Arab Studies Journal XXIX, no. 1 (2021) ARAB CRITICAL CULTURE AND ITS (PALESTINIAN) DISCONTENTS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR Adey Almohsen Literary criticism is a revolution . . . a bloodless, pure revolution. —Ahmad S. al-Karmi1 Literary and art criticism is one of the principal methods of struggle. —Mao Zedong2 In May 1953, on the fifth anniversary of the Nakba—the catastrophic Zionist expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians—al-Adab’s editor Suheil Idriss (1925–2008) asked if a momentous event like that of “the loss of Palestine and the calamity of [its] refugees” had kindled a creative flame in Arab letters.3 Save for “one or two epic poems and a few scattered odes and short stories in newspapers,” Idriss believed it had not.4 For him, adab al-nakba (Nakba literature) fell short of its tasks and petrified soon after “the dust of battle settled.”5 Idriss maintained that iltizam (commitment or adherence)—a mode of writing or creating art that is politically conscious and grounded in the day-to-day worries of the Arab populace—was the way out of this state of literary stagnation.6 Accordingly, it was only through Adey Almohsen is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. 56 Adey Almohsen iltizam that Palestinian and Arab letters could attain their “particular and global value.”7 These claims about the Nakba’s literary effects, or lack thereof, did not go unchallenged. And, in subsequent issues of al-Adab, a war of words broke out between Idriss and Jordanian writer ‘Isa al-Na‘uri (1918–85), who studied and taught in Jerusalem for nineteen years until he was forced to leave when the 1948 Arab-Israeli war broke out. Na‘uri “utterly opposed” Idriss’s proposition.8 For him, the “tragedy of Palestine” instigated acute rebellion in the Arab world and set in motion a “revolution of thought” comparable to that in France on the eve of the French Revolution.9 Na‘uri went on to list some of the Nakba’s intellectual products, from works of poetry and art to political treatises.10 He also argued that publishers muffled much of this output, thereby preventing it from getting the exposure it deserved among Arab audiences.11 Idriss in turn challenged Na‘uri to locate the purported literary effect of the Nakba in the works of “our established authors” and to discern the value of the “trivial works he cited.”12 And, if this Nakba literature was not given a fair chance in terms of publication, how could future literary historians assess that which did not exist?13 Idriss closed by distinguishing himself from Na‘uri, whose take on Nakba literature “lacked value in the course of history,” and by explaining that “in writing literary history, one ought to be scientific not sentimental.”14 A month later, this dispute over Nakba literature grew to involve Lebanese poet and biographer ‘Abd al-Latif Sharara (1919–92), plus Idriss and Na‘uri once more. Sharara braced Idriss’s position and suggested that the Nakba “exhausted all that it could have inspired in poetry, literature, criticism, and research.”15 He further rejected the “weeping, whimpering” literature of refugees and martyrs and reasoned that the task of Nakba literature lay elsewhere: namely, analyzing the “Zionist victory” in ethical and cultural terms.16 Na‘uri retorted and instructed Shararah and Idriss to consult the anthologies of Nakba literature by Palestinian literary historian Kamil al-Sawafiri (1914–92) and Palestinian Arabist Muhammad Y. Najm (1925–2009).17 The effect of the Nakba, for Na‘uri, was more of a holistic movement in Arab and Palestinian letters: “a grand literary treasure that deserved greater attention” from Idriss, Shararah, and their ilk.18 Addressing Idriss, Na‘uri explained that the “established authors” the former mentioned were “as good as dead” since they had failed to come to terms with the “new 57 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War spirit” of the post-1948 present.19 Na‘uri concluded by stating that his position on the Nakba was not a sentimental one, but one that came about from lived experience. If Idriss was unable to appreciate this stance from his place of privilege in Beirut, then he must have been living in Plato’s Kallipolis, “not in the Arab world or even near it.”20 The Idriss-Na‘uri-Sharara debate cited above underlines two issues that this article investigates. The first regards the marginal place Palestinian literature occupied in the mindset of post-World War II non-Palestinian Arab critics, particularly during the 1950s and early 1960s. The seemingly emotive nature of this literature ran against the burgeoning trend of politicized literature—that of iltizam expounded by Arab nationalists and existentialists or that of socialist realism propagated by Arab communists.21 Moreover, the individualist alienation themes common to the writings of many Palestinians did not appeal to the doctrinaires of politicized writing, since art was not to serve the self (and its contradictions) but the broad masses (and their struggles).22 A second point of investigation is how, contrary to received wisdom, many Arab intellectuals did not immediately view the Palestinian cause as an anticolonial struggle comparable to Algeria and other liberation battles in Afro-Asia. Rather, they primarily understood it as a refugee problem well into the mid-1960s. It was only some fifteen years after the Nakba that anticolonial framings of the Palestinian cause emerged. In this sense, the writings of Palestinian novelist, journalist, and activist Ghassan Kanafani (1936–72) played an integral role in shifting the framework from one of refugee crisis to one of anticolonial struggle. He wrote extensively—in critique, political opinion, and fiction—on the Nakba, its tragic outcomes, and various aspects of Palestinian history before and after 1948. Yet it was not until the mid-1960s that Kanafani’s thinking about Palestine underwent a paradigm shift of sorts: “I used to write about Palestine as a discrete cause up until I came to see in Palestine a comprehensive representation of the human cause.”23 This writing on Palestine as a core humane, anticolonial issue appeared in its rudimentary form throughout the newspapers and magazines Kanafani edited or contributed to in Beirut during the 1960s: al-Anwar, al-Muharrir, Filastin, and al-Sayyad, among others.24 But the idea congealed into a full-fledged literary-theoretical program when Kanafani published his first volume on resistance literature (adab al-muqawama) with Idriss’s Dar al-Adab on the eve of the 1967 June War. 25 Such a mode 58 Adey Almohsen of writing reached a political apex after the 1968 Battle of Karameh on the Jordanian-Israeli border and the concomitant radicalization of Palestinian national culture. Within the historiography of the Arab 1950s and 1960s, two overlapping narratives abbreviate the complexities of Arab intellectual history and of Palestinian history after World War II and the 1947-49 Nakba. The first of these narratives goes as follows: over the span of the 1940s, a new generation of Arab critics surfaced; critics who framed criticism as a political task and understood literature as more an expression of social tensions than a purely artistic endeavor. Iltizam was the catchword that many contemporary writers and scholars writing on this period use to describe this generational and theoretical shift.26 The second narrative places Palestinians in a state of intellectual and political slumber, “enclosed by the general Arab national developments” in the two decades separating the Nakba from the Naksa (1948–67).27 During these “lost years” of Palestinian history,28 “no Palestinian . . . organization of any kind existed.”29 It was not until Palestinians “discovered [themselves], discovered the world, and it discovered [them]” in the late 1960s that they entered the arena of world history.30 This article problematizes both of these historiographical narratives and their claims through an examination of the history of Palestinian literary and cultural criticism (al-naqd al-adabi wa-l-thaqafi) from 1948 to 1967. In doing so, the article accomplishes a two-fold aim. First, it undermines the “lost years” narrative and establishes instead the richness of Palestinian intellectual and critical output during the 1950s and 1960s. Second, the article seeks to puncture and do away with the topos of iltizam, arguing that Palestinian criticism and critical culture cannot be explained by the reductive framework of iltizam or written off as another (national) variant of it. To make my historical arguments, I survey journals, newspapers, and memoirs from 1948 to 1967. These sources enable me to foreground Palestinian voices and to explore how their perspectives on literature and politics can redress our understanding of an era often historicized as intellectually defined by iltizam or politically conquered by Arab nationalism.31 Conclusively, the Palestinian writers and critics I study sought a different, freer form of critical politics—a critical politics that does not envelop the immensity of these writers’ tragic existence in slogans of an imagined panArab unity or a utopian proletarian dictatorship. 59 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War Across much of the Arab world, literary and cultural criticism32— and the broader field of critique (naqd in Arabic)—was not an ivory-tower pursuit, but rather a productive activity capable of precipitating change and of challenging what was perceived as a retrograde Arab status quo. Still, in the Palestinian case, criticism can be further read as an expression of exilic anxieties, an intellectual panacea to marginalization at the hands of Arab peers, and an attempt to deal with the deleterious effects of an alienated existence. It is worth recalling, too, that critique was and continues to be a perilous activity in the Arab world, if not a lethal one. Consider the ghastly murders of critics of political Islam—Mahmud M. Taha (1909–85) in Sudan and Tahar Djaaout (1954–93) in Algeria—or of those who dared decry the postcolonial Arab state’s repressive politics—Sayyed Qutb (1906–66) in Egypt and Samir Kassir (1960–2005) in Lebanon.33 Modern Arab Criticism Over the first three decades of the twentieth century—amid a turbulent background of multiple wars, European imperial expansion, anticolonial mobilizations, and national revolts—a lively critical culture flourished in the cities of Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Khartoum, and Jerusalem. Literary criticism during this imperative period increasingly borrowed from discourses of nationalism and national renaissance (ba‘th). One such example was put forth by Ruhi al-Khalidi (1864–1913)—the Jerusalemite writer who lectured at the Sorbonne and officiated as an Ottoman counselor in Bordeaux—in al-Sayunizm ay al-Mas’ala al-Sahyuniyya (Zionism, or The Zionist Question).34 This 1912 manuscript represented an early work of literary-historical criticism steered by a patriotic dedication to Khalidi’s people and their resistance to Zionist expansion in Palestine. Although aspects of Khalidi’s treatment of Jewish history were inexpiably anti-semitic,35 his text’s language was perspicuous, targeting “basically educated Arabic readers.”36 Khalidi thus saw that criticism, when written unambiguously, could be weaponized as a means of national resistance—a theme Kanafani would later pick up in his 1967 Fi al-Adab al-Sahyuni (On Zionist Literature).37 Another complementary approach to the imbricated question of nation and literature was put forth by Egyptian novelist Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956) in his 1933 Thawrat al-Adab (A Revolution of Letters).38 Haykal 60 Adey Almohsen theorized a sharp, proportional relation between revolutionary politics and literature.39 The fate of national progress, Haykal declared, was incumbent upon the Arab intellectual. And, so, if national revolution was to break out, a revolution of letters had to take place first at the hands of a learned, youthful elite.40 One last contentious yet influential take on the same topic was put forth by Antun Sa‘adeh (1904–49)—the Syro-Lebanese diasporic activist and founder of the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP). Sa‘adeh posited, in al-Sira‘ al-Fikri fi al-Adab al-Suri (The Intellectual Struggle in Syrian Literature),41 that the worldliness of a given nation’s literature could not be gauged statistically by means of mass translation or global spread; rather, for literature to achieve the status of a world literature, it needed to tap into its unique reservoir of national thought.42 Sa‘adeh, as such, called upon Syrian writers to look inward to the soul of the Syrian nation and to create a Syrian literature unsullied by westerly or easterly influences.43 Sa‘adeh’s nationalist ahistorical rendering of Abbasid poets Abu Tammam (d. 845) and Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri (d. 1057) as the progenitors of an imagined Syrian nation notwithstanding, his interest in Arab literary heritage was far from idiosyncratic. And, indeed, during the early to mid-twentieth century, Arab critics showed great interest in the re-reading of turath and its reassessment for contemporary purposes. Two texts of literary criticism whose approaches to the question of turath were unique are Thuraya Malhas’s (1925–2013) Adab al-Ruh ‘ind al-‘Arab (Arabic Literature of the Spirit) and Rose Ghorayeb’s (1909–2006) al-Naqd al-Jamali wa-Atharuhu fi al-Naqd al-‘Arabi (Aesthetic Criticism and Its Influence on Arab Critique).44 Malhas—whose parents hailed from Nablus—first wrote Adab al-Ruh in 1951 as her MA thesis in Arabic at the American University of Beirut (AUB) before publishing it as a book in 1965.45 She therein traces the history of al-qiyam al-ruhiyya (spiritual values)—such as al-nafs (soul), al-kamal (perfection), al-sa‘ada (happiness), and al-khulud (perpetuity)—in Arabic poetry from the classical period into the modern.46 Damour-born Ghorayeb completed al-Naqd al-Jamali in 1945 but did not publish it until 1952. Hers was among the first attempts to examine turath and the corpus of classical Arab and Islamic texts through the lens of aesthetics and aesthetic theory, demonstrating how the likes of ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078) and Sayf al-Din al-Amidi (d. 1233) considered matters of beauty (jamal) central to any work of literature or poetry.47 Yet, despite 61 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War their originality, Ghorayeb and Malhas’s books remain on the fringes of the male-dominated canon of literary criticism in Arabic and have yet to receive the attention they deserve. Despite the efforts of these and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics, it was not until the contributions of Taha Hussein (1889–1973) that Arab criticism congealed into a full-fledged discipline and a socially centered form of writing. His criticism evolved into such a menacing craft that it drew the ire of conservative clerics from al-Azhar.48 In 1926, Hussein published Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry) based on his lectures as professor of history at the Egyptian University.49 He therein interrogates the historicity of turath, animating his method with Cartesian skepticism.50 Hussein’s reliance on René Descartes (1596–1650) did not stem, however, from a purely mimetic position.51 His aim, rather, was to excavate an old field with new tools: to liberate turath from stasis and consecration as well as open up a subject treated with “faith and certitude” and democratize it.52 Hussein’s main thesis in Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili questioned the veracity of much of pre-Islamic poetry, arguing that its language and imagery reflected the political conflicts of later periods following the death of Prophet Muhammad.53 His contested thesis aside, of particular interest in critical terms is Hussein’s attack on those who exercised a monopoly over the study of the Arabic language and approached its history apologetically.54 For Hussein, in order for Arab letters to modernize and regain their former vigor, critics ought to let go of their prejudices as Arabs or as Muslims: “Yes! When researching Arab literature and its history, we must forget our nationalism and its formalities and forget our religion and all that relates to it.”55 Hussein’s historical and secular approach to pre-Islamic poetry—for many gatekeepers the crowning achievement of Arabic literature—attracted censure from clerics and the state, among others. Hussein was tried for heresy though eventually found not guilty. The accompanying public scandal nevertheless forced him to revise the book in 1927 (publishing it under a different title).56 Arab critics from late Ottoman and British mandate Palestine were equally engaged in this late nahdawi57 intellectual exchange. One such critic was Ahmad al-Karmi (1894–1927), the brother of famed nationalist poet Abu Salma (1909–80). For Karmi, criticism was of foremost importance in cultural terms: “a catalyst for new thought” and “a pure, bloodless revolution 62 Adey Almohsen against [societal] faults and missteps.”58 As such, he sought to devise a set of ethics for what he called “al-naqd al-mawdu‘i” (objective criticism).59 Karmi called on critics to respect the dignity of those whose works they assessed and to write criticism both open to engagement with foreign thought (as opposed to being culturally and intellectually insular) and aimed at renewal as its purpose.60 Arguably, Karmi anticipated what Egyptian critic and literary historian Muhammed Mandur (1907–65) later postulated in his 1944 Fi al-Mizan al-Jadid (In the New Balance).61 Therein, Mandur railed against the “chaos of critique” and advocated for a criticism that is coherent, incisive, and moored to everyday life.62 Despite his death at a young age, Karmi was an active participant in the intellectual circles of Jerusalem and Damascus, including the likes of Qustaki al-Humsi (1858–1941), Mikhail Naimy (1889–1988), Khalil Baydas (1874–1949), May Ziadah (1886–1941), and ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964).63 An Emancipatory Criticism? With the signing of armistice agreements in 1949 between Israel and each of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, new forms of naqd swept the Arab world. This torrent of critical thought reflected the frustrations of the postwar youth with Arab ineptitude in Palestine and it broke out against the polarization of the emerging Cold War. Many Arab critics began to theorize the political need for a more grounded approach to writing, one where literature and poetry reflected the real world in its all of its dolor and glee.64 This dynamic did not emerge ex nihilo. For example, someone like Farah Antun (1874–1922)—the late nahdawi figure who advocated for the induction of the novel into the canon of Arab letters—saw writing as an ethical vocation whose aims were both edifying and provocative.65 Similarly, Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan (1905–41) stressed poetry’s ability to instigate revolt and its effectiveness as political weapon.66 This idea of a critical link between language, writing, and political realities was initially nebulous and variously named.67 Its resonance was nevertheless decisive within an Arab intellectual scene perturbed by the 1948 defeat—not just military defeat but also political and cultural. A forerunner to this tendency toward politicized forms of criticism was ‘Umar Fakhuri (1895–1946), the Lebanese socialist author.68 In his 63 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War role as a critic, Fakhuri wrote on the responsibility of literature in “revolutionizing reality,” and on how nature and day-to-day life constituted an infinite reservoir of ideas and insights for the “true writer or true poet.”69 Another pioneer who theorized a close affinity between the literary and the sociopolitical was Egyptian poet and critic Lewis ‘Awad (1915–90). ‘Awad’s theoretical finesse was on display in the 120-page preface to his 1947 translation of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.70 He deploys the method of historical materialism to analyze English romantic literature, contending that “romanticism is the literary expression of the bourgeois movement” and generalizing, more broadly, that “schools of thought and art could not be understood without first assessing the grounds from which they arose.”71 Critics like Mandur and the Lebanese Ra’if Khuri (1913–67) confronted the neatness of the Marxist literary paradigm of reflection and offered alternative theorizations on how life and literature intersected. For Mandur, what distinguished literature—as a work of art—from philosophy or science was the “aesthetic value inherent in its very method,” regardless of whether this literature was individualist or political in its aims.72 Mandur therefore rejected writing that was exclusively committed to addressing social or political problems at the expense of beauty and style.73 Further setting apart Mandur from many of his contemporaries was his call for art and literature to lead life on all fronts rather than mirroring it or hermetically opining about it.74 Khuri, not unlike Mandur, decried Soviet-style socialist realism and its “pre-engineered” perspective on the relation between writers and their societies.75 Khuri advocated for a local criticism stemming from lived Arab realities and wrote against those who desired to apply mechanistically Marxist or existentialist models to Arab culture, literature, and politics.76 He understood criticism not as an arcane specialty that spoke of the masses on paper or idolized the wretched among them, but rather as a “social career,” which actively supported calls for “dignity and bread” and advocated on behalf of those “toiling toward national liberation and social renewal” in the Arab world—regardless of the critic’s class background.77 These and other theoretical interventions regarding the sociopolitical tasks of criticism in the post-World War II Arab world were initially scattered across pamphlets, essays, and journals. It was not until the arrival of magazines such as al-Adab in 1953 and al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya in 1952 that this trend—soon to be loosely dubbed as iltizam—found an intel- 64 Adey Almohsen lectual home.78 Consequently, by the early 1950s iltizam—as a method of criticism and of literary and artistic production—rose to prominence and boasted a sizable following in the Arab world.79 Iltizam, however, was an ideologically and an intellectually heterogeneous phenomenon.80 In ways, iltizam was a big-tent tendency: a catch-all term for those who believed that literature and criticism were answerable to some abstract, unified entity, be it the proletarian masses for Arab communists or the pan-Arab nation for Ba‘thists and Nasserists.81 Contests over the role of literature and the responsibility of criticism were routine among the partisans of iltizam. Eventually, different journals came to espouse different visions of iltizam. Al-Adab, for instance, fancied an Arab nationalist understanding of iltizam—tinged with a healthy dose of Sartrean existentialism—under the headship of Francophile pan-Arabists Idriss and ‘Aida Matarji (b. 1934). Alternatively, al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya closely associated iltizam with the Soviet prototype of socialist realism favored by Lebanese communist critic Husayn Muruwwa (1910–87).82 Etymologically, the term iltizam was introduced to the Arabic lexicon by Taha Hussein through the short-lived magazine he edited, al-Katib al-Misri (The Egyptian Scribe).83 Between 1946 and 1947, Hussein published a series of articles commenting on France’s postwar cultural scene and how some of the questions raised in Paris reappeared in Cairo and other Arab capitals.84 He focused, in particular, on debates led by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) about the political commitment of authors and appraised, in detail, Sartre’s articles on the idea of “engaged literature.” Contrary to historiographical consensus, Hussein did not reject the concept of commitment outright.85 Rather, he took issue with aspects of its Sartrean definition. According to Hussein, Sartre was at fault for excluding poetry and rendering it as a purely aesthetic pursuit.86 Hussein alternatively posited that linking literary production to politics was not a modern contraption. Rather, authors—be they French or Arab, ancient or modern—have always crafted texts that were shaped by their social contexts and that responded to the pressing matters of their age.87 Hussein—who serialized in al-Katib al-Misri a set of “socially conscious” short stories sharply critical of the Egyptian monarchy and its pauperization of the Egyptian people—believed that “literary retirement [was] a death sentence” and that authors ought, instead, to “join people in their agony and joy.”88 Hussein closed his discussions of iltizam by warning, 65 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War fatefully, against the writing of a literature both far too politicized to the point of triteness as well as far too removed from real life to the point of irrelevance.89 It is worth noting that the inaccurate categorization of Hussein as an apolitical critic is owed to the mistranslation of the Arabic term for politics: siyasa. As Robyn Creswell points out, siyasa—in its common Arabic usage—connotes an “activity of oppression . . . or even fanaticism.”90 Siyasa therefore—for the most part—refers to politics in a negative sense: a politics of dogmatism and ideologization that Hussein held in disfavor (as opposed to a politics of emancipation). I would add that the corruption characteristic of postcolonial Arab regimes combined with the rise and consolidation of an authoritarian military elite throughout the 1950s and 1960s increasingly equated the term siyasa with illiberalism and despotic rule. For those gripped by iltizam, there was no place in their vision of post-World War II Arab culture for Hussein’s shunning of siyasa, or the allegedly bourgeois investment in questions of alienation typical of Jabra I. Jabra (1920–94) and other Palestinian authors.91 In 1955, iltizam reached a crescendo with the publication of Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya (On Egyptian Culture) by exiled Egyptian professors ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis (1923–2009) and Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim (1922–2009).92 They denounced Hussein and his generation of critics, condemning those who called for “absolute individualism and freedom” at the expense of national liberation.93 The book itself collated Anis and Alim’s dissentious articles on the state of Egyptian culture and opened with a trenchant foreword by Mruwwah, who attempted to situate Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya in a broader Arab context.94 For many, the text amounted to an “intellectual coup”—its impact ringing well beyond Egypt and distending into a “critique of culture in every Arab nation.”95 Its rigid assessments notwithstanding, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya was a “historical, literary document” of apodictic consequence.96 Anis and ‘Alim explained culture as “the totality of social labor expended by a designated nation in all of its classes and sectors.”97 Accordingly, literature was the “[essential] expression of societal events and positions.”98 From this structuralist vantage point, Anis and ‘Alim define criticism as less an exercise in aesthetic discernment and more an “organic undertaking” that lays bare the “social content” of a certain work of literature.99 Through such firm claims, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya decreed a historical divide and an 66 Adey Almohsen “epistemological schism” in Arab naqd, effectively separating itself from all forms of criticism that antedated it—particularly that of the pre-World War II period.100 In December 1957—not long after the literary event that was Fi alThaqafa al-Misriyya—Arab thinkers and writers convened in Cairo for the third Conference of Arab Authors. Yusuf al-Siba‘i (1917–78), the brigadiercum-intellectual and cultural trustee of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), organized the conference and presided over it.101 For his part, Nasser hosted a delegation of Arab writers at his presidential palace and preached about their national duty to unfetter Arab letters from the chains of “foreign control or influence.”102 Despite the conference’s pan-Arab focus, Palestinians received little attention. The only two mentions rendered them as either a “destitute Arab people” (sha‘b ‘arabi musharrad) or as the numeric sum of a “million refugees” (milyun laji’).103 The conference’s closing declaration reduced the plight of Palestinians to an imperial plot against the “sacred cause” of Arab unity and an affront to Arab dignity.104 Such dynamics did not go unnoticed. Palestinian participant Muhammed Y. Najm did not find appeal in the idea of iltizam “in its prevalent definition” or in its arrogant dismissal of opponents as “bourgeois or ivory-tower.”105 Many attendees had little patience for such views, as when one of them criticized another Palestinian participant, al-Sawafiri, for his “juvenile zeal.”106 The 1957 conference sounded the death knell of intellectual freedom in Egypt and marked the cooptation of iltizam and its devotees by Nasser’s authoritarian state.107 And as 1958 opened with yet another specious pan-Arab victory in the establishment of the short-lived United Arab Republic (UAR, 1958–61), iltizam became all the more synonymous with state-sponsored intellectualism. This uncompromising statist turn gradually engrossed different Arab periodicals, including several based in the alleged liberal beachhead of Beirut. It was in this context that Idriss and Matarji’s al-Adab transformed into a pastiche of pro-Nasserist cultural periodicals, parroting Arab nationalist rhetoric in the garb of critique. In spite of this history, scores of historians and literary scholars have long treated iltizam as “the keyword”108 for understanding Arab intellectual history after the Nakba and hailed its mouthpieces for playing an “active role in the liberation of the Arab people.”109 Such interpretations obviate the multitude of opprobrium that iltizam received from many Palestinian and 67 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War other Arab critics.110 Certainly, recent histories have tried to avoid reductive renderings of post-World War II Arab intellectual history by exploring iltizam’s adversary: namely, the arguably “uncommitted” trend represented by poetic modernists such as Syrian Adonis (b. 1930) and Lebanese Unsi al-Hajj (1937–2014), among others.111 Such attempts nevertheless turn a monolith into a binary of iltizam versus non-iltizam—whatever the latter may be. My point, rather, is to go “beyond iltizam” altogether and to understand, instead, post-World War II criticism as a complex and often chaotic movement of thought and counter-thought.112 Nakba and the Critique of/in Exile The historiographic fixation on iltizam (or on its counter) has overlooked a mix of intellectual voices from the 1950s and 1960s that merit further inquiry: from personalists, hedonistic existentialists, and scores of Arab feminists, to Palestinian thinkers variably interrogating their alienated condition.113 This section concerns itself with the latter: that is, Palestinian contributions to the field of post-World War II Arab criticism, inspecting the (marginal) place they occupied within it. Indeed, the Palestinian figures whose critical writings I inspect defy neat categorization. For example, many scholars pigeonhole Kanafani as the quintessential committed writer because of his theory of resistance literature.114 Yet he himself took issue with iltizam’s rejection of the role of personal experience in criticism and derided communist critics who lambasted Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago (1957) as being steered by the “objectivity of [Soviet] international strategy.”115 Studying Arab intellectual history through the lens of iltizam—or, through its myopic archive—offers but a partial picture of an otherwise rich period while privileging an unyielding intellectual trend. As attendees of the 1957 Cairo conference sang the praise of Nasser, Arab nationalism, and “the right kind of iltizam,”116 Jabra penned an essay critical of what in his view was the pitiful state of contemporary Arab culture. For Jabra, Arabic literature suffered under the spell of iltizam while its raison d’être—that of the human—was all but forgotten.117 Why? Because, Jabra claimed, iltizam abstracted suffering and expressed no more than the “froth of emotions.”118 The “chorus” of iltizam partisans, likewise, flattened the miseries of everyday life and rendered them into the material of sloganeering 68 Adey Almohsen and political one-upmanship.119 In light of iltizam’s “reduction of the cause of literature,” Jabra in many ways foretold its demise as a critical and literary trend in the Arab world.120 Such was the case a mere decade later.121 As a Palestinian inured to “psychological ruptures,” Jabra likewise questioned the “spurious compassion” Arab thinkers displayed toward the cause of his people and lamented that the literary treatment of Palestinians as refugees equaled an “annihilation (mahq)” of their individuality.122 Jabra’s centering of human individuality was not surprising when one considers that exile is an extremely personal affair.123 Or, when one considers that Jabra wrote this at the same time as Arabists and communists gathered in Cairo and spoke of Palestinians as a heteronomous mass.124 In closely reading the works of diasporic Palestinian critics after 1948, one senses how the Nakba affected their perspective toward their day’s literary issues and how its experience informed their stance vis-à-vis Arab culture. This is not to say that naqd in its Palestinian variant was consistent. Rather, the ordeal of removal has instilled shared features in Palestinian criticism: a “unity of the diverse,” to borrow the Marxist formulation.125 This section will point to these identifiable features through assessing the works of a few Palestinian poets and critics. Salma K. Jayyusi (b. 1929), akin to Jabra, took issue with iltizam’s wanton call for intellectuals to be “on-duty [against] traitors.”126 For Jayyusi, Arab nationalism offered no solution for Palestinians and their struggle since it sought to “build a new world,” while Palestinians sought a future that holds the “possibility of return” to a lost yet familiar world.127 In Arab settings, Palestinians were put in their place and constantly reminded of their marginal status as refugees—be it in official transactions, social interactions, or even in intellectual circles.128 This alienated existence, therefore, prompted many Palestinian critics to question the assuredness of ideology, especially during an era when Cold War ideologues locked horns. Ultimately, for Jayyusi, the Palestinian critical mood stemmed from the unique “world of the Nakba:” an ever-fluctuating, crisis-ridden world skeptical of teleological formulae and where slogans of “history-making” or “Arab struggle” have little place.129 Jerusalem-born Ibrahim Abu Nab (1931–91) wrote that many of the literary and poetic reforms in the post-World War II Arab world were indebted to the Nakba’s sobering effect on Arab intellectual life—having 69 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War inflicted it with a sense of “deep and bitter sadness.”130 The Nakba—as a tragic event and a literary trope—had its limits, however. For Abu Nab, Arab and Palestinian writers who employed “Nakba clichés” of struggling against imperialism and against its “Israeli offshoot” were, in effect, veiling “reductive and predetermined sermonizing” under the garb of radical literature.131 Such authors—who churned out not literature (adab) but “string beans (fasuliya)”—were stuck in a backward “pre-Nakba” mentality, trading Palestinian pain for political gain.132 It follows then, for Abu Nab, that to write literature faithful to the Nakba experience one ought to record the productive and destructive contradictions of exile and to communicate the depths of (Palestinian) alienation, so much so that the reader of this literature could sense the Nakba in affect as well as in flesh.133 Alongside an aversion to ideological sloganeering in literature and a rejection of iltizam’s abstracting of the personal, many Palestinian critics embraced post-World War II reforms of Arab letters. Some even spearheaded modernist movements in art and poetry. Baghdad, where Jabra settled after his removal, boasted an unconventional cultural scene in this period.134 There, the restive Jabra co-founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group (1951): an art collective that aimed at reinterpreting turath and Islamic arts through a sharply modernist lens.135 Within Baghdad’s intellectual circles, Jabra made no distinction between his roles as critic, artist, novelist, and poet.136 All expressed the “humane experience and agony” of his exile in a unique way.137 Ihsan ‘Abbas (1920–2003) was one of the earliest critics to support the free-verse experimentation of Iraqi poets during the late 1940s. This was in stark opposition to his coevals who attacked the likes of ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati (1926–99) with the “mattocks and axes” of conservative critique.138 ‘Abbas described himself as someone who lingered on “the margins of margins”139—twice alienated for being a Palestinian in a “cruel” Arab milieu and for being a critic in a “dormant society” that despised critique.140 In light of this self-conception, ‘Abbas displayed the utmost sensitivity to the literature of the margins. During his tenure as a professor of Arabic in Khartoum from 1951 to 1961, he took it upon himself to popularize the gems of modern Sudanese literature to Arab readers.141 By 1966, ‘Abbas’s efforts paid off when Sudanese novelist al-Tayyib Salih (1929–2009) published his now-celebrated novel, Season of Migration to the North, in a magazine run by another Palestinian: namely, Tawfiq Sayigh’s Hiwar (Dialogue, 1962–67)— 70 Adey Almohsen the Arabic arm of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. Sayigh (1923–71) himself opened up Hiwar to contributors from all corners of the Arab world and dedicated entire issues to topics such as the arts and letters of sub-Saharan Africa, Afro-Asian socialisms, the history of black Muslims, sexuality in the Arab world, and the civil rights movement in the United States.142 The city, as a space encapsulating the antinomies of modernity, was a recurrent theme in Palestinian critical thought. Like their co-nationals, several Palestinian critics dwelled on the thresholds of Arab cities. And the volatility of postcolonial Arab politics dragooned them through a cycle of embrace and banishment as they were made to trek from one Arab metropole to another. ‘Abbas, for example, resided in and exited Cairo, Khartoum, Beirut, and Amman.143 For Jabra, the city in all of it promises, desires, miseries, liberties, and restraints was a large-scale embodiment of his psychological flaws and exilic anxieties. Yet the city was also a site of return: a place where exiles would finally rest after a circuitous journey of loss—though Jabra, Abbas, and others perished before they would return to the “city” they imagined and longed for.144 Palestinian critics, ultimately, persevered in the Arab cities which they transiently resided in order “to prove their beingness (kaynuna) and to overcome their crushed selves.”145 Another aspect of Palestinian critique—one that is missed in postcolonial circles where Palestinian literature has become trendy—relates to the question of the self. In a telling 1959 exchange between Kanafani and Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika (1923–2007), the self and its place in the discipline of literary criticism was a major point of contention. Mala’ika, in that year’s April issue of al-Adab, proposed the creation of a regular section dedicated to “raising the caliber of [Arabic] literary criticism.”146 Although Mala’ika disparaged the sloppy language of several poets and their disregard for poetic meter (‘arud), the main takeaway from her inaugural article is that criticism ought to be objective, dispassionate, and driven by a “scientific ethos unsullied by emotion.”147 Kanafani penned a rejoinder to Mala’ika’s article in the following issue. There he took issue with her claim about criticism’s objectivity and argued instead that criticism was the product of “personal affect,” expressing the critic’s subjectivity and subjective reflection on a work of art or literature.148 Kanafani further suggested that for him, as a Palestinian, personal experience and memory were inseparable from the act of critique.149 71 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War A final point of commonality in Palestinian naqd was an insistence to introduce complex ideas in a language accessible to many readers—not unlike Khalidi in his 1912 al-Sayunizm as we saw before. Whether or not this stemmed from an intimacy with the residents of refugee camps, critics like Jabra, Abbas, and Kanafani it must be said to have succeeded in democratizing critical prose and demystifying it.150 Sayigh, for example, published articles to introduce American and English letters, while Jabra surveyed modern art history movements and worked on defining and Arabizing critical terms such as monologue, counterpoint, and climax among several others.151 That said, I would like to close by pointing to the fact that critics considered here shared either an Anglo-American education or an AngloAmerican training in terms of reading and influence. Jabra was educated in Cambridge and undertook research at Harvard; Sayigh taught at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge; Jayyusi studied in London and lectured at the universities of Utah, Michigan, Texas, and Washington; ‘Abbas, although educated in Egypt, taught at AUB, visited Princeton, and translated American literature including a refined translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; even Kanafani, who studied in Damascus, was an avid reader of American literature and once described himself as the Palestinian version of William Faulkner, given his artistic playfulness and singular geographic focus (Kanafani choosing Palestine where Faulkner chose Mississippi).152 Ultimately, Edward Said himself is a perpetuation to this decades-long exchange between American and Palestinian intellectual histories.153 Conclusion Despite the scope of their contributions, why were these Palestinian critics largely written out of post-World War II intellectual history? And do the shared features of Palestinian naqd point to any sort of structural or institutional arrangement? Many scholars have reductively treated post-World War II Arab intellectual dynamics either through the lens of iltizam or through the perspective of the rise and fall narrative of Arab nationalism. These tendencies are also coupled with writing off the 1948–67 period as one of nationalist and political inertia in Palestinian history. The nature of the intellectual archive (i.e., journals, magazines, newspapers, and other ephemera) lends itself, somewhat, to such analyses. Before the rise of inde- 72 Adey Almohsen pendent Palestinian cultural bodies beginning in the mid-1960s—such as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Research Center, the Institute for Palestine Studies, and the General Union of Palestinian Writers—Palestinian writings were scattered and disembodied in terms of publication and circulation. Palestinians wrote in a plethora of periodicals that were published across a vast Arab geography. To bring together these different articles and read them as either an organic whole or a critical tradition requires working across publications, repositories, and archives. As such, for most historians, Palestinian contributions between 1948 and the mid-1960s fell sideways, at best overlooked and at worst brushed off by those teasing out neater narratives about the period. This article constitutes an attempt to collate this disembodied Palestinian critical output, which, in fact, resisted institutionalization. Jayyusi herself was of a similar opinion, when in 1964 she described Palestinian intellectuals as a “force lacking organization,” with no “cultural infrastructure” that could extricate them from “the mazes of exile.”154 Palestinian naqd between 1948 and the mid-1960s, thus, resembled the messy reality of exile: that is, alterity in the face of the sameness of Arab politics (siyasa) and in the face of the Cold War’s ideological bickering.155 This Palestinian critical output—of which the above-discussed works are a small example—negates over-generalizing claims about the supposed slimness of the Palestinian archive or, worse, its loss. The Palestinian archive— whatever that may be in terms of make-up, locale, or organization—has been the subject of extensive theorization during the last few years.156 More than two decades of archival theory have animated this late move within the field of Palestine studies. Recent works on the epistemic and material possibility of a Palestinian archive have, rightly, echoed problematics associated with archives: their documentary control over the past; their alignment with political power; and their sanitization of history from categories of gender, race, and class.157 Yet, such treatments presume that the Palestinian archive is a consolidated, self-evident object. The Palestinian archive is plural, lost, looted, scattered, neglected, and rotting; it is an archive whose oral history component remains largely “out there” despite laudable attempts to catalog it.158 I argue, like others, that we need to read, sort, and assemble—rather than bemoan—the Palestinian archive. While exile may have dispersed the Palestinian archive and Israeli aggression may have looted parts of it, neither fact has obliterated it yet.159 73 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War Through reading a portion of the post-1948 Palestinian archive of literary criticism, I sought to do away with frameworks that collapse the complexities of post-World War II Arab intellectual history under notions of Arab nationalism, iltizam, or Cold War ideological rivalry. Such narratives impose neatness onto what was, in effect, a much more chaotic intellectual scene. As much as this article sought to demonstrate the complexities of postwar Arab intellectual history, it also sought to shed light on a set of interesting players left out from this history. Ultimately, what is at hand is an invitation for future researchers to open up the Arab intellectual past and bring from its margins more and more liminal figures. 74 Adey Almohsen ENDNOTES Author’s Note: This article benefited from the thoughtful comments of Ziad Abu-Rish, the editorial team, and anonymous reviewers at Arab Studies Journal. I would also like to express my gratitude to my awesome partner Viktoria Pötzl; my caring parents and family; my mentors (Daniel Schroeter, Yoav Di-Capua, and Faisal Darraj); and the members of my dissertation committee (Patricia Lorcin, Thomas Wolfe, Timothy Brennan, and Joseph Farag) for their consistent support and near-infinite patience. I dedicate this article to my parents, Sawsan and Abdulhameed, without whom my successes would have been impossible. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Ahmad Shakir al-Karmi and ‘Abd al-Karim al-Karmi, Ahmad Shakir al-Karmi: Mukhtarat min Atharihi al-Adabiyya wa-l-Naqdiyya wa-l-Qasasiyya (Damascus: Dar Atlas, 1964), 119. All translations from the original Arabic mine unless otherwise noted. Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” in Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung: Volume III (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), https://www. marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm. Suheil Idriss, “Shakawa al-Adab al-‘Arabi al-Hadith,” al-Adab 1, no. 5 (1953): 2. Ibid. Ibid. Neither Idriss nor his contemporaries appear to have ever defined the term “Nakba literature.” Rather, their writings imply an intersubjective understanding of the term to mean any fiction and non-fiction writing by Arabs or Palestinians that takes the Nakba as a core inspiration, concern, theme, or impetus. Ibid. The idea of iltizam as a literary mode includes local Arab influences (e.g., the critical works of Lebanese ‘Umar Fakhuri (1895–1946) and Ra’if Khuri (1913–67) as well as the poetry of Palestinian Ibrahim Touqan (1905–41) alongside both Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905–80) idea of engagement in literature and the Soviet model of socialist realism. As of late, iltizam has been a trendy term used by many historians and literary academics to sum up a complex post-World War II intellectual map, especially between 1948 and 1967. Yoav Di-Capua and Robyn Creswell offer critical analyses of the period in general and iltizam in particular. Di-Capua historicizes iltizam’s usage, variants, rise to prominence, and subsequent decline. Creswell explores the contemporaneous adversary of iltizam, the poetic modernism espoused by the circle of Beirut’s Shi‘r magazine (1957–63, 1967–70). See Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Idriss, “Shakawa,” 5. ‘Isa al-Na‘uri, “Ma’sat Filastin wa-Atharuha fi al-Adab,” al-Adab 1, no. 6 (1953): 61. Ibid. Ibid., 61–2. Ibid., 62. Suheil Idriss, “Rad Ra’is al-Tahrir,” al-Adab 1, no. 6 (1953): 62. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Abd al-Latif Sharara, “Istilham al-Nakba,” al-Adab 1, no. 7 (1953): 75. Ibid. ‘Isa al-Na‘uri, “Hawla Ta’thir al-Ma’sa Aydan,” al-Adab 1, no. 7 (1953): 75–6. Na‘uri was referring to anthologies in preparation by al-Sawafiri and Najm. Al-Sawafiri published his anthology a decade later in 1963. Najm scrapped the project altogether. For anthologies besides Ghassan Kanafani’s famed 1966 and 1968 works on resistance literature, see Thuraya 75 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Malhas, Muqaddimat al-Adab al-Filastini al-Mu‘asir fi al-Ma‘raka (1970); Kamil al-Sawafiri, al-Sh‘ir al-‘Arabi al-Hadith fi Ma’sat Filastin 1917–1955 (Cairo: Matba‘at Nahdat Misr, 1963); Saleh al-Ashtar, Fi Shi‘r al-Nakba: Bahth Takhtiti fi Asda’ Nakbat Filastin fi al-Shi‘r al-‘Arabi al-Mu‘asir (Damascus: University of Damascus Press, 1960). Al-Na‘uri, “Hawla Ta’thir al-Ma’sa Aydan,” 75–6. Ibid. Ibid. Examples, at least in terms of the Arabic novel and short story, include Hanna Mina (1924–2018), Muta‘ al-Safadi (1929–2016), Yusuf al-Siba‘i (1917–78), and Idriss. For more on the variances of these trends in post-World War II intellectual history, see Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism. The loudest example of such argument was put forth in ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis and Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, ed. Husayn Mruwwah (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1989 [1955]). Ghassan Kanafani in 1963, quoted in Kharij al-Nas, “Adab Ghassan Kanafani,” Al Jazeera Channel, 24:35, 9 February 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiF7cofJYtg&t=13s. I investigate this decolonial framing of Palestine during the late 1960s in the final chapter of my PhD dissertation, which is provisionally titled “On Modernism’s Edge: An Intellectual History of Palestinians after 1948.” Ghassan Kanafani, Adab al-Muqawama fi Filastin al-Muhtalla 1948–1966 (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1966). Studies abbreviating the period’s history under the banner of iltizam include M.M. Badawi, “Commitment in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” in Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Issa J. Boullata (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1980), 23–46; and Verena Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment (Iltizam) and Committed Literature (al‐Adab al‐Multazim) in the Literary Circles of the Mashreq,” Arabic and Middle Eastern Literature 3, no. 1 (2000): 51–62. Recent exceptions critical of the iltizam narrative include the works of: Waed Athamneh, Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017); Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism; and Elias Khoury, “Beyond Commitment,” in Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on the Political in Arabic Literature Since the 1940s, ed. Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil (Weisbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2015), 79–88. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980), 158. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 177–9. Perry Anderson, “The House of Zion,” New Left Review, no. 96 (2015): 33–4. Though the specific quote is pulled from Anderson, his is not a unique position and it has been advanced by many scholars of Palestinian history. For example, see Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 2008), 98–148; Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21–35; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 176–86; William Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–3. Said, The Question of Palestine, xv. For a typical summation of the period under the banner of iltizam, see Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 53–5. For a typical summation of the period as defined by the rise and demise of Arab nationalist politics, see Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 76 Adey Almohsen 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 2016); Raymond Hinnebusch, The International Politics of the Middle East (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Yoav Di-Capua perceptively notes the need to write Arab intellectual histories moored in the rich tradition of literary criticism and naqd in Arabic: “The full history of Arab literary criticism is yet to be written.” Exceptions to this include two excellent essays by Pierre Cachia and Barbara Harlow, respectively. See Yoav Di-Capua, “The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the Fall of the Udaba,” in Commitment and Beyond, 103; Pierre Cachia, “The Critics,” in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M.M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 417–42; Barbara Harlow, “Memory and Historical Record: The Literature and Literary Criticism of Beirut 1982,” in Left Politics and the Literary Profession, ed. Lennard J. Davis and M. Bella Mirabella (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 186–208. As Cachia comments on the precarious career of Arab critics: “Taha Hussein was at one time accused of heresy and at another dismissed from his job and denied the right to lecture in public. Others, from al-‘Aqqad to ‘Awad, have seen the inside of monarchic and republican prisons. Hussein Mruwwah has died a violent death in the factionalism that is tearing Lebanon apart. There is a heroic dimension to modern Arabic writing. Sustaining it is an exalted notion of the function of literature” (emphasis added). Cachia, “The Critics,” 441–2. Khalidi completed the 120-page manuscript of al-Sayunizm in 1912, a few months before he passed away. It was only recently published by the Institute for Palestine Studies. See Ruhi al-Khalidi, al-Sayunizm ay al-Mas’ala al-Sahyuniyya: Awwal Dirasa ‘Ilmiyya bi-l-‘Arabiyya ‘an al-Sahyuniyya, ed. Walid Khalidi (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2020). Also selections and analyses in Jonathan Gribetz, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 42, 45n22. On Khalidi’s stints at the Sorbonne and Bordeaux, see Faisal Darraj’s introduction to Ruhi al-Khalidi, Tarikh ‘Ilm al-Adab ‘ind al-Ifrinj wa-l-‘Arab wa-Victor Hugo, ed. Faisal Darraj (Doha: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa-l-Funun wa-l-Turath, 2013 [1904]), 8. On Khalidi’s subtle and not-so-subtle antisemitic arguments embedded in his 1912 manuscript, see Gribetz, Defining Neighbors, 54–82. Ibid., 49–50. Khalidi, Tarikh ‘Ilm al-Adab, 18–9; Ghassan Kanafani, Fi al-Adab al-Sahyuni (Cyprus: Rimal Publications, 2013 [1967]). Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Thawrat al-Adab (Cairo: Hindawi Foundation, 2013 [1933]). Ibid., 9–12. Haykal in Faisal Darraj, “al-Naqd al-Adabi,” in al-Thaqafa al-‘Arabiyya fi al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin: Hasila Awwaliyya, ed. Abdelilah Belkeziz and Mohamed Jamal Barout (Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies, 2013), 761. Published first in Sao Paulo in 1942 then in 1947 in Lebanon upon Sa‘adeh’s return there. Antun Sa‘adeh, al-Sira‘ al-Fikri fi al-Adab al-Suri (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1947 [1942]), 28–30. Ibid., 24–5. Thuraya A. Malhas, al-Qiyam al-Ruhhiyya fi al-Shi‘r al-‘Arabi, Qadimuhu wa-Hadithuhu, Hatta Muntassaf al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Lubnani, 1965); Rose Ghorayeb, al-Naqd al-Jamali wa-Atharuhu fi al-Naqd al-‘Arabi (Beirut: Dar al-‘Ilm lil-Malayin, 1952). Thuraya A. Malhas, “Adab al-Ruh ‘ind al-‘Arab” (MA thesis, American University of Beirut, 1951). Malhas, “Adab al-Ruh,” 4, 117–202. Ghorayeb, al-Naqd al-Jamali, 162–9. 77 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 Yunan Labib Rizq, “Taha Hussein’s Ordeal,” al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo, 24–30 May 2001), https://web.archive.org/web/20190203004449/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/2001/535/ chrncls.htm; Cachia, “The Critics,” 441–2. Taha Hussein, Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1926), 1. Hussein, Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili, 13–14. For example, see Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 6; Stephen Sheehi, “Inscribing the Arab Self: Butrus al-Bustani and Paradigms of Subjective Reform,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 1 (2000): 7–24. Hussein, Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili, 11–4; Faisal Darraj, “al-Naqd al-Adabi bayna al-Muhakah wa-l-Ibda‘,” in al-Thaqafa al-‘Arabiyya fi al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin, 776. Hussein, Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili, 7–10. Ibid., 12–4. Ibid., 12. Rizq, “Taha Hussein’s Ordeal.” For the differences between the 1926 and 1927 versions of the book and the scandal, see Yaron Ayalon, “Revisiting Taha Husayn’s Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili and its Sequel,” Die Welt des Islams 49 (2009): 98–121. According to Tarek el-Ariss, the nahda (Arab renaissance) 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 are attributed to nahda thought and institutions such as linguistic reform and the practice of translation; the emergence of new literary genres such as the novel; the periodical press, journalism, and a new publishing industry; professional associations and salons; a new education system; and, overall, an Enlightenment ideal of knowledge.” Tarek el-Ariss, ed., The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the “Nahda” (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2018), xv–xvi. Husam al-Khatib, al-Naqd al-Adabi fi al-Watan al-Filastini w-al-Shatat (Beirut: al-Muassasa al-‘Arabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 1996), 66, 72. Ibid., 72–7. Ibid. Mohammed Mandur, Fi al-Mizan al-Jadid (Cairo: Hindawi Foundation, 2017 [1944]). Mandur quoted in Darraj, “al-Naqd al-Adabi,” 762. Al-Khatib, al-Naqd al-Adabi, 66–71. Darraj, “al-Naqd al-Adabi,” 799–800. Ibid. Yaser Abu-‘Ulayan, “al-Itijah al-Qawmi fi Shi‘r Ibrahim Tuqan,” Bethlehem University Journal 16 (1997): 41–73. These terms included al-adab al-mas’ul (responsible literature), al-adab al-mukafih (struggle literature), al-adab al-hadif (purposeful literature), al-adab al-taqaddumi (progressive literature), adab al-ma‘raka (battle literature), and, later, adab al-muqawama (resistance literature). For more on Fakhuri in English, see Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 52–3. ‘Umar al-Fakhuri, al-Fusul al-Arba‘a, ed. ‘Izzat al-Qamhawi (Doha: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa-l-Funun wa-l-Turath, 2011 [1941]), 11–2; 24–5. Percy Shelley and Lewis ‘Awad, Prometheus Taliqan, trans. Lewis ‘Awad (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma li-l-Kitab, 1987 [1947]) Ibid., 80–2. Also see Awad, quoted in Darraj, “al-Naqd al-Adabi,” 799, 806. Mandur, al-Adab wa-Madhahibuhu (Cairo: Nahdat Misr, 1949), 190–2. Ibid. Mandur, “al-Manhaj al-Idiyuluji fi al-Naqd,” al-Majalla (Cairo) 7, no. 73 (1963): 14. Mandur 78 Adey Almohsen 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 further argues that the writing of literary history is pivotal to the development and modernization of national identity. By registering moments of openness in the classical canon, Mandur—like Hussein before him—sought to disarm rising anti-intellectual currents that in his view hijacked turath to sustain “outmoded customs and conventions.” Ra‘if Khuri, quoted in Faisal Darraj, “Ra‘if Khuri,” al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi (Beirut) 37, no. 425 (2014): 85. Ra‘if Khuri, “Wajibat al-Naqid,” al-Adab, 6, no. 1 (1958): 107. Darraj, “Ra’if Khuri,” 84–6. Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 64–9, 92–3; Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 56. Cachia, “The Critics,” 436–8. Ibid. A similar point has been made by Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab in 1961. See Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, “Commitment and Non-Commitment in Modern Arabic Literature,” trans. Thomas Levi Thompson (1961), https://www.academia.edu/37675314/Translation_ of_Badr_Sh%C4%81kir_al_Sayy%C4%81bs_1961_Lecture_Commitment_and_Non_ Commitment_in_Modern_Arabic_Literature_. Di-Capua discusses the differences and battles between communists and Arab nationalists in al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya and al-Adab. See Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 77–107. It was Klemm, however, who first raised the topic. Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 56. Hussein explained his choice for the magazine’s name as follows: “[the magazine] owed its name to the famed ancient sculpture of the amanuensis or seated scribe … [it] idealizes Egypt’s mytho-historical role in world culture as the inventors of writing.” Quoted in English translation by Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 58. Di-Capua adds that Hussein would later be the target of ridicule and disdain by the Arab youth who espoused iltizam over the 1950s and 1960s (61–3). Also see Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 51–3. Taha Hussein, “Mulahazat,” al-Katib al-Misri (Cairo), no. 21 (1947): 9–21; Taha Hussein, “al-Adab Bayna al-Ittisal wa-l-Infisal,” al-Katib al-Misri, no. 11 (1946): 373–88. Also see David DiMeo, Committed to Disillusion: Activist Writers in Egypt from the 1950s to the 1980s (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016), 41–62. The belief that Hussein was an “elitist” who rejected socially conscious writing in favor of a l’art pour l’art position continues to resonate in the field of modern Arab intellectual history. One notable exception is the work of Hussam R. Ahmed, who treats Hussein as a seasoned political and cultural activist. See Hussam R. Ahmed, “Egyptian Cultural Expansionism: Taha Hussein Confronts the French in North Africa (1950-1952),” Die Welt des Islams 58, no. 4 (2018): 409–41; Hussam R. Ahmed, “Statecraft and Institution-Building between Two Revolutions: Taha Hussein and Egypt’s Road to Independence, 1919-52,” PhD diss., McGill University, 2018. It appears that many historians and literary scholars reproduced, uncritically, the allegations of Arab nationalist and communist writers against Hussein in the 1950s. See Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 58–61. Hussein, “Mulahazat,” 13–5. Hussein, “al-Adab Bayna al-Ittisal wa-l-Infisal,” 376–88. Ibid., 375, 379. Also see Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 59. Hussein, “al-Adab Bayna al-Ittisal wa-l-Infisal,” 378. Creswell, City of Beginnings, 23. Faisal Darraj, “al-Waqi‘iyya bayna al-Naqd wa-l-Idiyulujiyya,” in al-Thaqafa al-‘Arabiyya fi al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin, 808–12. 79 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis and Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, ed. Husayn Mruwwah (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1989 [1955]). Anis and al-‘Alim, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, 29, 3–13, 25–30. Also see Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 83–6. Ibid. Sa‘dallah Wannus, “al-Muqadimma,” in Taha Hussein: al-‘Aqlaniyya, al-Dimuqratiyya, alHadatha, vol. 1, ed. Faisal Darraj, ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, and Sa‘dallah Wannus (Nicosia: IBAL Publishing, 1990), 8–9; Anis and al-‘Alim, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, 3–6. Darraj, “al-Naqd al-Adabi,” 801. Anis and al-‘Alim, Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, 25. Ibid., 44. Ibid. Or, what came to be known as the intellectual battle of shuyukh (the old) versus shabab (the youth). Di-Capua analyzed this intellectual-generational battle at length and argued that the shuyukh eventually lost and fell out of favor. I take issue with his article’s assertion (as to why, read note 113 below). Di-Capua, “The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the ‘Fall of the Udaba,’” in Commitment and Beyond, 89–104. Egyptian novelist Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987) described Siba‘i as the “major of cultural security,” a reference to his military history and his tight rein over Egypt’s cultural scene. See Nerfan Nabil, “Yusuf as-Siba’i . . . Raed al-Amn al-Thaqafi,” al-Bawaba News, 16 June 2018, http://www.albawabhnews.com/3148936. Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 113. Gamal Abdel Nasser, “Hajatuna ila al-Taharrur al-Fikri,” al-Adab 6, no. 1 (1958): 3. “Nida’ ila Udaba’ al-‘Alam,” al-Adab 6, no. 1 (1958): 4; “Waqa’i‘ Mu’tamar al-Udaba’,” al-Adab 6, no. 1 (1958): 101. “Waqa’i‘ Mu’tamar al-Udaba’,” 101. Ibid., 117; Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 119. Sami al-Durubi, “Qara’tu fi al-‘Adad al-Madi min al-Adab,” al-Adab 6, no. 2 (1958): 87. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, Reissue with a New Preface (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 [1962]), 355–6; Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 115–9. Cachia, “The Critics,” 437. Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 54. For examples, see Salma K. Jayyusi, “Hawla Minbar al-Naqd,” al-Adab 7, no. 5 (1959): 57–9; ‘Isa al-Na‘uri, “Taqaddumiyya wa-Ta’akhkhuriyya,” al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya 6, no.1 (1957): 52–5; Jabra I. Jabra, “‘Awd ‘ala Aqni‘at al-Haqiqa wa-Aqni‘at al-Khayal,” Hiwar 4, no. 5 (1966): 70–80; al-Sayyab, “Commitment and Non-Commitment in Modern Arabic Literature”; Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, “al-Hurriyya wa-l-Tufan,” al-Adib 17, no. 1 (1958): 12–15, 85. Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 120–1; Creswell, City of Beginnings, 38–9. I borrow the phrase from Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury (b. 1948). See Khoury, “Beyond Commitment.” Much of the historiography dealing with this intellectual moment has uncritically consumed and replicated the binaries put forth by Anis and al-‘Alim in Fi al-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, misinterpreting ideological statement for historical effect. Decades later, at the close of the twentieth century, it was not the polemical, ideologized archive of iltizam that was revisited and recovered by Wannus, Darraj, and novelist ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif (1933–2004) but the supposedly defeated and irrelevant intellectual heritage of Hussein. Many intellectual historians have failed to note that ‘Alim retracted his 1955 position, describing, instead, Hussein’s corpus as a “wonderful model of active participation in expressing social life and in 80 Adey Almohsen 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 contributing to reform it . . . Hussein was a philosopher, whose life was his thought and whose thought was his life always” (emphasis added). Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Wannus, “al-Muqaddima,” 9–11. For a classic example, see Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987). Ghassan Kanafani, “Minbar al-Naqd wa-l-Duktur Zhivago,” al-Adab 7, no. 5 (1959): 60–2. Kanafani was also attacked for apolitically misrepresenting the Palestinian cause when he published his 1966 novella, Ma Tabaqqa Lakum. See Bilal al-Hasan, “Ma Tabaqqa Lakum li-Ghassan Kanafani wa-Azmat al-Bahth ‘an Shikl Riwa’i Jadid,” al-Hurriya (Beirut) 7, no. 333 (1966): 18–9. So claimed Idriss at the Cairo conference. Idriss, quoted in Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 116. Jabra, “al-Hurriyya wa-l-Tufan,” 13. Ibid. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. See Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 26–46, 229–49. Jabra, “al-Hurriyya wa-l-Tufan,” 13–4, 85. Abd al-Rahman Munif, “Writer and Exile,” trans. Iman Al Kaisy and Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, Journal of World Literature 3, no. 4 (2018): 504. I borrow the term from the Kantian distinction between heteronomy and autonomy, whereby the former refers to those actions occurring outside the individual (or the unit—in our case of Palestinians) by means of external influence and causing the subject, thus, to act in a specific way dictated from without. “If the will seeks the law which is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims to be universal laws of its own dictation, consequently if it goes out of itself and seeks this law in the character of any of its objects, there always results heteronomy.” Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1979), 57. Marx states that the “concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” (emphasis added). Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 101. Salma K. Jayyusi, “al-Muthaqqaf al-‘Arabi wa-l-Qadaya al-Qawmiyya,” Hiwar 3, no. 1 (1964): 113–4. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 114–5. Ibid., 115. Mu‘jam al-Babtin li-Shu‘ara’ al-‘Arab al-Mu‘asirin, “Ibrahim Abu Nab (1931-91),” Mu’assassat ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Sa‘ud al-Babtin al-Thaqafiyya, https://www.almoajam.org/lists/inner/12; Ibrahim al-Sha‘rawi, cited in Ibrahim Abu Nab, “al-Jadhwa al-Shi‘riyya al-Filastiniyya Ba‘d al-Nakba,” al-Adab 14, no. 3 (1966): 82–5 and 126–7. Ibid., 82. Ibid. Ibid., 83–4. Jabra I. Jabra, al-Rihla al-Thamina: Dirasat Naqdiyya (Sidon: al-Maktaba al-‘Asriyya, 1967), 10. For more on the “creative mess” and modernist euphoria that was 1950s Baghdad, see Yaseen Noorani, “Visual Modernism in the Poetry of ’Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati,” Journal of Arabic Literature 32, no. 3 (2001): 239–55; Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, 81 Arab Critical Culture and its (Palestinian) Discontents After the Second World War 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, 131–51. Majid al-Samarra’i, “Risala min al-‘Iraq: Jama‘at Baghdad li-l-Fann al-Hadith,” al-Adab 19, no. 6 (1971): 73–76. Jabra I. Jabra, interviewed by Halim Barakat in “al-Haraka al-Thaqafiyya,” Afaq (Beirut) 2, no. 1, (1959): 125–8. Ibid., 128. Majida Hammud, al-Naqd al-Adabi al-Filastini fi al-Shatat (Nicosia: IBAL Publishing, 1992), 37; Ihsan ‘Abbas, Man Alladhi Saraqa al-Nar? Khatarat fi al-Naqd wa-l-Adab, ed. Widad al-Qadi (Beirut: al-Mu’assassa al-‘Arabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1980), 79. Hammud, al-Naqd al-Adabi, 33; ‘Abbas, Man Alladhi Saraqa al-Nar, 23. His autobiography, Ghurbat al-Ra‘i (A Shepherd’s Diary of Alienation), cites numerous instances of discrimination against him in Egypt, Sudan, and Lebanon. For instance, upon graduating from Cairo, he applied to work for the Arab League but his application was rebuffed for being Palestinian and since Palestine was not a dues-paying member of the league. Also, after its independence in 1956, the Sudanese government sought to indigenize official posts, leaving ‘Abbas without a job by 1961. Ihsan ‘Abbas, Ghurbat al-Ra’i: Sira Dhatiyya (Amman: Dar al-Shuruq, 2006), 192, 222–8, 251; Khitam Salman, “Ihsan ‘Abbas: Ghurbat al-Ra’i wa-l-Taghriba al-Filastiniyya,” Nizwa (Muscat), no. 70 (2012): 29–40; Jabra I. Jabra, “Mulahazat ‘an al-Adab wa-l-Thawra al-Filastiniyya,” Mawaqif (Beirut) 3, no. 3 (1970): 17–25. See, for example, Ihsan ‘Abbas, “Nahdat al-Shi‘r fi al-Sudan,” al-Adib 13, no. 1 (1954): 40–4. Along with the aforementioned article, ‘Abbas published many articles on Sudanese poetry and literature in a short-lived yet widely read Jordanian magazine edited by ‘Isa al-Na‘uri between 1952 and 1953: al-Qalam al-Jadid (The New Pen). Al-Qalam al-Jadid, al-Ufuq al-Jadid (The New Horizon, 1961–6), and other literary magazines published in Amman, Irbid, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tulkarm in pre-1967 “unified” Jordan are subjects of two chapters in my doctoral dissertation. Refer to the following issues of Sayigh’s Hiwar magazine: no. 3 (1963), no. 4 (1963), no. 7 (1963), no. 10 (1964), no. 16 (1965), and no. 17 (1965). For more, see ‘Abbas, Ghurbat al-Ra’i, 193–223. As‘ad Razuq, “al-Ustura fi al-Shi‘r al-Mu‘asir,” Afaq (Beirut) 2, no. 1 (1959): 47–90. Khitam Salman, “Ghurbat al-Ra‘i w-al-Taghribah al-Filastiniyya,” Majallat Jami‘at al-Quds al-Maftuhah li-l-Abhath wa-l-Dirasat, no. 13 (2008): 355–90, 374–5. Mal’aika named the section Minbar al-Naqd, meaning The Platform of Critique. Nazik al-Mala’ika, “Minbar al-Naqd,” al-Adab 7, no. 4 (1959): 2. Ibid. Kanafani, “Minbar al-Naqd wa-l-Duktur Zhivago,” 61. Ibid., 62. A similar observation was made by Majida Hammud, who wrote a book on Palestinian literary criticism in exile. See Hammud, al-Naqd al-Adabi, 309–10. The number of such articles runs into the dozens and they are scattered across different journals, but I cite a few here from Idriss’s al-Adab: Jabra I. Jabra, “al-Munulugh, al-Muntaj, al-Tadmin,” al-Adab 14, no. 3 (1966): 58–63; Jabra I. Jabra, “al-Shi‘r al-Amriki al-Hadith,” al-Adab 3, no. 1 (1955): 110–7; and Tawfiq Sayigh, “al-Shi‘r al-Inklizi al-Hadith,” al-Adab 3, no. 1 (1955): 92–103. This observation does not dismiss, however, the rich contributions of French-educated Palestinian critics such as Faisal Darraj (b. 1942), Dawud Talhami (b. 1943), and Elias Sanbar 82 Adey Almohsen 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 (b. 1947). It just notes the connections between Anglo-American thought and literature and the Palestinian critical tradition after the Nakba and even well before. This forms the basis of different research project of mine, tentatively titled “The Mystique of Palestine: The Palestinian History of Postcolonial Theory.” Jayyusi, “al-Muthaqqaf al-‘Arabi,” 113. This is not unlike Said’s description of Palestinian as “cubistic, all suddenly obtruding planes jutting out in to one or another realm, culture, political sphere, ideological formation, national polity.” And, for whom the “wildly multiple Palestinian actuality . . . is a political scientist’s nightmare.” Said, The Question of Palestine, 123. These include New Directions in Palestine Studies: The Politics of the Archive and the Politics of Memory, a conference co-organized by Beshara Doumani and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Providence, RI, 3–4 March 2017; “Special Section: Palestine: Doing Things with Archives,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (May 2018). For example, see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science: International Journal on Recorded Information 2, no. 1–2 (2002): 1–19; Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9–25. Among several excellent example is the Palestinian Oral History Archive collection in the Archives and Special Collections Department, American University of Beirut. See https:// libraries.aub.edu.lb/poha/. On the topic of the loss and neglect of Palestinian archives, see Hana Sleiman, “The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement,” Arab Studies Journal 24, no. 1 (2016): 42–67. For a fairly recent example of the Israeli looting of Palestinian archives refer to: Rami Younis, “Looted from Beirut 35 Years Ago, Now on Display in Tel Aviv,” 972mag, 4 December 2017, https://972mag.com/looted-from-beirut-35-years-ago-now-on-display-in-tel-aviv/131187/. 83 Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.