Search results for ""Author Hala Halim""

The articles in Alif 37 address the intersection of literature and journalism, in a wide variety of Arabophone, Francophone, Anglophone, and Latin American contexts, analyzing the literary in relation to an array of journalistic genres and forums, including the interview, investigative journalism, the questionnaire, the blogosphere, creative non-fiction and reportage, literary websites, cultural periodicals, the autobiographical essay, and writers’ opinion articles. Complemented by the testimonies of two journalist–littérateurs and an interview with an artist–poet–art critic, the studies present fresh aspects of Arab literary modernity, littérature engagée, the politics of reception and translation in cultural journalism, canon-formation in relation to journalism, the journalistic delineation of a literary generation’s profile, gender and censorship of creative writers, and revolution and civil strife.

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Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city’s culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—who she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers’ representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anticolonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas, one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

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