Nouri Gana

Rap and Revolt in the Arab World

Despite its relative novelty as a form of artistic expression in the Arab cultural scene, rap music emerged in the last decade or so as a fresh force of sociocultural and political dissent that cannot be disregarded in the study of youth and Arab culture. In a world that is currently shot through with insurrection and revolt, rap music is not only part and parcel of the exponential curve of change sweeping across, among others, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Morocco but also an indispensable feature of Arab culture itself or, at least, of what will have become of Arab culture in the aftermath of its ongoing transformation by rap and hip hop. This essay approaches the phenomenon of Arab rap music as an emergent form of cultural and communal intelligibility and solidarity whose simultaneous influence on and indebtedness to global hip hop and youth cultural movements has transformed it into an increasingly transnational collaborative project, bringing together a heterogeneous array of artists despite their dispersed geopolitical locations. While the history of rap music in the United States is replete with East Coast/West Coast dichotomies, clashes, and lethal rivalries as, for instance, in the case of Tupac Shakur (2Pac) and Christopher Wallace (the Notorious B.I.G.) in the mid- 1990s culture wars, the development of rap music into a worldwide youth phenomenon should be seen as a result of intense circulations, exchanges, borrowings, adaptations, hybridizations, and graftings of global

The Vicissitudes of Melancholia in Freud and Joyce

In “Dubliners and the Art of Losing,” John Gordon maps Joyce’s various literary appropriations of a strange Irish habit that converts accidental absences into engineered subtractions, simple lacks into suffered losses.1 Gordon then glosses over the more sedimented cultural twin of such a habit—in effect, the tendency to defuse transhistorical or individual losses into constitutive or structural absences—and attributes the habit to a hermeneutics broken loose from its historical moorage. I would rather ascribe it, however, to a fully fledged psychic apparatus, set in motion largely by a post-Famine cultural history of successive losses. Rather than remapping the literary inscriptions of such a history—a task accomplished by scholars such as David Lloyd, Seamus Deane, and Declan Kiberd2—my interest here is more modest: to lay bare, through a close examination of two characters from Dubliners, the patterns of psychic engagement with loss at the level of individual, personal history. While the short stories that constitute Dubliners present us with a wide variety of characters who have experienced the pangs of loss, “The Sisters” and “A Painful Case” are unique in their exposition of a sequential trajectory that ranges from attachment, loss, and melancholia to mania or suicide. Joyce intuitively inscribes through the character of Father Flynn in “The Sisters” an interactive relationship between loss, melancholia, and mania and through the character of Emily Sinico in “A Painful Case” a similar relationship between loss, melancholia and suicide. In this, he anticipates Sigmund Freud, who articulates the psychic rationale behind the regression of some melancholics into mania and the adoption by some others of a more lethal line of flight—suicide. This essay exposes the striking parallels between the literary inscriptions of the turn from melancholia to mania and from melancholia to suicide in Joyce’s stories and Freud’s psychoanalytic exposition of the vicissitudes of melancholia. Not

Beyond the Pale:TOWARD AN EXEMPLARY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE JUDGE AND THE LITERARY CRITIC

Abstract Gadamer’s pursuit in Truth and Method of an applicative literary hermeneutics modeled on legal hermeneutics earns him the status of a precursor to the emergence of what is known in North America as the “literature and law movement.” Attentive to the debates and controversies surrounding this movement, this article seeks to explore an interpretive interzone in which the judge and the literary critic, if they apply themselves to a poetics of elasticity, might be of exemplary significance to each other. The notion of “exemplarity” does not, however, imply a mechanical appropriation of the practices of the one by the other, but a mutually nuanced and complicated approximation of the strengths of each by the other. In the light of this normative poetics of proximity and distance, Dworkin’s model of the “chain novel” is assessed and supplemented by (an alternative) model grounded in Foucault’s genealogy of authorship as expounded in his article “What Is an Author?”