Shared Margins : An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria after the Revolution / Samuli Schielke, Mukhtar Saad Shehata.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schielke, Samuli, Author.

Shehata, Mukhtar Saad, Author.

Contributor:

Saad Shehata, Mukhtar, Contributor.

Schielke, Samuli, Contributor.

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Funder.

Series:

ZMO-Studien

ZMO-Studien ; 41

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Alexandria (Egypt)--Intellectual life.

Alexandria (Egypt).

Alexandria (Egypt)--Social life and customs.

Egypt--Alexandria.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (XVI, 272 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypt's second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts, Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination, and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011. Literary writing, this book argues, has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken-for-granted of a societal milieu, and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

On names, pronouns, and spelling

List of illustrations

Map of Alexandria

Introduction: Where is Literature?

Part I: About writing

1 Why write, and why not stop?

2 Infrastructures of imagination

3 The writing of lives

Part II: Writing about

4 Can poetry change the world?

5 Where is Alexandria?

6 Writing on walls

7 Is prose poetry a conspiracy against the Noble Qurʾan?

8 The search for a clear vision

Afterword: On exiles and alternatives

Bibliography

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2021)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9783110726305

3110726300

OCLC:

1262307890