The Naksa at 50: Nostalgia and Memory in the Middle East and Beyond

A panel with Hosam Aboul-Ela (University of Houston), Elliott Colla (Georgetown University), and Nadia Yaqub (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Friday, April 28, 2017
12:00 PM
Charles E. Young Research Library (YRL) Presentation Room 11348
The Naksa-the widely-­‐used Arabic term for the “setback” suffered by Palestinians in the 1967 war-represented not only a defeat but also a turning point. While this turning-point had important political implications, its cultural ramifications and the explosion of creative expression it engendered also marked the Arab world indelibly. The proliferation of critical output produced by Arab thinkers and artists in its aftermath deserves to be at the center of academic inquiry as we observe this anniversary. Instead of focusing on political or legal repercussions, the conference panel will consider the relatively understudied impact of the Naksa in relation to Nostalgia and Memory, highlighting cultural production and institutional aspects of art.
THE '67 WAR DID NOT TAKE PLACE: Arab Intellectuals between Critique and Resistance
In many accounts of the 1967 war and its aftermath, the conflict is treated as a primal event that shifted the trajectory of cultural and intellectual life in the Arab region. This paper offers a partial challenge to this received wisdom through readings of texts by prominent Arab writer/ intellectuals that engage the Arab scene in the years after the war. Edward Said offers a prominent example of a writer that shows a marked change in trajectory after the war. His short essay, "The Arab Portrayed," grows over the course of several years into one of his masterworks, Orientalism. Simultaneously, Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui crystallized earlier work after the war by publishing his The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? One key difference between the two projects is that Laroui's model included a critique of Arab nationalism that built on earlier arguments, whereas Said did not initially engage the complicity of the Arab postcolonial condition in the "crisis." A significance of this distinction can be illuminated via several readings. First, Sonallah Ibrahim's novel 67, written in Beirut in 1968, reinforces his pre-existing critique of the bourgeoisification of daily life in Egypt under Nasser and another intellectual, Arwa Salih in The Stillborn also sees the crisis as one which inheres in daily life. The ingrained, social, and self-critical dimension of the crisis pulls on Said himself in his later writings, which move toward a set of increasingly Gramscian propositions. The critical discourse of the organic intellectual that emerges out of these texts proves suggestive in the still ongoing project of comprehending the regional intifadas of 2011 and after.
Hosam Aboul-Ela is an Associate Professor in the University of Houston’s Department of English. He is the translator of 4 Arabic novels and the author of critical articles in the areas of literature of the Americas, literary theory, and Arab cultural studies. He is the author of Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, co-editor with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of the Seagull Books series "Elsewhere Texts," and series editor for Seagull Books' Arabic list. His book-length study of U.S. imperial culture as read through the lens of cultural critical theory from the Global South will appear in 2018.
Elliott Colla teaches in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Duke University Press, 2007). He has translated of works of contemporary Arabic literature, including most recently Raba‘i al-Madhoun’s The Lady from Tel Aviv.
Nadia Yaqub is associate professor of Arabic Language Cultures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Pens, Swords and the Springs of Art: the Oral Poetry Dueling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee (Brill, 2006) and numerous articles and book chapters about Arabic literature and film. She is the co-editor with Rula Quawas of Bad Girls of the Arab World (forthcoming from University of Texas Press, 2017). Her book manuscript “Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution” is currently under review.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Santa Barbara Center for Middle Eastern Studies