Yasser Elhariry - Böcker

Investigating the material imprint of water on thought itselfWater Logics examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical approaches.From the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, this rich collection is inhabited by migrants, port cities, and coral reefs. It explores the fruitful potential of water for literary, anthropological, and ethical studies, bringing both cohesive transdisciplinarity and fresh comparative perspectives to hydro-criticism. Taken together, the wide range of critical interpretative practices constitutes a signal contribution to the blue humanities.

Investigating the material imprint of water on thought itselfWater Logics examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical approaches.From the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, this rich collection is inhabited by migrants, port cities, and coral reefs. It explores the fruitful potential of water for literary, anthropological, and ethical studies, bringing both cohesive transdisciplinarity and fresh comparative perspectives to hydro-criticism. Taken together, the wide range of critical interpretative practices constitutes a signal contribution to the blue humanities.

Holes command attention. They make us giggle, squirm, and wonder. But what do they really mean to us and why are they so often surrounded by surprising discourses of power and control? For millennia, the figure of the hole stood as the cornerstone for idioms and expressions that denote emptiness, lack, absences, and voids. Approaching a hole makes one wary of imbalance or depravation. A hole demands to be filled. This Book Is Full of Holes challenges these hollow associations, offering instead a range of unexpected (and provocative) religious, sociosexual, philosophical, and scientific discourses.Through an analysis of a wide range of literary and cultural objects, yasser elhariry brings disparate discursive spheres into conversation. He nimbly juxtaposes the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and postcolonial feminism.Satirical, dead serious, and deeply personal, elhariry’s treatise on this seemingly dead-end object—holes—illuminates the paradox that they nonetheless maintain a persistent hold on the imagination. His stylish analysis reveals their overlooked racialized, gendered, homophobic, and corporeal histories. Holes have been weaponized. This Book Is Full of Holes disarms.

Holes command attention. They make us giggle, squirm, and wonder. But what do they really mean to us and why are they so often surrounded by surprising discourses of power and control? For millennia, the figure of the hole stood as the cornerstone for idioms and expressions that denote emptiness, lack, absences, and voids. Approaching a hole makes one wary of imbalance or depravation. A hole demands to be filled. This Book Is Full of Holes challenges these hollow associations, offering instead a range of unexpected (and provocative) religious, sociosexual, philosophical, and scientific discourses.Through an analysis of a wide range of literary and cultural objects, yasser elhariry brings disparate discursive spheres into conversation. He nimbly juxtaposes the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and postcolonial feminism.Satirical, dead serious, and deeply personal, elhariry’s treatise on this seemingly dead-end object—holes—illuminates the paradox that they nonetheless maintain a persistent hold on the imagination. His stylish analysis reveals their overlooked racialized, gendered, homophobic, and corporeal histories. Holes have been weaponized. This Book Is Full of Holes disarms.

Pacifist Invasions is about what happens to the francophone lyric in the translingual Franco-Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys side-by-side comparisons of classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic commentary traditions in the original language against the landscapes of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into the French lyric, and the mechanisms by which poets foreignize French, as they engage in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature.Through fine-grained analyses of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a cross-cultural history and rereading of French and francophone literatures in relation to the transversal translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics. It offers a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis. The vision of the postfrancophone succeeds the point of exhaustion within the French poetic sociolect, with wide-ranging and surprising implications for the study of French and francophone poetry.

Pacifist Invasions is about what happens to the francophone lyric in the translingual Franco-Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys side-by-side comparisons of classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic commentary traditions in the original language against the landscapes of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into the French lyric, and the mechanisms by which poets foreignize French, as they engage in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature.Through fine-grained analyses of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a cross-cultural history and rereading of French and francophone literatures in relation to the transversal translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics. It offers a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis. The vision of the postfrancophone succeeds the point of exhaustion within the French poetic sociolect, with wide-ranging and surprising implications for the study of French and francophone poetry.

Sounds Senses is about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.

Sounds Senses is about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.

Traversed by masses of migrants and wracked by environmental and economic change, the Mediterranean has come to connote crisis.

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean examines the embodied praxis of hospitality—whether through the ritual modes of religious history, the pages of literature, the visual arts, dystopian narratives of the future, or the realpolitik of shelter and asylum. It moves beyond dominant transit tropes of aporetic exchange (in the lineage of Jacques Derrida). The volume offers a fractal view of Mediterranean studies as inflected by the lived, aesthetic, and philosophical histories of hospitality.This book brings together leading voices ranging from early-career to established scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to argue for a distinct focus on the Mediterranean pre/conditions and pre/histories of hospitality. To date, there has been no interdisciplinary intervention that takes up hospitality as a starting point to critical thinking about Mediterranean studies as an expansive, dynamic, and ever-evolving discipline. Against the inescapable backdrop of necropolitics and catastrophe, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean offers a rich, agentive alternative for Mediterranean worldmaking.

Traversed by masses of migrants and wracked by environmental and economic change, the Mediterranean has come to connote crisis.

Literature as Sound Studies identifies literature as a site of sonic invention and reconfiguration, contributing a range of terms, models, and methods for attending to sound.Considering literary works drawn from a range of traditions—from twentieth-century Moroccan poems to early-modern English plays—Literature as Sound Studies brings out the sophisticated ways that literary writers and commentators have used and studied sound. Moving beyond the use of literature as mere ear witness to history, this collection brings out the complexity of sonic figuration in literature and literary studies, suggesting how this attentiveness to sound might anticipate, illuminate, and enrich the contemporary field of sound studies.The very category of the literary, considered as a subset of language writ large, has often hinged on the particular attention that literary works draw to their own sound, whether that sound be psychologically rehearsed, as in silent reading, or acoustically realized, as in a theatrical performance. Weaving together methods and concepts drawn from both literary and sound studies, these essays make legible literature’s complex role in shaping and writing a history of sound.