Alif 21 Reviews

As one of the first non-European journals to critically address the category of Weltliteratur bilingually from the perspective of the Global South, this special issue of Alif addresses this problem theoretically and empirically. The critical conversation about the problem of the category of Weltliteratur is not only extended beyond the European and North American sphere that has largely dominated and framed the discussion of Weltliteratur, but is juxtaposed formally in a way that permits us to understand that there are other “world literatures” that allow us to reexamine the contending theories, practices, and underlying assumptions of Weltliteratur. Essays in this volume emphasize in different ways the inherent tension between postcolonial studies and “world criticism,” and to that extent open up new realms for the discovery of new knowledges, new epistemes, modes of conversation, and communication.

This issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics is devoted to the intersection of the imaginary and the documentary, the fictional and the cultural in the three genres of literature (poetry, fiction, and drama), in history, in film (feature and documentary), in photography, in plastic arts, and in architecture. Collage in art, portrait paintings, political poetry, archival footage in films, the historical novel, and the metaphors of historiography are some of the examples that demonstrate the interfacing between the imaginary and the documentary. Subjectivity and ideology of the artist and scholar might be couched in a flight of fantasy or in a rational argument, but in both cases they are joined to a specific worldview that is analyzed and discussed. Contributors: Abdel Rahman El Abnoudy, Emad Abdel Latif, Saeed Alwakil, Tamim El Barghouti, Judith Butler, Safaa Fathy, Tahany El Gebaly, Ahmed Haddad, Sabry Hafez, Chouaib Halifi, Stuart Hall, Barbara Harlow, Ahmed Heakl, Jeffrey Herlihy, Ahmed Abdel Mo‘ty Higazi, Abdullah Ibrahim, Walid El Khachab, Jalal Uddin Khan, Hasna Lebbady, Iman Mersal, Helmi Salem, Stephanie Schwerter, Basheer El Sibaei, Larbi Touaf, John Carlos Rowe, Angela Vaupel, Elizabeth Wickett, Shaaban Yusuf.