Abstract: The long literary history of Gilgamesh is inextricable from the history of empire. The epic itself condemns its main character for the imperial nature of the quest that he launches against Humbaba, and the violence he wreaks on the territory that he conquers: as the gods pour scorn on his seemingly triumphant deeds, the… Read more

Abstract: This article uses the concepts of “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory,” along with their literary tropes, to theorize resistance to the colonial ideals of modernity in Israel and Iraq and to contest the oppressive developmental temporalities associated with this modernity. By analyzing Imīl Ḥabībī’s al-Mutashāʾil (The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, 1974) and Aḥmad… Read more

Abstract: This article analyzes Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade as a counter-theory to what Marnia Lazreg calls “French revolutionary war theory,” which transformed civilian life during the Algerian War (1954-1962) into a battle front. Djebar pushes back by “de-fronting” the entire Algerian landscape; rather than protecting the pre-revolutionary binary of combat/civilian or… Read more

Abstract: This article discusses translatability and the figure of the illiterate “fanatic” – in the context of the Muslim Egyptian fellah – as the limit of World Literature. The illiterate/fellah’s words cannot reach global readers due to crises of access and translation that characterize the world literary periphery, and forms of “killjoy” critical reading that… Read more