Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

Anna Ball is Senior Lecturer in English (Postcolonial Studies) and Co-Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (Routledge, 2012). Karim Mattar is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a transdisciplinary humanist, and his research and teaching interests are focused around world literature, the history of the novel, the Middle East, the Israel / Palestine conflict, and critical theory. With Anna Ball, he is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

• Abstract Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors List of Figures Note on TransliterationsIntroduction 1. Dialectics of Post/Colonial Modernity in the Middle East: A Critical, Theoretical, and Disciplinary Overview; Anna Ball and Karim Mattar2. Edward Said and the Institution of Postcolonial Studies; Karim Mattar3. Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-First Century Horizons; Waïl S. Hassan4. Interview with Ahdaf Soueif; Anna Ball5. Interview with Sinan Antoon; Karim MattarI. The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism 6. Between the Postcolonial and the Middle East: Writing the Subaltern in the Arab World; Juan R. I. Cole7. Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-Reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World; Wen-Chin Ouyang8. On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab / Jew Figure Revisited; Ella Shohat9. Colonial Violence, Law, and Justice in Egypt; Stephen Morton10. Peripheral Visions: Translational Polemics and Feminist Arguments in Colonial Egypt; Marilyn Booth11. Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy; Erdağ GöknarII. States of Post/Coloniality: Politics, Religion, Gender, Sexuality 12. Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert); Réda Bensmaïa13. Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies, and Millennial Palestine; Salah D. Hassan14. ‘They are in the right because I love them’: Literature and Palestine Solidarity in the 1980s; Anna Bernard15. Nikes in Nineveh: Daesh, the Ruin, and the Global Logic of Eradication; Sadia Abbas16. There was no ‘Humble Task’ in the Revolution: Anti-Colonial Activity and Arab Women; Anastasia Valassopoulos17. The Queerness of Textuality and / as Translation: Ways of Reading Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter; Lindsey MooreIII. The Post/Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context 18. Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar; Tahia Abdel Nasser19. Bare Life in the ‘New Iraq’; Ikram Masmoudi20. Towards a Globalisation of Contemporary Iranian Literature?: Iranian Literary Blogs and the Evolution of the Literary Field; Laetitia Nanquette21. Popular Culture and the Arab Spring; Caroline Rooney22. The Syrian Revolution, Art, and the End of Ideology; miriam cooke23. Biopolitical Landscapes of the ‘Small Human’: Figuring the Child in the Contemporary Middle Eastern Refugee Crisis in Europe; Anna Ball24. Afterword: Critical Companionships, Urgent Affiliations; Anna Ball and Karim MattarBibliography Index

By bringing the Middle East and postcolonial studies into critical conversation, this capacious volume urges us to rethink both, and gives the tools with which to do so. The wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays examine 　how the literature and culture of the region critically interrogate and illuminate the dynamics of colonialism, modern imperialism and global capitalism. This is a volume that will become an important landmark in the field.