Shared Margins: An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria after the Revolution

Samuli Schielke; Mukhtar Saad Shehata

Open Access Published by De Gruyter 2021

Shared Margins

An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria after the Revolution

Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata
Funded by: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Volume 41 in the series ZMO-Studien

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726305

Overview
Contents

About this book

Open Access

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.

Author information

Samuli Schielke, Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany; Mukhtar Saad Shehata, Alexandria, Egypt.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
On names, pronouns, and spelling Publicly Available Download PDF	XIII
List of illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	XIV
Map of Alexandria Publicly Available Download PDF	XVI
Introduction: Where is Literature? Samuli Schielke Open Access Download PDF	1
Part I: About writing
1 Why write, and why not stop? Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata Open Access Download PDF	15
2 Infrastructures of imagination Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata Open Access Download PDF	39
3 The writing of lives Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata Open Access Download PDF	77
Part II: Writing about
4 Can poetry change the world? Samuli Schielke Open Access Download PDF	117
5 Where is Alexandria? Samuli Schielke Open Access Download PDF	139
6 Writing on walls Samuli Schielke Open Access Download PDF	171
7 Is prose poetry a conspiracy against the Noble Qurʾan? Samuli Schielke Open Access Download PDF	203
8 The search for a clear vision Open Access Download PDF	229
Afterword: On exiles and alternatives Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata Open Access Download PDF	249
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	259

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Researchers and students in Anthropology, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies
Pages
- Front matter: 16
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 40
- Coloured Illustrations: 15
Keywords: Alexandria; Egypt; anthropology; literary circles

eBook

Published: July 5, 2021
ISBN: 9783110726305

Hardcover

Published: July 5, 2021
ISBN: 9783110726770