Caroline Rooney

"Addressing the question of how neoliberal ideology has served to conflate the radical left with extremism, this book examines how the Arab left has asserted itself in the context of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism during and after the Arab uprisings. It examines how the Arab cultural left has offered a critique of the signifying practices of political hegemonies in the region and argues that though creative expression as constituted in the very language of the Arab uprisings, it has put forward its own alternatives Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the opening chapters of the book identify how ethical and radical values pertaining to sociality are co-opted by political leaders in the Middle East and turned into jargon. Later chapters outline resistance to this co-option through a poetics of inter-subjectivity that takes structures of feeling into account, ranging from disappointment, despair and distrust, to dignity, solidarity and reconfigured senses of the sacred. In showing how psychological and affective states relate to signifying practices, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating 'radicalization' from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde."--

Culture and the Arab Left After the Uprisings

Creative Radicalism in the Middle East

Addressing the question of how neoliberal ideology has served to conflate the radical left with extremism, this book examines how the Arab left has asserted itself in the context of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism during and after the Arab uprisings. It examines how the Arab cultural left has offered a critique of the signifying practices of political hegemonies in the region and argues that though creative expression as constituted in the very language of the Arab uprisings, it has put forward its own alternatives Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the opening chapters of the book identify how ethical and radical values pertaining to sociality are co-opted by political leaders in the Middle East and turned into jargon. Later chapters outline resistance to this co-option through a poetics of inter-subjectivity that takes structures of feeling into account, ranging from disappointment, despair and distrust, to dignity, solidarity and reconfigured senses of the sacred. In showing how psychological and affective states relate to signifying practices, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating 'radicalization' from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde.

Culture and the Arab Left after the Uprisings

Rita Sakr

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film and art. The book investigates and promotes an awareness of an ethics of representation on questions of extreme emotional investment, comparing representations of the siege to representations of other traumatic events, visiting responses from those of different cultural backgrounds to the same event and considering implications with respect to comparative approaches. Chapters explore how literature, journalism and art contribute to overcoming the dangers of forgetting and denial, memorial excess and fundamentalism, the radicalization of violence, and the complete breakdown of trust on international levels, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities. The book extends the use of postcolonial methodologies affiliated with history, international relations, and psychoanalysis (memory, trauma) to Middle-Eastern studies, and visits the siege’s effect on different forms of memory and memorialization: selective memory, trauma, gaps and fissures in historical accounts, recording of eyewitness reports, and artistic re-imaginings and realizations of alternative archives.

Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut

The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism

Through examination of the functions of language and cross-cultural readings of literature – from African queer reading to postcolonial Shakespeare – Rooney explores the nature of the real, providing: a way out of some of the current deadlocks of feminist theory an anti-essentialist approach to gender in which both male and female readers may address a consciousness of the feminine a platform for postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers to engage in a dialogue around the status of the performative in regard to the other a new theory of poetic realism in both canonical and postcolonial literatures a re-reading of the Enlightenment legacy in terms of postcolonial liberation theory a comparison of contemporary debates on the real across the humanities and the sciences. Exploring current ideas of performativity in literature and language, and negotiating a path between feminist theory’s common pitfalls of essentialism and constructivism, Caroline Rooney argues convincingly that by rethinking our understanding of gender we might also equip ourselves to resist racism and totalitarianism more effectively.

Literature and a Poetics of the Real

Decolonising Gender

Donna Landry

Karen Jones

Kaori Nagai

Charlotte Sleigh

Monica Mattfeld

Cosmopolitan Animals asks what new possibilities and permutations of cosmopolitanism can emerge by taking seriously our sharing and 'becoming-with' animals. It calls for a fresh awareness that animals are important players in cosmopolitics, and that worldliness is far from being a human monopoly.

Caroline Rooney

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