An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

This book looks at eight post Arab Spring novels in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature. Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Karim Alrawi, Youssef Rakha, Yasmine El Rashidi, Omar Rober Hamilton, Saleem Haddad, and Nada Awar Jarrar all focus on the Arab world in their work; on the lives of ordinary and minority peoples; and on the revolutions of their respective nations. This volume shows how these contemporary Anglo-Arab novelists exhibit linguistic experimentation akin to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of ‘deterritorialization’, but in a way that is unique to Anglo-Arab writing. The selected novelists repudiate the use of metamorphosis, which is usually an essential part of the deterritorialization of a major language. Instead, their writings enact the minor practice of linguistic deterritorialization by using metaphor and by incorporating contemporary modes of protest like popular slogans, tweets, and chants. These authors challenge the conventions of minor literature and, by adopting this mode of deterritorialization, foreground the experiences of officially silenced voices.

Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through examining new representations of same-sex desire emerging in recent francophone autofictional writing from the Maghreb, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in North Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses specifically how Franco-Maghrebi writers Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet-Chékib Djaziri, and Nina Bouraoui foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories and cultures. By writing in French, Spurlin demonstrates that the writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser but inflecting a European language with discursive turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experiences of gender and sexual alterity—a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.

One writer is stranded by the Second World War. Another flees multiple revolutions to live the rest of his life in Rio de Janeiro. Two others, public about their sexuality at home, choose self-exile. In Lost and Found Voices Luc Beaudoin offers a critical engagement with these four displaced authors: Witold Gombrowicz, Valerii Pereleshin, Abdellah Taïa, and Slava Mogutin. Not quite fitting into their respective diasporas and sharing an urge to express their queer desires, it is in their published works of literature, film, and photography that these writers locate their shifting identities and emergent queer voices. Their artistry is the basis from which Beaudoin traces their expressions of desire in language, culture, and community, offering a contextual queer reading that navigates their linguistic, cultural, artistic, and sexual self-translations and self-portrayals. Their choices are determinative: Gombrowicz masked his attraction to men in his works, keeping the truth hidden in an intimate diary; Pereleshin explored his lust in Brazilian Portuguese after being shunned by the Russian diaspora; Taïa writes in French to destabilize both the language and his status as an immigrant in France; Mogutin becomes a hardcore gay rebel in word and image to rattle assumptions about gay life. Bringing authors generally not familiar to an English-speaking readership into one volume, and including Beaudoin's own experience of living between languages, Lost and Found Voices provides provocative insights into what it means to be gay in both the past and the present.

Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it’s just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don’t do, or don’t want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout. Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taïa or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today’s world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.

How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek. Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.

Through analysis of the complex discourse surrounding trauma and loss, this book provides a necessary examination of temporality and ethics in Israeli film and television since the turn of the millennium. The author examines posttraumatic idioms of fragmentation and incoherence, highlighting the rising resistance towards generic categories, and the turn to unconventional and paradoxical structures with unique aesthetics. Maintaining that contemporary Israeli cinema has undergone an ethical shift, the author examines the revealing traumas and denied identities that also seek alternative ways to confront ethical question of accountability. It discusses the relationships between trauma, nationalism, and cinema through the intertwined perspectives of feminism, queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies, showing how national traumas are constructed by notions of gendered, sexual, and racial identity. This innovative text highlights the complexities of discourse surrounding trauma and loss, informed by multiple categories of difference. Across each chapter various elements of Israeli film are explored, spanning from strategies used to critically examine victim-perpetrator dynamics, co-existence in temporal space, women’s cinema in Israel, displacement, and queer communities and identity. Beyond its direct contribution to cinema studies and Israel studies, the book will be of interest to trauma and memory studies, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies, and cultural studies.

This book explores the representation of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present day. Bringing together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire, the book approaches queer Muslims in the diaspora as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. The book examines 3 main themes: the depiction of queer desire across racial and national borders, the negotiation of Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the positioning of the queer Muslim self in time and place. This study will be of interest to scholars, as well as to advanced general readers and postgraduate students, interested in Muslims, queerness, diaspora and postcolonialism. It brings nuance and complexity to an often simplified and controversial topic.

New Voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe captures the experience in writing of a fast growing number of individuals belonging to migrant communities in Europe. The book follows attempts to transform postcolonial literary studies into a comparative, translingual, and supranational project. Cristián H. Ricci frames Moroccan literature written in European languages within the ampler context of borderland studies. The author addresses the realm of a literature that has been practically absent from the field of postcolonial literary studies (i.e. Neerlandophone or Gay Muslim literature). The book also converses with other minor literatures and theories from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Asians and Latino/as in the Americas that combine histories of colonization, labor migration, and enforced exile.

In the last 15 years, queer movements in many parts of the world have helped secure the rights of queer people. These moments have been accompanied by the brutal rise of crony capitalism, the violent consequences of the ‘war on terror’, the hyper-juridification of politics, the financialization/ managerialization of social movements and the medicalization of non-heteronormative identities/ practices. How do we critically read the celebratory global proliferation of queer rights in these neoliberal times? This volume responds to the complicated moment in the history of queer struggles by analysing laws, state policies and cultures of activism, to show how new intimacies between queer sexuality and neoliberalism that celebrate modernity and the birth of the liberated sexual citizen, are in fact, reproducing the old colonial desire of civilizing the native. By paying particular attention to the problematics of race, religion and class, this volume engages in a rigorous, self-reflexive critique of global queer politics and its engagements, confrontations, and negotiations with modernity and its investments in liberalism, legalism and militarism, with the objective of queering the ethics of our queer politics. Published by Zubaan.