that travels from French to Arabic and ultimately into a market for readers in other languages.
For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq's Submission glimmers like a shiny lu... more For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq's Submission glimmers like a shiny lure. The storyline contains the sorts of details that appeal to an easy and seductive journalistic gloss. The year is 2022. A charismatic Muslim prime minister is elected in France, and an almost caricatured series of events follows: men and women are separated; the university president converts to Islam and weds a young wife; professors are coerced to convert or retire early; and so on. Add to the plot Houellebecq's professed Islamophobia and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and you have the ingredients of a newsworthy book to be addressed by critics, journalists, and readers across the world. Like a number of reviewers, I initially found myself lured to consider religion, secularism, and contemporary French politics against the backdrop of the newly published English translation. But as I began reading, I was confronted with a challenge of a different sort. <http://www.telospress.com/fictional-futures-and-literary-pasts-reflections-on-houellebecqs-submission/>
Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s, 2015
The question of literary engagement tends to focus centrally on the commitment of the writer and ... more The question of literary engagement tends to focus centrally on the commitment of the writer and the situation linking a literary work to its audience. In Mahmoud Darwish's “al-Qurban,” however, this connection is complicated. Here, the complicity between the “we” of the poem and the audience in Cairo turns on a fundamental ambiguity, one that conflates the audience in the room with the address staged in the poem itself. If the poem is committed, if there is a resonance for those applauding, then it is seemingly contingent upon how the poem comes to be heard. This particular occasion marks one instance in which the poem takes place, but it also frames an ambivalence between the place in the poem (a scriptural scene) and the place of the poem (at the Cairo International Book Fair). Shifting the optic of analysis from committed writing to the poetics of reading, we might ask: in what way must we read, or hear, the poem to understand commitment? The play of pronouns underscores the bifurcated address to the “you” in the poem and the “you” reading the poem. This formal play with lyric address—as well as the various registers of political and religious intelligibility—suggest that the historicist logic (central to those who understand Darwish in terms of commitment) is merely one way to derive meaning from the poem.
Published in _Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940's_, edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil with Yvonne Albers
The German East-West Divan—the program facilitating the encounter between Rashid al-Daif and Joac... more The German East-West Divan—the program facilitating the encounter between Rashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer and the publication of their ensuing reflections—is meant to promote "cultural dialogue" among writers. In the opening lines of his account, Rashid al-Daif shifts nearly immediately from the framework of culture to sexuality, describing how he learned that Joachim Heffer is gay and the discomfort this disclosure raised. Heffer’s response points to the homophobic undertones of Rashid al-Daif's comments, but resorts in doing so to classic Orientalist tropes regarding despotism and sexuality.
In this cultural exchange, one which supposedly bridges Germany and Lebanon, queer politics appears to meet Orientalism, entangled in the cultural translation of categories. What is remarkable, this essay suggests, is not so much that a Lebanese writer reflects on a gay German, but that there is a key reversal. Where, for queer theory, the confessional and the disclosing one’s sexual secrets play a central role, in Rashid al-Daif’s account, the writer inverts the narrative mode of writing from the self. Quite simply, he gives himself over to the other—taking not himself but his partner as the subject of his writing. What we read is not the narrator confessing his innermost secrets, but a narrator obsessed with the activities of his partner. And unlike a sexologist who claims to understand through a scientific practice, the writer here takes his own affective response as the groundwork for his hermeneutics of the other. Inadvertently or not, Rashid al-Daif manages to complicate some of the key terms of cultural dialogue by undoing the privileged narrative mode of the confessional.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2013
Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of The Yacoubian Building, the book’s au... more Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of The Yacoubian Building, the book’s author, Alaa al-Aswany, responded, “Why aren’t Italy, France, or the United States defamed by movies dealing with homosexuality?” Implicit in his defensive question is a perceived distinction between First World gay rights and social conservatism in the Third World. My paper considers this conventional coupling of gay rights and civilizational discourse in the global reception of The Yacoubian Building. Against the author’s remarks, I argue that the story is remarkable for staging an interplay between the putatively opposed characters of Hatim Rashid, an openly gay newspaper editor, and Taha al-Shazli, a young man lured into a terrorist group. By uniting these two characters along parallel tracks, The Yacoubian Building queerly couples the seemingly antagonistic forces endemic to the civilizational discourse of gay rights and offers us a means for imagining new constellations of queer politics.
Lamenting that “the concept of literary study is broadened . . . so radically that it becomes ide... more Lamenting that “the concept of literary study is broadened . . . so radically that it becomes identical with the whole history of humanity,” René Wellek implores scholars instead to “face the problem of ‘literariness’.” This essay considers Wellek’s formalist conception of literariness alongside what might appear its counterpoint: the historically situated understanding of adab. Just how universal is Wellek’s concept of literariness? In what ways does adab reaffirm or undermine its pertinence across textual traditions? Rather than present Wellek’s formalism and adab as opposites, this essay notes their common grounding in the pedagogical and ethical registers of the term literature—understood less as a canon of texts than as a set of practices and disciplines. Moving between the institutional foundations of modern literary study in Egypt, a footnote from Jirjī Zaydān’s literary history, and reflections on literature by the Orientalist H.A.R. Gibb, the various subsections consider how emergent definitions of literature and adab turn on assertions of how to read, respond and relate to texts. In the end, this shifted emphasis posits world literature less as an amalgam of particular textual traditions than as the disciplines and practices that inscribe how literature comes to matter.
We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguis... more We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary traditions, levels differences between scripture, poetry, and prose, and fashions textual forms into a particular pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical practice.
In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide―from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes.
A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.
From _Politics of Piety_ through _Religious Difference in a Secular Age_, Saba Mahmood forged met... more From _Politics of Piety_ through _Religious Difference in a Secular Age_, Saba Mahmood forged methods that hit centrally on the analysis of politics, history, gender, and sexuality. She modeled both in her scholarship and teaching a commitment to pursuing questions deeply relevant to political sensibilities, and she demonstrated the importance of deep historical, cultural and linguistic knowledge. In her writings, theoretical concepts arise from the critical analysis of disciplines and practices situated in time and place, whether Egyptian social movements in the 1990s or the complexities of Ottoman legal traditions. The broad appeal of her seminars stemmed from her attention to contemporary fields of inquiry and from the critical engagement she offered, challenging us to reflect on our commitment to specific political imaginaries.
This special issue considers the place of religion and secularism in the field of literary study.... more This special issue considers the place of religion and secularism in the field of literary study. The authors draw from anthropology, history, philosophy, and law, and all share in a common effort to take the category of religion seriously—not necessarily as a term with a fixed descriptive meaning, but as a category that nonetheless has implications for what we do when we read. The six essays trace the interactions of religion, literature, and secularism at distinct historical moments—ranging from early modern Spain to the nineteenth-century United States and interwar Germany and Palestine. They also chart how literature inflects the sensibilities, behaviors, and attitudes of readers. Spanning regions, languages, and methods, the issue bridges questions about reading secularism with critical reflections on the disciplines undergirding its textual traditions.
This essay tracks Karl Marx’s famous line “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represe... more This essay tracks Karl Marx’s famous line “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” as it travels from a translated epigraph in Edward Said’s Orientalism to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” What follows from this minor textual detail is a broader exploration of how “other” languages take place in postcolonial theory—not only Said and Spivak’s German, but Abdelfattah Kilito’s Italian and Frantz Fanon’s Arabic. What is the place of translation in self representation? How do instances of textual citation complicate the self of self-representation? In the ricochet between citation and translation, language matters not necessarily as a sign of fluency, but as part of a pragmatics of critique, positionality, and ultimately solidarity. Each instance of language use (German, Italian, Arabic) highlights the potentials of reuse, citation, and re-imagination for consolidating the bonds of anticolonial struggle and a vision of a postcolonial future. Shifting from translation to resonance and from language to voice, the essay ultimately engages the poetic potentials of translation as part of a pragmatics of anticolonial solidarity, integral to and beyond the self at the heart of self representation.
Michael Allan and Gauri Viswanathan discuss connections among philology, literary history, and re... more Michael Allan and Gauri Viswanathan discuss connections among philology, literary history, and religion, drawing from writers such as Edward Said, B.R. Ambedkar, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Massignon, and Kumud Pawde.
To listen for the whisper is to be welcomed into the cacophony of enunciations and the seduction ... more To listen for the whisper is to be welcomed into the cacophony of enunciations and the seduction of possible meanings: waswasa. Caught between hearing and mishearing, the whisper is only partially spoken, partially disclosed, and only visible as a trace of the enunciating lips. An embodied utterance exceeding linguistic sense, the whisper emerges as a faint figuration of postlingualism—it is both in and of language, but it pushes us to listen and learn anew.
I choose my title “dying to read” for two reasons: first, to consider those lifeworlds—those ways... more I choose my title “dying to read” for two reasons: first, to consider those lifeworlds—those ways of experiencing, sensing, and being—seemingly eclipsed by the rise of modern conceptions of literacy; and second, to consider the relation between the novel and death itself—that is, death as a sort of literary limit, the horizon of the possible testimonial, and the experiential limit of what can be narrated. It is with this in mind that I address an alternate plotline for the history of the novel. At the boundary between literacy and illiteracy is the condition of the possibility of the novel itself. If we understand reading to be implicated in social transformations such as schooling, libraries, and print culture, then how might we understand the passing of forms eclipsed by a new literary regime? The essay here provides a reading of Taha Hussein's "Call of the Curlew" to consider narrational limits and unnovelizable lives. At the limits of novelization is a never-ending story of a persistent past with lingering forms of life and language that continue to haunt the supposedly modern present. It is this story that is of interest to me here, one that is refracted through the move from illiteracy to literacy—an inquiry into what we might call the horizon of the literary.
What is it to see a photograph of language? The essay draws together various semiological scenes ... more What is it to see a photograph of language? The essay draws together various semiological scenes (Barthes’ reflections on indexicality, Niépce’s early photograph at Le Gras, the Rosetta Stone, and William Henry Fox Talbot’s photograph of Egyptian hieroglyphics) to question the underlying relationship between philology and photography. At first glance philology and photography might appear to offer two distinct semiological regimes—one to be approached as a matter of languages, codes, and symbols, and the other as an ontological trace imprinted with light. To counter this seeming opposition, the essay focuses on Talbot’s brochure of Egyptian hieroglyphics as it reveals language anew: on its pages, the photographic trace of linguistic symbols. From this encounter between philology and photography—between Barthes, Niépce, Champollion, and Talbot—arises an entangled history connecting Orientalism, translation, and media theory.
How might we read, interpret, or understand Saba Mahmood’s use of the term hermeneutics? Does an ... more How might we read, interpret, or understand Saba Mahmood’s use of the term hermeneutics? Does an anthropologist read this term differently than a theologian, than a literary scholar, than an historian? The interpretative site in Mahmood’s work is less in the text (whether Azazeel or the Danish cartoons, for example) than the conditions of its reception, the terms of response, and competing frames of intelligibility. And one can see how Mahmood’s delicate engagement with body (situations, sensibilities, and conditions) and mind (interpretation, response, and critique) has especially critical implications for the place of thinking, interpretation, and ultimately, hermeneutics.
Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, 2019
Encyclopedia entry on Youssef Chahine's Iskandariyya...Leh? (Alexandria...Why?) with an analysis ... more Encyclopedia entry on Youssef Chahine's Iskandariyya...Leh? (Alexandria...Why?) with an analysis of the film in the context of a broader history of queer cinema in Egypt.
Where, as literary scholars, we often seek semiological ways to anchor our claims in language, Fa... more Where, as literary scholars, we often seek semiological ways to anchor our claims in language, Fanon’s radio chapter brings to light the importance of a robust media ecology informed by attention to transformations in sense perception. He both describes and inspires those who struggle for a future unlike the present, and in doing so he details the terms of reverberation within a revolutionary network. In “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” listening and reading come together beyond language, text, and format in the framework of a revolutionary reception that immediately resonates with those in the movement he describes. Fanon’s chapter thus suggests that learning to read may have less to do with discerning, deciphering, and interpreting than with attuning oneself to the imagined future of a transformed world.
The article focuses on a passage from Palace of Desire, a realist novel by the Egyptian writer, N... more The article focuses on a passage from Palace of Desire, a realist novel by the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and investigates how realism mediates the relation between scientific universalism and religious knowledge. While literary scholars have discussed realism in relation to what George Levine describes as "natural theology" or as part of a larger secularizing discourse of Victorian England, I consider how Mahfouz’s novel stages the tension between natural science and Islamic conceptions of the world's origin. My analysis addresses the terms of a tense debate within a family about how to understand the son's publication of an article on Darwin. This discussion highlights alternate conceptions of knowledge and authority, not all of which are based on an empirical observation of the world, and it questions not only how to read properly, but how to critique and correct what is supposedly misunderstood. The richly philosophical novel unravels the problem of understanding, torn between the authority of the Quran and the literacy of a modern education. Drawing from the 19th century Darwin debates in the Arabic-language journal, al-Muqtataf, I focus on Mahfouz's re-reading of these episodes in his novel. What are the philosophical presumptions of realism, and in what ways do religious frames complicate realism's transcendent mediation? The exploration of this problem ultimately draws me away from the framework of cultural identity and towards realism's relation to the dynamic interplay of secularization, modernization and religion.
In Assia Djebar's _Fantasia_, the narrator describes the linguistic resonance of her mother's cla... more In Assia Djebar's _Fantasia_, the narrator describes the linguistic resonance of her mother's claim that her daughter " reads " —by which she implies, via Arabic, that her daughter studies. The circularity of an Arabic expression spoken in French makes the scene both descriptive and performative of the sorts of migrations, displacements and appropriations at play in this Algerian novel. In what language ought such multilingual work be read? By looking at inter and intra-lingual travels, this article emphasizes slippages between texts and readers, French and Arabic, and postcolonial and world literature. We encounter here less a lingua franca—that is, a global French or francophone framework—than we do the fundamental instability of any particular language in this internally translating text that travels from French to Arabic and ultimately into a market for readers in other languages.
For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq's Submission glimmers like a shiny lu... more For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq's Submission glimmers like a shiny lure. The storyline contains the sorts of details that appeal to an easy and seductive journalistic gloss. The year is 2022. A charismatic Muslim prime minister is elected in France, and an almost caricatured series of events follows: men and women are separated; the university president converts to Islam and weds a young wife; professors are coerced to convert or retire early; and so on. Add to the plot Houellebecq's professed Islamophobia and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and you have the ingredients of a newsworthy book to be addressed by critics, journalists, and readers across the world. Like a number of reviewers, I initially found myself lured to consider religion, secularism, and contemporary French politics against the backdrop of the newly published English translation. But as I began reading, I was confronted with a challenge of a different sort. <http://www.telospress.com/fictional-futures-and-literary-pasts-reflections-on-houellebecqs-submission/>
Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s, 2015
The question of literary engagement tends to focus centrally on the commitment of the writer and ... more The question of literary engagement tends to focus centrally on the commitment of the writer and the situation linking a literary work to its audience. In Mahmoud Darwish's “al-Qurban,” however, this connection is complicated. Here, the complicity between the “we” of the poem and the audience in Cairo turns on a fundamental ambiguity, one that conflates the audience in the room with the address staged in the poem itself. If the poem is committed, if there is a resonance for those applauding, then it is seemingly contingent upon how the poem comes to be heard. This particular occasion marks one instance in which the poem takes place, but it also frames an ambivalence between the place in the poem (a scriptural scene) and the place of the poem (at the Cairo International Book Fair). Shifting the optic of analysis from committed writing to the poetics of reading, we might ask: in what way must we read, or hear, the poem to understand commitment? The play of pronouns underscores the bifurcated address to the “you” in the poem and the “you” reading the poem. This formal play with lyric address—as well as the various registers of political and religious intelligibility—suggest that the historicist logic (central to those who understand Darwish in terms of commitment) is merely one way to derive meaning from the poem.
Published in _Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940's_, edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil with Yvonne Albers
The German East-West Divan—the program facilitating the encounter between Rashid al-Daif and Joac... more The German East-West Divan—the program facilitating the encounter between Rashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer and the publication of their ensuing reflections—is meant to promote "cultural dialogue" among writers. In the opening lines of his account, Rashid al-Daif shifts nearly immediately from the framework of culture to sexuality, describing how he learned that Joachim Heffer is gay and the discomfort this disclosure raised. Heffer’s response points to the homophobic undertones of Rashid al-Daif's comments, but resorts in doing so to classic Orientalist tropes regarding despotism and sexuality.
In this cultural exchange, one which supposedly bridges Germany and Lebanon, queer politics appears to meet Orientalism, entangled in the cultural translation of categories. What is remarkable, this essay suggests, is not so much that a Lebanese writer reflects on a gay German, but that there is a key reversal. Where, for queer theory, the confessional and the disclosing one’s sexual secrets play a central role, in Rashid al-Daif’s account, the writer inverts the narrative mode of writing from the self. Quite simply, he gives himself over to the other—taking not himself but his partner as the subject of his writing. What we read is not the narrator confessing his innermost secrets, but a narrator obsessed with the activities of his partner. And unlike a sexologist who claims to understand through a scientific practice, the writer here takes his own affective response as the groundwork for his hermeneutics of the other. Inadvertently or not, Rashid al-Daif manages to complicate some of the key terms of cultural dialogue by undoing the privileged narrative mode of the confessional.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2013
Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of The Yacoubian Building, the book’s au... more Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of The Yacoubian Building, the book’s author, Alaa al-Aswany, responded, “Why aren’t Italy, France, or the United States defamed by movies dealing with homosexuality?” Implicit in his defensive question is a perceived distinction between First World gay rights and social conservatism in the Third World. My paper considers this conventional coupling of gay rights and civilizational discourse in the global reception of The Yacoubian Building. Against the author’s remarks, I argue that the story is remarkable for staging an interplay between the putatively opposed characters of Hatim Rashid, an openly gay newspaper editor, and Taha al-Shazli, a young man lured into a terrorist group. By uniting these two characters along parallel tracks, The Yacoubian Building queerly couples the seemingly antagonistic forces endemic to the civilizational discourse of gay rights and offers us a means for imagining new constellations of queer politics.
Lamenting that “the concept of literary study is broadened . . . so radically that it becomes ide... more Lamenting that “the concept of literary study is broadened . . . so radically that it becomes identical with the whole history of humanity,” René Wellek implores scholars instead to “face the problem of ‘literariness’.” This essay considers Wellek’s formalist conception of literariness alongside what might appear its counterpoint: the historically situated understanding of adab. Just how universal is Wellek’s concept of literariness? In what ways does adab reaffirm or undermine its pertinence across textual traditions? Rather than present Wellek’s formalism and adab as opposites, this essay notes their common grounding in the pedagogical and ethical registers of the term literature—understood less as a canon of texts than as a set of practices and disciplines. Moving between the institutional foundations of modern literary study in Egypt, a footnote from Jirjī Zaydān’s literary history, and reflections on literature by the Orientalist H.A.R. Gibb, the various subsections consider how emergent definitions of literature and adab turn on assertions of how to read, respond and relate to texts. In the end, this shifted emphasis posits world literature less as an amalgam of particular textual traditions than as the disciplines and practices that inscribe how literature comes to matter.
When Alexandre Promio reached the shores of Alexandria in 1897, he began a voyage to capture Egyp... more When Alexandre Promio reached the shores of Alexandria in 1897, he began a voyage to capture Egyptian sites cinematically for the Lumiere Brothers' film company. Among a number of these early films, his 50-second shot of the pyramids at Giza, Les Pyramides (vue generale), is now understood as a monument within early film history and a testament to the international spread of the new medium. What the film offers, however, is less the novelty of seeing the pyramids, which were often depicted in paintings, lithographs and photography, than the novelty of seeing them in time. The article argues that Les Pyramides (vue generale) transforms the pyramids from mythologized and abstracted objects into a temporal event seen over a 50-second duration. Juxtaposing the film alongside David Roberts' Approach of the Simoon, the article first explores how the film shifts the relation to the historical past located in the distinction between restoration and preservation. Then, turning to Andre Bazin's 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image' and Alfred North Whitehead's theory of the event, the article addresses how the film's realism derives less from what it depicts than with the duration of depiction itself. Les Pyramides (vue generale) ultimately challenges the thematic discussion of film in terms of objects and places and invites us to consider the implications of cinematic time in the history of film form.
In 1959, Frantz Fanon delivered his essay titled "Sur la culture nationale" in a speech to the Bl... more In 1959, Frantz Fanon delivered his essay titled "Sur la culture nationale" in a speech to the Black Writers' Conference in Rome. Cast against the backdrop of the ongoing colonial struggle in Algeria, the ambitiously crafted remarks set out to redefine national culture, examining the dynamic relation of national liberation and cultural production as well as proclaiming the creation of a new public ["un nouveau public"]...
For all of the attention these various analyses accord to Fanon's cultural analysis and corporeal... more For all of the attention these various analyses accord to Fanon's cultural analysis and corporeal schema, a crucial aspect of Fanon's writing is forgotten in this selective remembering. What is striking is that, inadvertently or not, Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks not with a discussion of race per se , but with the problem of language. While certainly the gesture of reading Fanon's epidermal schema is important, I am concerned here with the conundrum by which this study of epidermalization begins not with recognition based on the speaker's skin, as one might expect, but with recognition based on the speaker's language. The immediate relation set forth, in the first chapter, is one that offers crucial insight into how Fanon critically interrogates key assumptions about the communicative function of language and its imbrication in the flesh. What is communicated in the process far exceeds the intentions of the speaker, and language as such comes to be understood as the intersubjective basis of colonial subjection. My essay, then, is not an effort to remember Fanon as a post-structuralist avant-la-lettre, nor is it guided towards a view of Fanon that simply challenges what would become post-structuralist thought. Instead, by looking closely at Fanon's analysis of language, I hope to explore those aspects of his work that enact an alternate linguistics, predicated on a close interaction between language and the body.
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Books by Michael Allan
In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide―from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes.
A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.
Special Issues by Michael Allan
Papers by Michael Allan
Published in _Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940's_, edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil with Yvonne Albers
In this cultural exchange, one which supposedly bridges Germany and Lebanon, queer politics appears to meet Orientalism, entangled in the cultural translation of categories. What is remarkable, this essay suggests, is not so much that a Lebanese writer reflects on a gay German, but that there is a key reversal. Where, for queer theory, the confessional and the disclosing one’s sexual secrets play a central role, in Rashid al-Daif’s account, the writer inverts the narrative mode of writing from the self. Quite simply, he gives himself over to the other—taking not himself but his partner as the subject of his writing. What we read is not the narrator confessing his innermost secrets, but a narrator obsessed with the activities of his partner. And unlike a sexologist who claims to understand through a scientific practice, the writer here takes his own affective response as the groundwork for his hermeneutics of the other. Inadvertently or not, Rashid al-Daif manages to complicate some of the key terms of cultural dialogue by undoing the privileged narrative mode of the confessional.
In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide―from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes.
A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.
Published in _Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940's_, edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil with Yvonne Albers
In this cultural exchange, one which supposedly bridges Germany and Lebanon, queer politics appears to meet Orientalism, entangled in the cultural translation of categories. What is remarkable, this essay suggests, is not so much that a Lebanese writer reflects on a gay German, but that there is a key reversal. Where, for queer theory, the confessional and the disclosing one’s sexual secrets play a central role, in Rashid al-Daif’s account, the writer inverts the narrative mode of writing from the self. Quite simply, he gives himself over to the other—taking not himself but his partner as the subject of his writing. What we read is not the narrator confessing his innermost secrets, but a narrator obsessed with the activities of his partner. And unlike a sexologist who claims to understand through a scientific practice, the writer here takes his own affective response as the groundwork for his hermeneutics of the other. Inadvertently or not, Rashid al-Daif manages to complicate some of the key terms of cultural dialogue by undoing the privileged narrative mode of the confessional.