Commitment and Beyond

Front matter

VU De commitment and beyond

AN ( Y í 9 A fic IA A TUS reichert literaturen im kontext arabisch - persisch - türkisch literatures in context arabic — persian - turkish

Vol. 41: | Commitment and Beyond.

Part 3 Of Poetics and Politics: Revolution and Literary Commitment

Randa Aboubakr The Egyptian Colloquial Poet as Popular Intellectual:

Atef Botros Rewriting Resistance: The Revival of Poetry of Dissent in Egypt after January 2011

Roots of a Discourse: Historical Concepts of Literary Commitment

Beyond Eommitment 3:23:27 ERKENNEN E EPI Eam 79 Yoav Di-Capua

Refiguring //tizam: Literary Commitment after 1967

Stephan Guth Between Commitment and Marginalization:

Zeina G. Halabi The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i:

Refqa Abu-Remaileh The A fterlives of Iltizam:

6 Table of Contents

Michael Allan You, The Sacrificial Reader:

Muzaffar al-Nawwab's Concept of Colloquial Poetry as

Art of Resistance 7.5 eed eo ee DURER E Bede EE OH EG RES A tend 201 Sinan Antoon

Towards a New Concept of Engagement in the Theater of

Saadallah’ WannoUus 4... er tero nO RE I 221

Part4 Commitment or Dissent? Contemporary Perspectives

Tarek El-Ariss Fictiön:of Scandal... nece tede cete e eee ee Woe ied ee ue ea Shae 237

Christian Junge On Affect and Emotion as Dissent:

Kamal al-Riyahr's Novel Al-Ghurilla Read as an Example of

Stephan Milich Narrating, Metaphorizing or Performing the Unforgettable?

The Politics of Trauma in Contemporary Arabic Literature... 285

Felix Lang Redeemed from Politics:

On the Politics of Spectatorial Situatedness in the

Performances of Rabih MIOU cria r AE 317

Hanan Toukan Whatever Happened to //tizam?

Acknowledgments

This volume is the outcome of an ongoing interest pursued by the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME), a research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien, namely to investigate the interplay between aesthetical practices and politics in the Middle East. It draws in part on a conference entitled “Commitment and Dissent in Arabic Literature since the 1950s” convened at the CNMS in June 2013 and organized jointly by the research group Figures of Thought | Turning Points: Cultural Practices and Social Change in the Arab World at the CNMS and EUME.’ The conference was a follow-up to a EUME summer academy devoted to the theme “Aesthetics and Politics: Counter-Narratives, New Publics, and the Role of Dissent in the Arab World” that was held in September 2012 at the American University in Cairo,’ in cooperation with its Center for Translation Studies, the Department of English Literature at Cairo University, and the CNMS.

Under the title “Aesthetics and Politics” the 2012 Cairo Summer Academy addressed the role of dissent, new publics and counter-narratives. “Aesthetics and Politics” and “Culture and Politics” were also the themes of the regular EUME Berliner Seminar in the winter term of 2012/13 and the summer term of 2013. Seminar sessions included presentations by EUME fellows such as Tarek El-Ariss on “Fiction of Scandal: Literature, New Media and Revolutionary Politics in the Arab World” or round-tables on “Culture, Class, Youth, Performativity and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in the Arab World,” where a group of scholars from the CNMS in Marburg presented their work to colleagues in Berlin. All of the contributors to this volume have been associated with these academies or involved in these events and debates. Many have been fellows of EUME or are part of the CNMS-based research group Turning Points.

The present volume is a part of this growing network based on common interests and shared commitment, not only to scholarship as such but to actively fostering greater inclusiveness, more freedom, and what the late Edward Said described as democratic humanism. We thus owe a heartfelt thankyou to all those without whom these encounters could not have taken place: Samia Mehrez and Randa Aboubakr, who hosted the Summer School in Cairo; the members of its steering committee, Samah Selim, Ayman El-Desouky, Elias Khoury, Michael Allan, and Rachid Ouaissa; the Summer school’s organizational team, Manuela Campos and Barbara Bishay (both EUME), and the organizational team of the Marburg workshop, Yvonne Albers, Charlotte Pardey, and Ali Sonay (all CNMS).

The editors would also like to thank all institutions that have supported EUME and the CNMS over the past years, the Forum Transregionale Studien, the Land of Berlin, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and German Research Foundation (DFG). We are grateful to the DFG (DFG-Leibniz-Prize) for granting the generous financial support that has enabled the publication of this volume.

Our sincerest gratitude goes to all those directly involved in the realization of this volume.

First, we wish to express our gratitude to the contributors for their patience and perseverance during a two-year editorial process and their willingness to share their important work and thus support this publication project.

8 Acknowledgments

In particular, the editors wish to thank Michael Allan who has taken the time to read and comment critically on some chapters. His insights have helped shape and further sharpen quite a few of the arguments in these chapters.

We would also like to express our deep gratitude to the editorial assistants Ricarda Macco, Jessica Metz and Amina Nolte, whose meticulous work lies at the heart of this undertaking. This book would be much the poorer without their unstinting dedication and attentive diligence, which extended to even the smallest details of the style editing process.

A special thank goes to Abdellatif Aghsain and Hafid Zghouli who, despite a pressing deadline, nevertheless took on the task of checking the Arabic of the complete manuscript.

We are also indebted to Paul Bowman, who reviewed the chapters, and our typesetter Thomas Breier for their professionalism and perseverance over the last two years.

We have also greatly valued the kind support provided by the Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag as well as the attractive presentation of the volume, so too Sigrun Kotb's reliable assistance.

This book would not have been possible without Yvonne Albers, who has patiently and efficiently supervised the entire editing process and communicated throughout the whole production period with the authors. The co-editors would like to extend their sincere thanks and gratitude to her. She was not only a source of inspiration creatively and intellectually but her versatility and work ethic, qualities crucial for such a long-term project, were humbling.

xxx

The transliteration of Arabic names has been adapted according to the IJMES transliteration system. However, some common names and notions have been left in their commonly used spelling without further indication.

1 http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/about-us/profile.html; www.forum-transregionale-studien.de

2 The conference was funded by the Land of Berlin and the German Research Foundation (DFG). http://www. eume-berlin.de/en/events/workshops/workshops-since-2006/commitment-and-dissent.html; https://www.uni-marburg.de/cnms/forschung/denkfiguren-wendepunkte/aktivitaeten/konferenzen-workshops/conferencecommitment-dissent

3 http//www.eume-berlin.de/en/events/summer-academies/eume-summer-academies/2012-aesthetics-and-politics. html

Introduction: Tracks and Traces of Literary Commitment— On Iltizam as an Ongoing Intellectual Project

If one day the people will to live Then destiny must reply;

The darkness must disappear, And bonds must break.’

These are the lines of the poem “The Will to Live" (“Tradat al-hayah”) written in 1933 by the Tunisian poet Abū al-Qasim al-Shabbr (1909-1934) to which the rallying chant of the popular uprisings in the Arab world in 2011 responded: “The people want the fall of the regime/system" (“Al-sha‘b yurid isqat al-nizam"). Regimes indeed fell and history is evolving. The euphoria sparked by the fall of authoritarian rulers in Tunisia and Egypt that year has now evaporated. Current developments in many countries of the region seem to be heading in different directions, towards greater fragmentation, sectarianism, and violence, witnessing a resurgence of the paradigms of the old order, such as the outworn dichotomy of authoritarianism versus religious extremism. While the temptation of authoritarianism may be strong now, and prove to be so in the years ahead, aspirations for a new era of democracy, human dignity and social justice in the Middle East and North Africa persist. The popular uprisings and ongoing struggles in the region are profoundly changing the political landscape. The category of society and the political itself have resurfaced, once more attracting public attention. The struggle for a new order challenges those traditional paradigms employed to understand the politics and culture in and about the region, burgeoning a new set of questions. ‘Revolution,’ as both a theoretical concept and a concrete practice, has facilitated the emergence of innovative modes of critique and allowed the reconfiguring of individual subjectivities and communal solidarities. ‘Revolution’ as a process is related to, shaped by, and expressed in new aesthetic and political practices as well as new channels of communication. Similar to other precedents evident in transitional moments in history, the imminent question of literature’s contributory role in times of social change and upheaval is once again being subjected to reevaluation, both by writers themselves as well as in scholarly debate. At the heart of this endeavor lies the question as to the impact of literature on social reality and, prior to that, how to understand the relationship between the literary text and reality as such.” In recent years, the nexus of aesthetics and politics has become a vividly and hotly debated topic among artists, intellectuals, and scholars in and outside the Arab-speaking world.

Reflecting the Political

Due both to a paradigm shift in political theory (for an overview see e.g. Bedorf and Róttgers; further Bleiker; Frost) as well as diverse experimental movements in literature and the visual arts in recent decades, introduced by way of the reception of poststructuralist, postcolonial and post-Marxist theory, the political in art (and therefore literature) is no longer mainly understood as a transmitter of a certain political ideology through the artistic medium but also as a kind of critique that primarily subverts established political and cultural orders. Herein, so the argument goes, art may provide a democratic space where the idea or the state of a community can be negotiated by its members (Ranciére). This sort of critique involves different forms and strategies, for instance: corroding hegemonic orders by means of revealing and aggravating internal contradictions; re-narrating history from peripheral or nonhegemonic social or generational perspectives; and deconstructing particular elements of a given order (be it linguistic, pictorial, architectural, or performative) and uncovering the hidden mechanisms of power that constructed it. Under these aesthetic premises political art is conceived as ontologically addressed ‘against’ a given system (that is understood as a construct built by those who are ‘in power’), so that the political in the aesthetic field is often referred to today by modes of ‘dissent,’ ‘resistance,’ and ‘subversion.’ That this conception is not easily applicable to the historical and contemporary aesthetic field in the Middle East becomes symptomatically evident in the complex situation of post-revolutionary Egypt—from the fall of the Mubarak regime to the Muslim Brotherhood government to the deposition of Mursi by the military in summer 2013 that eventually brought al-Sisi to power—, a situation accompanied by violent turmoil and traumatic experiences, where a clear cut differentiation between positions supporting a given state ideology and resistance to those in power is not always discernible. From late summer 2013 onwards,’ politics has split the public, so that observers of post-revolutionary Egypt, public intellectuals, writers, and publishers alike, have controversially debated the role authors and intellectuals are to play under such circumstances.

Taking this recent historical experience as its starting point, this book is about the relationship between literature—and to a lesser extent visual and performative art^—, society and politics in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Middle East and North Africa. It is an attempt—by revisiting and reconsidering the relationship of the two realms of art and politics in recent history—to come to terms with changing conceptualizations of the political in Arabic literature. The volume examines historical and contemporary conceptions of iltizam (literary commitment)? and, therein, how notions of ‘writing for a cause’ have been shaped, rejected, or re-actualized from the 1940s until today.

Recalling Andreas Pflitsch's comment that there has never been a depoliticized period in modern Arabic literary history, one could add that this is no less the case today: “The principal spark kindling controversy was the means of this commitment; at issue was not whether literature should be committed to social and political causes but how it was to undertake this mission" (“The End of Illusions" 29, emphasis in the original).

This book thus aims to widen the perspective on both the historical and contemporary discourses about how the political in literature is and has been understood, conceptualized, perceived, and produced. It builds upon a number of seminal research volumes on the conceptual history of Arab literary commitment in English (Badawi; Harlow; Guth, Furrer, and Bürgel; Guth and Ramsay; Di-Capua),° but first and foremost Verena Klemm’s pioneering and in-depth study on the issue, a work that opened up new arenas of thought by analyzing in meticulous detail the intellectual debate on i/tizam in literary circles of the Mashriq from the 1940s until the post-naksa (post-1967) period, when “the fervent appeals to write adab multazim lost their persuasive power among the critical forces of leftist literary circles" (“Different Notions" 58). The present volume may be understood as an endeavor to further develop Klemm's seminal insights, focused mainly on the period between the 1940s and 1970s, by expanding the perspective to include more recent developments in Arabic literature and the arts since the 1990s.

Leading Questions and Concerns

Among the new questions that arose from the Arab uprisings 1s that of newness itself. What ‘new’ components can we detect in contemporary forms of artistic or literary commitment? In what way do they differ from Arabic literary practices since the late 1960s, when an affinity to what scholarship has described as ‘postmodern’ was first identifiable in trends like the New Sensibility? Furthermore, how easily can we conceptually dissociate these ‘literatures of dissent? from literary commitment during the heydays of Arab Modernism between the 1940s and the 1960s, the literary paradigm so powerfully and deeply interwoven and coeval with political ideology and the era of decolonization? Should we dismiss the latter as a co-opted sphere that followed a politics of affirmation rather than one of critical dissent? Or did the discourses of iltizam in the 1950s and 1960s also carry notions of dissent and resistance that are still connected to contemporary conceptions, as the scores of references today to past writers and works would seem to suggest? To what extent do the premises of contemporary literary engagement and what has been termed the “new political” in Arabic literature (El- Ariss) differ from the premises on which mid-century historical engagement was based? And again, how does this compare to the political dimension of ‘postmodern’ approaches since the late 1960s, in so many ways a counter-reaction to the literature of engaged realism? None of these questions are easily answered, at least not unambiguously. There are no clearly defined lines between one historical conception and the next, but always a blurry fade-in/fadeout, as some elements are transferred while others are rejected and maybe rediscovered at another time depending on the specific relationship to the zeitgeist.

This volume contributes to the study of literary commitment in the Arab-speaking world and aims—by taking a dual comparative and diachronic perspective—to create a critical framework that addresses the concept of political engagement in contemporary Arabic literary studies. This critical investigation will cover four stages in its ‘circuitous’ itinerary: Starting with the present day, it will look at literary practices during the “Arab Spring,’ then track back to the beginnings of literary politicization during the 1940s and 1950s, identifying its roots in terms of the history of ideas, subsequently cross the historical caesura of the late 1960s to consider competing and conflicting re-conceptualizations and rejections of literary engagement in the 1970s and 1980s, before finally returning to a more recent period, namely the 1990s through to 2011. This structure is in no way conceived as an all-explanatory tour de force through modern Arabic literary history; rather, the aim is to discern and trace some of the main ideas formulated within Arabic literature concerning its own politics and, therein, the sometimes thinner, sometimes thicker ribbon that entwines literature with social reality.

Hence, although chapters place stress on specific decades to focus on historical accumulations of ideas, the volume proposes a non-linear reading of ideas of the political in modern Arabic literary history by beginning its exploration in the present, then rereading the past, before concluding once again in the present. The value of this approach is that it offers a dual opportunity: To reconsider both our understanding of actual positions as well as our perception of allegedly outdated notions of the political in literature and how literature renders them. The controversy surrounding iltizam and its legacy will thus furnish a common thread throughout the volume. With each contribution focusing on its own subject, the volume reevaluates attempts at literary engagement and disengagement respectively, i.e. the claim for artistic autonomy from the 1940s to the present day on both a diachronic and synchronic level. Attempts at periodizing historical changes in literary engagement/politics are being reevaluated—from committed literature to a New Sensibility or Postmodernism, and finally to something we might temporarily call revolutionary commitment or the ‘new political'—and challenged. As such, each chapter aims to approach the question of literary engagement both as a specific period in the history of modern Arabic literature and as an ongoing project in Arab intellectual history.

Origins of a Debate

What, then, are these historical accumulations that shaped and influenced shifts regarding notions of the political in modern Arabic literature?

Discourses on the moral (and herein political) cause of literature are part of Arab literature in general, as the Arabic word adab for literature indicates and a rich tradition confirms. When adab became literary—to borrow the title of an article Michael Allan wrote in 2012— the responsibility of the writer towards moral and social development was retranslated in the Arab ‘project of modernity,’ the nahda. Literary commitment became a crucial issue for many writers and intellectuals in the region throughout the 1940s and 1950s, decades marked by the rising impact of existentialist philosophy, socialist ideology and the paradigm of development during and after the struggle for independence of the Arab nation states. The translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous article Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" in this highly politicized period had a tremendous impact on the intellectual and literary scene (> Di-Capua’). First translated by Taha Husayn as iltizam, the term gained immense prominence, and thus the idea of the politically and socially engaged author as spokesperson of nations, political parties or ideologies became the all-embracing concept in the discourse of Arabic literary criticism in the mid-twentieth century (Klemm, Literarisches Engagement; “Different Notions"). Contributing to the fame of this concept on the level of society, were, following Edwar al-Kharrat (Idwar al-Kharrat), *[fJactors such as the social unrest, the dislocation of the class relations ensuing upon the Second World War, the growing demands of a nationalist movement [...], [and] the appalling conditions under which the poor, illiterate masses laboured" (180).

The Writer as Voice of Political Doctrines and Dissent

Over the course of these years, the social-realist approach of these engaged authors fitted well with the dominant political ideologies especially prevalent in Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq. Reciprocal interplay between al-adab al-multazim and the 1deologies of communist, Baathist and nationalist movements and parties, themselves inspired by Marxist thought, matured and dominated the literary field in the late 1940s to the 1960s. In this context, literary commitment—in its mainstream expressions—did not necessarily mean dissent; it was also employed to cover affirmative positions vis-à-vis hegemonic discourses and leading political doctrines."

An example from Egypt standing for a different model and trajectory are the artists, poets and writers associated with the Fann wa-Hurriyya (Art and Freedom) group, later renamed Khubs wa-Hurriyya (Bread and Freedom), founded in the late 1930s around the Surrealist poet Georges Henein (Jürj Hunayn) and figures such as Anwar Kamil (Anwar Kamil) or Ramsis Younan (Ramsis Yünän). Henein called for an “Independent Revolutionary Art,” independent from what they perceived as the reactionary cultural politics of state-regulated art and the censorship of dissenting visions, both at home as well as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The group dissolved in 1945, Henein was forced into exile, a fate shared by several artists who refused to join the chorus of support for developmentalist and authoritarlan regimes. Henein and his group—like other dissident writers such as the Egyptians Wagih Ghali (Wajth Ghali) or Albert Cosseiry (Albir Qusayri) or the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulous (Sargün Bülus)—Tremained marginal figures in the public culture of the Arab world until the 1980s; since their rediscovery in the 1990s however, they have become a major intellectual reference point for writers, artists and intellectuals all over the Arab world.’

Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s it became unthinkable to champion a concept of literature detached from current political and social realities. A poetic self-understanding as the teacher, guardian, or even savior of the nation became implicit. But at the same time a whole series of doubts arose—expressed more or less between the lines—as to the possibility of being able to actually exert influence on society. On the one hand, literati themselves were constantly victims of censorship, political attacks, exile, poverty, war, and eviction. Many intellectuals and writers experienced exile and marginalization and thus articulated in their writings a critique or even an ambivalence toward their own literary discourse and the role of the politically committed intellectual (— Halabi). On the other hand, as the political situation became increasingly confusing, messy, and more or less hopeless, especially after the traumatic defeat of the Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel and the rise of the oil-based economy in the 1970s, literati—either directly employed by the cultural apparatuses of the state or funded through journals and newspapers sponsored by the oil-rich countries—increasingly became the mouthpiece for certain ideologies or regimes, leaving them caught in an economy of exploitation where they found themselves worn down between the demands of opposing forces and eventually driven to squalor.

Post-Naksa Discourses and New Sensibility

After the 1967 war and the death of the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamal ‘Abd al-Näsir) in 1970, a period of disorientation and self-doubt followed, Arabic novels calling into question the idea of literature's explicitly political position and 1deological partisanship (— Khoury). Writers and literary critics struggled to describe the new prose experiments emerging in these years, which covered a diverse array of approaches, for instance the magical realism of Salim Barakat (Salim Barakat), Abdelrahman Munif’s (‘Abd al-Rahman Munif) re-narration of history as a counter-hegemonic act (— Mejcher-Atassi), or the fragmented narratives of an unreliable author as practiced by Elias Khoury (Ilyas Khürr). What connected most of these new approaches was the profound questioning of literary realism, so long prevalent in the literary field, the authors guided by a general mistrust of modes of representation and motivated by an interest in minority perspectives. Strategies of fragmentation and deconstruction emerged, and these were often defined, while not remaining uncriticized, as a ‘postmodernist’ shift in modern Arabic literature. Consequently, hijacked as it were to bolster the impression of a prosperous and just future, the notion of political commitment in literature—a direct articulation of political ideas—was reviewed or rejected by quite a few Arab writers at the time (— Pannewick; — Halabi).

The aforementioned Egyptian writer and literary critic Edwar al-Kharrat named this experimental period, definitively crystallizing after 1967, al-hassasiyya al-jadida, the New Sensibility (> Guth). At its core, the literature of a/-hassasiyya al-jadida criticized the mimetic realism of the engaged novel that “took for granted, in whatever philosophical order it was conceived, that it was possible and even desirable to portray, or reflect, that is to represent, the reality in literature" (al-Kharrat 187, emphasis in the original). Reflecting the work of his generation, al-Kharrat instead pleaded for a modernist literature that was not attempting to depict reality but searching for its own poetic reality, understanding the quest of writing as “a constant questioning with no pretence to ready answers" (ibid.). He furthermore traced five currents, which he subsumed under this new literary phenomenon: A tendency towards alienation and estrangement; subjective introspection; a steering towards the mythical, the popular, and cultural heritage (turath); fervent imagination and exaggeration transcending the borders of external reality; and that which is probably most close to al-adab al-multazim, a “neo-realist” current that adheres to the idea of literature as representation of social reality but employs new writing techniques. Beside the novels of Sunallah Ibrahim or Salwa Bakr (Salwa Bakr), with the term “neo-realism” al-Kharrat was also referring to the literary experiments of engaged Palestinian writers such as Ghassan Kanafani (Ghassan Kanafani) (who called for a resistance literature, adab al-mugawama, dedicated to the Palestinian cause as the fida’i’s main weapon alongside the armed struggle) or Emile Habibi (Imil Habibt) (> Abu-Remaileh).

Beyond Commitment—New Forms and Modes of Political Intervention

In his introductory chapter to Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives, Andreas Pflitsch explains that even though the notion of reality and its representability had profoundly changed—one fact that allowed Arabic literature after 1967 and 1975, respectively, to be interpreted as “postmodern”—, two elements remained constant, the need to ‘write with/for a cause' and an authorial self-perception of being a voice for the oppressed. As Munif, who did not consider himself as political or engaged in the sense of iltizam, emphasized in an interview in 1990:

An Arab writer is a fida’i, a resistance fighter. In countries where freedom of opinion does not exist, parties are not allowed, where a constitution probably does exist, all those who are able to express themselves are obliged to put up resistance. Their function is to enlighten the people, to make them aware of justice and injustice, as long as legal and commonly accepted political institutions are lacking. (qtd. in Pflitsch, Gegenwelten 152; our translation)

Pflitsch further stresses that it was not the authors’ claims to be political which vanished; rather, it was the forms and modes of political intervention which changed fundamentally. It was therefore of no surprise that authors like Rashid al-Da’if (Rashid al-Da Tf) attacked the main medium of representation, namely language, which he saw as still ballasted with the political slogans of the 1960s and 1970s (Pflitsch, “The End of Illusions" 30).

Just the same, the fida’i-rhetoric in Munif's quote shows how certain terms and images were still vivid in the imaginative vocabulary of a generation who had witnessed and acutely felt the defeat of 1967 and, for the Lebanese, the Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s. Literature by writers who witnessed these years still seems to feel connected to these post-naksa paradigms; but many of the literary experiments during the 1990s and 2000s (similar to what happened in theater and the visual arts) reveal another shift concerning the relationship between literature and the political. In post-war Lebanon, the absurdity of competing (confessional) ideologies and historiographies provoked a now harsh and explicit critique of aesthetic representation and literary mimicry (— Albers; — Lang), and what was formerly claimed to be a universal and shared reality was now completely dismissed. As the Lebanese writer al-Da’if put it, there was no reality one could describe anymore. It was not only in Lebanon that the skeptical refusal towards any “closure of representation” (Derrida 250) was radicalized and the disbelief in an unfractured rendering of reality through artistic means took hold. The literary narratives of the "generations of the 1990s" in Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia and Morocco were also characterized by the deconstruction of the ‘T as a reliable instance or omniscient force. As Sabry Hafez remarks with regards to Egypt, the narratives of the 1990s "celebrate [the] erasure [of all established and solid things]” without being “motivated by any perception of alternative possibilities, but by a strong desire to strip reality from its legitimacy and solidity" (371). Hafez goes on to say that “heroic deliverance” is perceived by these writers as “a false hope resulting from the death of ideology, the loss of conviction and failure to re-examine the emptiness of the vocabulary of daily exchange" (ibid.). According to Hafez's interpretation, it has become difficult to find an engaged impetus in these recent literary experiments: The individual’s feeling of being lost “leads him to wallow in nothingness, and to be condemned to a meaningless individualism which enhances its sense of orphanhood, marginality and insignificance" (380).

Kifaya-Rhetoric and the *New Political

However, this reading of contemporary literature as a “novel of the closed horizon" (also Hafez) has, by now, been revised and severely criticized. Tarek El-Ariss has pointed out that dismissing these new writings as merely individualistic and self-centered, which positions them far away from the concerns of nahdawi udaba’ or the 1950s and 1960s practitioners of iltizam, disregards their inherently confrontational dimension. Authors like Khaled al- Khamissi (Khalid al-Khamisi) (Taxi) or Rajaa Alsanea (Raja' al-Säni‘) (Girls of Riadh) transcend the divide between writing and activism through an aesthetic of crash, collapse and infiltration, exposing sites of vulnerability and instability in the (political/social/cultural) system, the literary text itself, and in the authorial function (— El-Ariss). Similar to contemporaneous attempts in the field of visual and performative arts, this literature also reflects the conditions to which literary production is subjected, i.e. the book market and its mechanisms and regulations. Moreover, as Christian Junge argues in his contribution to this volume, these authors also ceased merely deconstructing community representation, reintroducing it into the literary text and thereby “facilitating total criticism and provoking radical emotions" (— Junge).

This observable comeback of a confrontational, affective literature that dares to once again deal with the idea of a possible communitas can no longer be tackled solely under the *nothing-else-to-lose' mentality of a disenfranchised, solipsistic generation. But neither is the kind of ‘revolutionary’ engagement which drives this new literature based on an ideology ‘behind’ the writings—3it is, rather, located in the aesthetics itself. Therefore, it is worth considering the allegedly ‘new’ political in these still postmodern writings—at least regarding their predilection for figures and strategies of disruption, for transgressing genre boundaries, and for celebrating heterogeneity—and to read their notions of engagement, community, the public, and the relationship between text/artwork, author/artist, and social reality against equivalent concepts as manifested in the literatures of iltizam and beyond. Furthermore, since the 1990s and along with the increasing impact of a global art market on Middle Eastern cultural production, visual and performative arts have gained—after the longtime hegemony of the literary in Arabic culture—an important role in the search for the *new political? and critical aesthetic practice, which allows for and demands a perspective that goes beyond the realm of the literary (— Toukan, — Albers).