Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/119457
Title: | On the Ruins of What’s to Come, I Stand: Time and Devastation in Syrian Cultural Production since 2011 |
Author(s): | McManus, Anne-Marie![]() |
Issue Date: | 2021 |
Extent: | 17 Seiten |
Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Publisher: | University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL |
URN: | urn:nbn:de:gbv:3:5-1981185920-1214151 |
Subjects: | Syrien![]() Asad, Baššār al ![]() Arabischer Frühling ![]() |
Abstract: | The core concepts of this article are drawn from Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian texts and films whose authors—Sulaiman, Ra’id Wahsh, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the Abounaddara film collective, Osama Esber, and Samar Yazbek—supported the uprising and held the state responsible for the war. Multigenerational, elite, and celebrated in their respective artforms, these authors reside in Europe and the US and do not self-define as a movement. Within the opposition’s cultural field, these literary and documentary works are iterations of a fierce engagement with 2011’s aftermath that represents the uprising obliquely because the revolution’s political promise demanded new, noncoercive codes of representation. Even the uprising and oppositional culture cannot become sacred symbols, hence Abounaddara’s cry in 2015: “Down with the heroes of the Syrian revolution!” Conscious of their address to multiple publics several works discussed here appeared simultaneously in Arabic and English translation—and of culture’s many uses in the Syrian conflict, they eschew the codes of refugee literature, revolutionary discourse, and, for the most part, sensationalist address to international audiences. Thus, Abounaddara is known for its “right to the image” campaign, which critiques representations of Syrian corpses. Wahsh notes, “writing is a [market] stall” for “pain.” “Because I am bored,” interjects Sulaiman’s Babylonian, “I play with the corpse of the future in the ill lit / language room,” offering up “a sentence no one can use”. Ten years after the popular uprising that became a brutal war, Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian authors are engaged in the struggle to craft a historical consciousness that can acknowledge and mourn for their recent revolutionary past without reifying it. As they write in and of material, political, and social ruin, their works echo collective traumas in regional memory: the Palestinian nakba, the rise of Syria’s Assad regime, Lebanon’s civil war, the 2003 occupation of Iraq, and more. The ruin appears cruelly recursive, yet it is arrested in the corpus of works discussed in this article: poetry by Firas Sulaiman and Osama Esber; prose by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Samer Yazbek, and Ra’id Wahsh; and documentary film by the Abounaddara Collective. Drawing on Arabic poetic modernism and regional politics, I argue that ruin imagery—ranging from war’s rubble to ancient artefacts—carries distinctive structures of temporal anticipation in Syrian literary and cultural memory. The writers and filmmakers discussed deploy formal and thematic means of stasis and repetition, displacement and accumulation, to summon these temporal structures—only to refuse, interrupt, and reroute them. I argue that such poetic engineerings of the images of ruin assert the singularity of the Syrian present within broader collective memories of ruin. As such, they raise a historicizing challenge to the current academic dominance of reading ruin imagery, notably from the Middle East, through an imperial lens. |
Annotations: | Elektronische Reproduktion |
URI: | https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121415 http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/119457 |
Open Access: | ![]() |
License: | ![]() |
Journal Title: | Critical inquiry |
Publisher: | The University of Chicago Press |
Publisher Place: | Chicago |
Volume: | 48 |
Issue: | 1 |
Original Publication: | 10.1086/715985 |
Page Start: | 45 |
Page End: | 67 |
Appears in Collections: | Zweitveröffentlichungen |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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McManus_2021_CI-Manuscript.pdf | 629.69 kB | Adobe PDF | ![]() View/Open |