What is inscribed in a name? Whether it is a name of a person that you can’t get out of your head, or the quirky name of an important file that you hope you won’t forget. I don’t know when and how my fixation with names started. It must have been before ‘Bill’ had become […]
It’s impossible not to make this personal. While I am sitting here at my computer, my wife is at her sister’s house on Long Island helping to take care of her father, whose life cancer will soon cut far too short. No one knows, or wants to predict, how soon soon will be, but as […]
The comic book, in its present day form, is regarded as an imported medium to the Arab world. We have always translated, lettered, reprinted and read American, European, and Japanese comics, and in comparison rarely made indigenous Arab comics. The rate and scale of production has been in fits and starts, never really sustained or […]
In a recent New York Times interview with the artist Emily Jacir about her installation “Material for a Film” (now on display at the Guggenheim), she was asked how she “distinguish[es] between her political activity and her art.” Jacir’s work draws on personal experience as a Palestinian living and working in the West Bank and […]
Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of residencies across the globe and in different contexts – from major art institutions to community cultural centers to non-conventional (and even non-art) spaces – that host artists, archivists, researchers, architects, curators, activists and scientists as well. Yet, the rise in residencies has not been matched […]
Between the ardor of militants and passions of aesthetes, a retrospective visit to the golden era of ciné-clubs in the Arab world. There was a time in the contemporary history of Arab world, a mere forty or thirty years ago, when the passion for non-commercial cinema and the yearning for critical engagement with art and […]
At a recent talk at New York University under the title: “ Whatever Happened to Masculinities Studies?” Michael S. Kimmel, who has written extensively on Masculinity mostly, but not exclusively, within an American context, spoke about the current state of Masculinity studies in the American academy. To my mind there seems to have been a […]
Is transnationalism necessarily a study of multiculturalism? Or is it a case of translating the transnational structures of nation, self, and community into “translational,” as Ackbar Abbas puts it? Here I offer a comparative approach to the representation of the so-called blossoming, multicultural Istanbul, particularly its relationality with the rising ‘transnational’ interest to it. Suggesting […]
However much we moan and groan, however much we lament, reminisce, mull over, write, dig up, represent, glorify, venerate—even if we use the entire vocabulary of literature and science to conjure it up, the past will not return. Even if we cry, kick the ground with our feet like temperamental children, beg people, societies and […]
I. Before I arrived, before I read Darwish, before I knew where it was on a map and some time after my mother tried to describe what her father’s father told her about it, Beirut was a part of me. At family gatherings in Boston or New Jersey or New Hampshire, sitting on wall-to-wall carpets […]