This interdisciplinary issue of the literary journal Alif is devoted to the desert—as a geographical locus and symbolic image—and to various texts related to it, drawn from literature and the arts, history and anthropology, film and environmental studies. Scholars from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America contribute articles in Arabic, English, and French related to the visual representation of the desert in medieval iconography and in contemporary cinema, in American poetry and in pre-Islamic poetics, in human geography and in sociological thought, in French novels and in Arabic novels, in religious traditions and in ecological approaches, in travel literature and in critical discourse. Includes contributions by Saeed Alwakeel, Saad El Bazei, Sharif Elmusa, Jehan Farouk, Naglaa Hassan, Abdullah Ibrahim, Salma Mobarak, Senayon Olaoluwa, Yasmine Ramadan, Nathalie Roman, Randa Sabry.
Alif 33
The Desert: Human Geography and Symbolic Economy
This interdisciplinary issue of the literary journal Alif is devoted to the desert—as a geographical locus and symbolic image—and to various texts
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Ferial Ghazoul is an Iraqi scholar, critic, and translator. She is professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo and editor of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. She has translated modern Arabic poetry and fiction to English and critical theory from English and French to Arabic.
