Arabic As A Secret Song

The celebrated and highly versatile writer Leïla Sebbar was born in French colonial Algeria but has lived nearly her entire adult life in France, where she is recognized as a major voice on the penetrating effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The dramatic contrast between her past and present is the subject of the nine autobiographical essays collected in this volume. Written between 1978 and 2006, they trace a journey that began in Aflou, Algeria, where her father ran a schoolhouse, and continued to France, where Sebbar traveled, alone, as a graduate student before eventually realizing her powerful creative vision. The pieces collected in this book capture an array of experiences, sensations, and sentiments surrounding the French colonial presence in Algeria and offer an intimate and prismatic reflection on Sebbar’s bicultural upbringing as the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Sebbar paints an unflinching portrait of her original disconnection from her father’s Arabic language and culture, depicting her struggle to revive a cultural heritage that her family had deliberately obscured and to convey the vibrant yet muted Arabic of her father and of Algeria. Looking back from numerous vantage points throughout her life, she presents the complicated and divisive dynamics of being raised "between two shores"--the colonized and the colonizer. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

Asmahan was the toast of Cairo song and cinema in the 1930s. A Druze princess, she came from an important clan in the mountains of Syria, but broke free from her traditional family background, left her husband and became a public performer. She was also rumoured to be an agent for the Allied forces during WWII. Through the story of Asmahan and her musical career, the reader glimpses not only aspects of the cultural and political history of Egypt and Syria between the two world wars, but also the change in attitude in the Arab world towards women as public performers on stage.

Arabic is one of the world's largest languages, spoken natively by nearly 300 million people. By strength of numbers alone Arabic is one of our most important languages, studied by scholars across many different academic fields and cultural settings. It is, however, a complex language rooted in its own tradition of scholarship, constituted of varieties each imbued with unique cultural values and characteristic linguistic properties. Understanding its linguistics holistically is therefore a challenge. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics is a comprehensive, one-volume guide that deals with all major research domains which have been developed within Arabic linguistics. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field, who both present state-of-the-art overviews and develop their own critical perspectives. The Handbook begins with Arabic in its Semitic setting and ends with the modern dialects; it ranges across the traditional - the classical Arabic grammatical and lexicographical traditions--to the contemporary--Arabic sociolinguistics, Creole varieties and codeswitching, psycholinguistics, and Arabic as a second language - while situating Arabic within current phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexicological theory. An essential reference work for anyone working within Arabic linguistics, the book brings together different approaches and scholarly traditions, and provides analysis of current trends and directions for future research.

Worldwide Women Writers in Paris examines a new literary phenomenon consisting of an unprecedented number of women from around the world who have come to Paris and become authors of written works in French. It takes as its starting point a series of filmed interviews conducted in the French capital, a set of recorded conversations motivated by a desire to pay homage to these discrete voices and images at a moment characterized by impressive diversity. Their individual paths to France and to French are noteworthy, and these authors of different generations and varying places of origin emphasize their singularity. However, the juxtaposition of their reflections reveals that many have faced similar difficulties when learning the French language, adapting to life in France, and many have encountered forms of prejudice in the publishing world related to their ethnicity or gender. These challenges have led them, each in an idiosyncratic manner, to tackle tough topics in their work and to respond to adversity by finding effective creative expressions. Taken together, the innovations and interventions in oral and written form of these authors collectively contribute to significant change in the specialized score that is the Parisian literary landscape: Hélène Cixous (Algeria); Zahia Rahmani (Algeria); Leïla Sebbar (Algeria); Bessora (Belgium); Julia Kristeva (Bulgaria); Pia Petersen (Denmark); Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe); Eva Almassy (Hungary); Shumona Sinha (India); Chahdortt Djavann (Iran); Yumiko Seki (Japan); Evelyne Accad (Lebanon); Etel Adnan (Lebanon); Nathacha Appanah (Mauritius); Brina Svit (Slovenia); Eun-Ja Kang (South Korea); Anna Moï (Vietnam).

Think - speak - listen: A portrait of an artist's work The act of hearing the sound of spoken language forms a fluid, sometimes fractured act of change in time. At the same time, orality and the human voice are situated in space and thus create new places. This publication brings to the fore the performative character of the human voice and the unifying, spatial quality of sound and presents works by the artist Ricarda Denzer from the last ten years. The starting point of this book is the thesis that thinking has a voice and that this voice has a body. Listening as a physical, performative act is understood as a creative process of "becoming world," of participating in the world. The book explores questions of how we think, how we remember, and how we relate to the world. An overview of the artistic work of Ricarda Denzer in the period 2013-2023 Artistic practice as situated listening; experimental artistic approaches from sound and voice studies With contributions by Fouad Asfour, Christa Benzer, Ricarda Denzer, Christiane Erharter, Christian Höller, Brandon LaBelle, and Jaimini Patel

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.

This is a study of an almost inaccessible area of the intricate linguistic fabric of Afghanistan – namely, its secret codes of communication. The text draws on a profound knowledge of Afghanistan and neighbouring regions, as well as the cultural and sociolinguistic processes at work across Eurasia. The author situates these sociolinguistic matters within the appropriate diachronic and comparative background, and traces the numerous threads which connect them to areas both close to and distant from Afghanistan. The book will be of great interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including, but extending beyond, the realms of linguistics, cultural history, and sociology. It will also be of practical value in many areas, notably with regards to military and political issues, as well as humanitarian aid.