Author: Epsita Halder Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000531678 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Analysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the battle of Karbala, this multi-layered study explores what it means to be Muslim, as well as the nuanced relationship between religion, linguistic identity and literary modernity that marks both Bengaliness and Muslimness in the region.This book is an intervention into the literature on regional Islam in Bengal, offering a complex perspective on the polemic on religion and language in the formation of a jatiya Bengali Muslim identity in a multilingual context. This book, by placing this polemic in the context of intra-Islamic reformist conflict, shows how all these rival reformist groups unanimously negated the Karbala-centric commemorative ritual of Muharram and Shī‘ī intercessory piety to secure a pro-Caliphate sensibility as the core value of the Bengali Muslim public sphere.
Author: Abbas Kadhim Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292739265 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
While some scholars would argue that there was no “Iraq” before King Faysal’s coronation in 1921, Iraqi history spans fourteen centuries of tribal communities that endured continual occupation in their historic homeland, including Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century and subsequent Ottoman and British invasions. An Iraqi identity was established long before the League of Nations defined the nation-state of Iraq in 1932. Drawing on neglected primary sources and other crucial accounts, including memoirs and correspondence, Reclaiming Iraq puts the 1920 revolt against British occupation in a new light—one that emphasizes the role of rural fighters between June and November of that year. While most accounts of the revolution have been shaped by the British administration and successive Iraqi governments, Abbas Kadhim sets out to explore the reality that the intelligentsia of Baghdad and other cities in the region played an ideological role but did not join in the fighting. His history depicts a situation we see even today in conflicts in the Middle East, where most military engagement is undertaken by rural tribes that have no central base of power. In the study of the modern Iraqi state, Kadhim argues, Faysal’s coronation has detracted from the more significant, earlier achievements of local attempts at self-rule. With clarity and insight, this work offers an alternative perspective on the dawn of modern Iraq.
Author: Roxanne Varzi Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822388030 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
With the first Fulbright grant for research in Iran to be awarded since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Roxanne Varzi returned to the country her family left before the Iran-Iraq war. Drawing on ethnographic research she conducted in Tehran between 1991 and 2000, she provides an eloquent account of the beliefs and experiences of young, middle-class, urban Iranians. As the first generation to have come of age entirely in the period since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, twenty-something Iranians comprise a vital index of the success of the nation’s Islamic Revolution. Varzi describes how, since 1979, the Iranian state has attempted to produce and enforce an Islamic public sphere by governing behavior and by manipulating images—particularly images related to religious martyrdom and the bloody war with Iraq during the 1980s—through films, murals, and television shows. Yet many of the young Iranians Varzi studied quietly resist the government’s conflation of religious faith and political identity. Highlighting trends that belie the government’s claim that Islamic values have taken hold—including rising rates of suicide, drug use, and sex outside of marriage—Varzi argues that by concentrating on images and the performance of proper behavior, the government’s campaign to produce model Islamic citizens has affected only the appearance of religious orthodoxy, and that the strictly religious public sphere is partly a mirage masking a profound crisis of faith among many Iranians. Warring Souls is a powerful account of contemporary Iran made more vivid by Varzi’s inclusion of excerpts from the diaries she maintained during her research and from journal entries written by Iranian university students with whom she formed a study group.
Author: Syed Akbar Hyder Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190451807 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
In 680 C.E., a small band of the Prophet Muhammads family and their followers, led by his grandson, Husain, rose up in a rebellion against the ruling caliph, Yazid. The family and its supporters, hopelessly outnumbered, were massacred at Karbala, in modern-day Iraq. The story of Karbala is the cornerstone of institutionalized devotion and mourning for millions of Shii Muslims. Apart from its appeal to the Shii community, invocations of Karbala have also come to govern mystical and reformist discourses in the larger Muslim world. Indeed, Karbala even serves as the archetypal resistance and devotional symbol for many non-Muslims. Until now, though, little scholarly attention has been given to the widespread and varied employment of the Karbala event. In Reliving Karbala, Syed Akbar Hyder examines the myriad ways that the Karbala symbol has provided inspiration in South Asia, home to the worlds largest Muslim population. Rather than a unified reading of Islam, Hyder reveals multiple, sometimes conflicting, understandings of the meaning of Islamic religious symbols like Karbala. He ventures beyond traditional, scriptural interpretations to discuss the ways in which millions of very human adherents express and practice their beliefs. By using a panoramic array of sources, including musical performances, interviews, nationalist drama, and other literary forms, Hyder traces the evolution of this story from its earliest historical origins to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Today, Karbala serves as a celebration of martyrdom, a source of personal and communal identity, and even a tool for political protest and struggle. Hyder explores how issues related to gender, genre, popular culture, class, and migrancy bear on the cultivation of religious symbols. He assesses the manner in which religious language and identities are negotiated across contexts and continents. At a time when words like martyrdom, jihad, and Shiism are being used and misused for political reasons, this book provides much-needed scholarly redress. Through his multifaceted examination of this seminal event in Islamic history, Hyder offers an original, complex, and nuanced view of religious symbols.
Author: Heather Brunskell-Evans Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9460918972 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 107
Book Description
This book is without doubt one of the most important publications that I have read for a very long time. These stories by Iraqi scholars raise many important insights, issues and questions. Their accounts provide some chilling insights into the terrible forms of oppression and discrimination that are part of the barriers to the realisation of an inclusive and creative development. It is extremely difficult to appreciate the pain and suffering that has been an integral part of their lives. Their accounts are readable and refreshingly honest. I do believe that there is a moral responsibility for all members of departments in universities to read and discuss this book as a matter of urgency. This needs to be done in terms of what we can learn about Iraq and in turn, to critically examine our own current conditions, relations, policies and practices, so that we can also struggle for a more inclusive system of educational provision and practice in higher education.
Author: Elena Anastasaki Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000627276 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths. The construction of the artist’s identity, be it collective or personal, rests on a series of aesthetic praxes. Caught between the mythic idealisation of poetic genius and its social devaluation, the Romantic artist seeks to create a place for himself, and in doing so, he engages in his own mythmaking. This process is studied in an interdisciplinary perspective, approaching texts and writers from different traditions. The study analyses various typologies of the artist, numerous mythmaking strategies as well as several postural techniques; all of which have sketched major direct or indirect fictional self-portraits in the European tradition.
Author: Morteza Yazdanjoo Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000822028 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
As an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this monograph addresses the dynamic yet understudied "intertextual dialogism" between modern American literature and contemporary Iranian Cinema, pinpointing how the latter appropriates and recontextualizes instances of the former to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Drawing on Louis Montrose’s catchphrase that Cultural Materialism foregrounds "the textuality of history, [and] the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. The recontextualization of Herzog, Franny and Zooey, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman into contemporary Iran provides an intertextual avenue to delineate the textuality of history and the historicity of texts
Author: Valeria Taddei Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1040010644 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
The poetics of epiphany have long been recognised as a broad aesthetic trend of modernism, related to the power of art to reveal the hidden essence of reality. Yet the critical use of the concept is still contested, complicated by the fact that in many modernist works exceptional moments are anything but revealing. This book embraces the blurred nature of epiphanies and sets out to explore their effects in a comparative journey paralleling Anglophone and Italian modernist short fiction. The work of four modernist short story writers – Luigi Pirandello, James Joyce, Federigo Tozzi, and Katherine Mansfield – illuminates epiphanies as complex phenomena, connected to multiple aspects of modernist culture, which appear in artistic experiences developed independently in the same decades. The ideas of Henri Bergson, William James, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, nuance our understanding of the stories and of the author's vision behind them. At least three threads emerge, as a result, as common characteristics of modernist epiphanies. First, they are a result of the ‘inward turn’ and of the curiosity about the psyche’s subconscious processes. Second, they attempt to rediscover lived experience as a source of partial but reliable knowledge. Third, they re-actualise mystical experiences as conduits to a secular insight about life. The main appeal of these modernist moments of enlightenment is precisely that they establish an atmosphere of ambiguity where multiple and sometimes irreconcilable potential meanings can be found. By so doing, they succeed in evoking the undifferentiated creative potential that, according to the widespread vitalist philosophies of the age, constitutes the essence of life. In reframing ambiguity and indeterminacy as spaces of creation and choice, epiphanies thus bring out a lesser known, life-affirming but not naïve vein of modernist inspiration.
Author: Didier Coste Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000804488 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 359
Book Description
This cross-disciplinary approach to literary reading of any provenance based on an “experimental cosmopolitan” epistemology de- and recontextualizes the texts from the points of view of multiple cultures and historical moments, enriching interpretation and aesthetic experience beyond the backgrounds of the present reader and the origin of a particular literary discourse. Trusting the authority of an author or an “original” text and ignoring the fundamental plurilingualism of the literary experience obstructs the wealth of cosmopolitan reading in a globalized and fragmented world. A thorough critique of both local and overarching theories in clear dissent from the binaries of “decolonial theory” and the overextension of “nomadic theory” supports a precise research and teaching methodology at variance with past trends of Comparative and World Literature. Considering literature as the aestheticized use of language, which is universal, the many analyses provided can be extrapolated to other genres, eras, and cultural areas.
Author: Epsita Halder
Author: Abbas Kadhim
Author: Farhat Hasan
Author: Roxanne Varzi
Author: Syed Akbar Hyder
Author: Heather Brunskell-Evans
Author: Elena Anastasaki
Author: Morteza Yazdanjoo
Author: Valeria Taddei
Author: Didier Coste