From the review: ”The humor the meme conveys is near universal in its pluralistic possibilities, while providing a local idiom for that universality to anchor itself: through the creative process of comedy (not so different from fiction-writing), Drake’s face, Sisi’s face, and stifled giggling over underwear humor alter the comedy canon, paving the way for Hussein to cite them as inner-text in future episodes, and for other comedians, Arab or otherwise, to access and drape them over the nether regions of their own respective demagogues.
May Hawas’ book Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public (Routledge, 2019) takes an interest in precisely this kind of global cultural exchange, this time on the level of the literary text. Hawas writes her book in defense of World Literature as a discipline that can encompass and transcend the postcolonial; that can surpass “the question of literary representation” that has stymied many an academic or political project and can venture to ask: what can these books achieve in their various “pedagogical locations in our present time?” (4). In her view, World Literature goes beyond the binaries so integral to the postcolonial tradition without forgetting them—it absorbs the terms and contents of those binaries but asserts that the journey towards cobbling together one’s self (or one’s selves, as she insists) is not only more individually fulfilling, but more politically subversive.”
Click here to read the full review on Politics/Letters.
Aya Labanieh 