Table Of Content‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739
Also by Rita Sakr:
MONUMENTAL SPACE IN THE POST-IMPERIAL NOVEL: An Interdisciplinary Study (2011)
THE ETHICS OF REPRESENTATION IN LITERATURE, ART AND JOURNALISM:
Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (with Caroline Rooney, 2013)
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739
‘Anticipating’ the
2011 Arab Uprisings:
Revolutionary
Literatures and Political
Geographies
Rita Sakr
Research Associate, University of Kent, UK
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739
© Rita Sakr 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 ISBN 978–1–137–29472–2
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DOI 10.1057/9781137294739
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction: ‘Anticipating’, Writing,
and Rebelling in the Arab World 1
2 ‘A Way of Making a Space for
Ourselves Where We Can Make the
Best of Ourselves’: Writing Egypt’s ‘Tahrir’ 21
3 ‘Here It’s Either Silence Or Exile’:
The Stories of ‘Rats’ that Rebelled in Libya 47
4 ‘We Would Meet Them One Day, and Call
Them to Account for Their Oppression’:
Post-2005 Prison Writings in Syria 71
Bibliography 100
Index 109
vi
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739
Preface
In 2010, I was finishing my monograph Monumental Space
in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study that
engages with literary representations of various political
geographies across which revolution, the fall of empires,
and the rise of fledgling democracies are envisioned and
in many cases ‘anticipated’. Lebanon and Turkey were
at the heart of the project. But in February 2011 when
decades-old oppressive regimes started to unravel across
the Arab world, I wrote a post-script to the monograph
with the title ‘Monumental Space and the Collapse of Arab
Dictatorships’ that would become the first step in a two-
year-long close engagement with literature and changing
political geographies in the Arab world.
From this perspective, this Palgrave Pivot study is the
product of the intellectual and political environment
in which it was written. In 2010, I was reading Richard
Jacquemond’s Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and
Society in Modern Egypt and Samia Mehrez’s Egypt’s Culture
Wars: Politics and Practice while re-reading, for the third
time, Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. It was a
time when their understanding of the role of writers with
respect to history had not yet been either fully validated
or qualified (as it has been since then) by the historical
transformations that would sweep over Egypt in the fol-
lowing years.
This was also a time when particularly Egypt’s writ-
ers and artists, ignored by political scientists and area
studies specialists, became the center of the attention
of very few engaged academics and critics who saw the
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 vii
viii Preface
inter-connections between literary visions and democratic possibilities
in the country. I was fortunate to collaborate, through a visiting schol-
arship then my current position as Research Associate on a ‘Global
Uncertainties Leadership Fellowship’ at the University of Kent, with
a brilliant academic and activist who has been at the forefront of this
engagement. Caroline Rooney, as part of an ESRC-funded fellowship
titled ‘Radical Distrust’, visited Egypt and interviewed writers and
young bloggers who would become some of the prime forces behind the
revolutionary popular imagination of the 2011 uprising. Her co-edited
journal issue Egyptian Literary Culture and Egyptian Modernity (Journal of
Postcolonial Writing 47.4, 2011) brings together not only interviews with
people like Ahdaf Soueif and Rehab Bassam who in 2010 expressed their
faith in change but also excellent essays by academics, based in Egypt
and Britain (including Ayman el-Desouky, Marilyn Booth, Julia Borossa,
Monira Soliman, and others) that explore the relationship of Egyptian
literature to freedom and activism. Rooney’s pioneering insights with
respect to Egyptian literary culture and its ‘prospective’ dimensions are
summed up in her introduction to the JPW volume that will be referred
to in the following chapters. My conversations and work with Caroline,
as well as with colleagues who participated in conferences on the ‘Arab
Spring’ cemented my interest and work on this subject. As well as my
debt to Caroline’s invaluable contributions to this field, I was particu-
larly inspired by the work of Ayman el-Desouky, Joseph Massad, Ziad
Elmarsafy, Miriam Cooke, Barbara Harlow, Rami Khouri, and Delphine
Pagès el-Karoui.
The recent period made me realize that while Egypt’s visionary litera-
tures and spaces continue to be closely analyzed, there was relatively less
substantial work (with few exceptions) on specifically the dynamic of
revolutionary literatures and political geographies (in monumental sites,
houses under surveillance, exilic territories spaces of ‘disappearances’,
and political prisons) especially across Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, and on
the wider significance of this dynamic to both the recent and ongoing
events in the Arab world and the larger post-imperial histories of the
region. From this perspective and as part of the ongoing multifaceted
intellectual debate on the topic, this Palgrave Pivot volume re-visits the
fascinating spaces of writing and rebelling that are introduced in the first
chapter and developed in the following three, within the framework of
the intersections among literature, cultural geography and human rights
discourse.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739
Acknowledgments
In February 2011, as I was finishing a book on the liter-
ary representations of memorial spaces in post-imperial
contexts including the Middle East, I began an exciting
but also troubling research journey into the revolutionary
Arab ‘republic of letters’ and its various citizens: writers of
international fame, marginalized voices, exiles, ex-prison-
ers, and others among the discontented and visionaries
of a region on fire. But the journey would not have been
completed without the support of friends, colleagues, and
loved ones.
I thank Benjamin Doyle of Palgrave Macmillan for
embracing this project and enthusiastically supporting it
all the way through.
I thank Professor Caroline Rooney for giving me the
invaluable opportunity to work with her at the University
of Kent on exciting, pioneering projects funded by the
ESRC under the ‘Global Uncertainties’ research pro-
gram. Caroline believed before hardly anyone else in the
transformative role of writers across the Middle East and
North Africa. Her understanding of these dynamics is
tremendously inspiring and her publications in this area
have been of great significance to the ways in which I
formulated this study.
I am hugely grateful to Professor Liam Kennedy for
granting me a welcoming space to present, share, and
develop my ideas on the inter-disciplinary approach to
conflict in the Middle East within the Clinton Institute for
American Studies at University College Dublin where I
DOI: 10.1057/9781137294739 ix
