https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/32683 Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:11:01 GMT 2026-04-16T12:11:01Z https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121416 Title: Race, time, and the petrified subject in Algeria : reading Frantz Fanon's Algerian writings and Kateb Yacine's Nedjma Author(s): McManus, Anne-Marie Abstract: Two major thinkers of anti-colonialism in Algeria—Kateb Yacine, author of the novel Nedjma (1956), and Frantz Fanon—described the impacts of colonial violence through figures of petrification that blur the border between human and nonhuman. Their works ground this article's relational reading across anti-Black and anti-Algerian racializations, drawing on Sylvia Wynter's concept of rhythmic reading and scholarship on comparative racialization. Petrification seeks to capture subjective absence: a modality of living as a negated subject who is excluded from the category of the human. This relational frame suggests absence as a plural, disappearing mode of knowledge production under colonialism. Yacine's novel fleshes out alternative modalities of being human that appear, in Fanon's Algerian writings, as flickers en route to revolution, or clinical diagnoses. Fanon's oeuvre and its readers generate a new critique of Yacine's canonical novel. This article develops absence as a new vocabulary, beyond colonial psychiatry and its agentive resistance, for the reading of literature from the settler colony. Building on feminist critiques of Nedjma, it names anti-Blackness in the novel as an instance of the text's participation in the field of Man at the moment it tries to write, through absence, its outside. Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121416 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121415 Title: On the Ruins of What’s to Come, I Stand: Time and Devastation in Syrian Cultural Production since 2011 Author(s): McManus, Anne-Marie Abstract: The core concepts of this article are drawn from Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian texts and films whose authors—Sulaiman, Ra’id Wahsh, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the Abounaddara film collective, Osama Esber, and Samar Yazbek—supported the uprising and held the state responsible for the war. Multigenerational, elite, and celebrated in their respective artforms, these authors reside in Europe and the US and do not self-define as a movement. Within the opposition’s cultural field, these literary and documentary works are iterations of a fierce engagement with 2011’s aftermath that represents the uprising obliquely because the revolution’s political promise demanded new, noncoercive codes of representation. Even the uprising and oppositional culture cannot become sacred symbols, hence Abounaddara’s cry in 2015: “Down with the heroes of the Syrian revolution!” Conscious of their address to multiple publics several works discussed here appeared simultaneously in Arabic and English translation—and of culture’s many uses in the Syrian conflict, they eschew the codes of refugee literature, revolutionary discourse, and, for the most part, sensationalist address to international audiences. Thus, Abounaddara is known for its “right to the image” campaign, which critiques representations of Syrian corpses. Wahsh notes, “writing is a [market] stall” for “pain.” “Because I am bored,” interjects Sulaiman’s Babylonian, “I play with the corpse of the future in the ill lit / language room,” offering up “a sentence no one can use”. Ten years after the popular uprising that became a brutal war, Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian authors are engaged in the struggle to craft a historical consciousness that can acknowledge and mourn for their recent revolutionary past without reifying it. As they write in and of material, political, and social ruin, their works echo collective traumas in regional memory: the Palestinian nakba, the rise of Syria’s Assad regime, Lebanon’s civil war, the 2003 occupation of Iraq, and more. The ruin appears cruelly recursive, yet it is arrested in the corpus of works discussed in this article: poetry by Firas Sulaiman and Osama Esber; prose by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Samer Yazbek, and Ra’id Wahsh; and documentary film by the Abounaddara Collective. Drawing on Arabic poetic modernism and regional politics, I argue that ruin imagery—ranging from war’s rubble to ancient artefacts—carries distinctive structures of temporal anticipation in Syrian literary and cultural memory. The writers and filmmakers discussed deploy formal and thematic means of stasis and repetition, displacement and accumulation, to summon these temporal structures—only to refuse, interrupt, and reroute them. I argue that such poetic engineerings of the images of ruin assert the singularity of the Syrian present within broader collective memories of ruin. As such, they raise a historicizing challenge to the current academic dominance of reading ruin imagery, notably from the Middle East, through an imperial lens. Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121415 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121414 Title: Die monotheistische Wende im Ḥimyar Author(s): Jeschke, Josef Abstract: In diesem Artikel präsentiere ich die Ergebnisse meiner Dissertation, die ich am 01. Dezember 2021 an der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena im Fach Semitistik verteidigt habe. Zunächst werde ich die Hauptfragestellung vorstellen, gefolgt von einer Diskussion der verwendeten Quellen und der angewandten Modelle aus der Konversionsforschung. Anschließend werde ich die Ergebnisse meiner Analyse von Lexikon und Onomastikon ansprechen, und danach die historische Einbettung des Prozesses in die monotheistische Wende im Römischen und Sasānidischen Reich sowie in Aksum. Zum Schluss möchte ich einige zentrale Ergebnisse zusammenfassen. Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121414 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/120911 Title: [Rezension von: Rechtspluralismus in der Islamischen Welt] Author(s): Schneider, Irene Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/120911 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z