Plainclothes,
2025
University of Kent
Plainclothes, Chris Deacy
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Plainclothes (2024), directed by Carmen Emmi.
East Of Wall,
2025
University of Kent
East Of Wall, Chris Deacy
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of East of Wall (2024), directed by Kate Beecroft.
Twinless,
2025
University of Kent
Twinless, Chris Deacy
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Twinless (2024), directed by James Sweeney.
The Virgin Of Quarry Lake,
2025
University of Kent
The Virgin Of Quarry Lake, Chris Deacy
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of The Virgin of Quarry Lake (2025), directed by Laura Casabé.
André Is An Idiot,
2025
University of Nebraska Omaha
André Is An Idiot, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of André is an Idiot (2025), directed by Tony Benna.
By Design,
2025
University of Nebraska Omaha
By Design, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of By Design (2025), directed by Amanda Kramer.
Omaha,
2025
University of Nebraska Omaha
Omaha, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Omaha (2024), directed by Cole Webley.
Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing,
2025
University of Minnesota
Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Spatial and temporal motifs predominate throughout the extensive corpus of Arabic prison writing. However, far from establishing the prison as an exceptional space, and periods of imprisonment as “time outside time,” this paper argues that modern Arabic prison literature tends instead to blur the distinction between “inside” and “outside” prison space and time. In place of a rigid spatial demarcation, dramatically exemplified by images of towering, razor wire-tipped walls, Arabic prison writing consistently seeks to create continuity between the punishment meted out to those within the prison’s walls and the repression endured by those beyond it. Consequently, these texts figuratively …
Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels,
2025
Duke University
Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam …
Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives,
2025
McMaster University
Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the …
The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria,
2025
Forum Transregionale Studien
The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). …
Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State,
2025
Center for Media and Cultural Freedom – Samir Kasir Eyes
Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The Syrian Assad regime used prisons as tools of domination. As such, prisons had the power not only of active repression but also as places of detention and disappearance for Syrians. The expansion of political detention in Syria over fifty years transformed prison into a living being in the sense that prison became a part not just of Syrians' political life, but also of their social identity. One can recognize it in voices, attitudes, lifestyles, and even written and oral culture. Syrian cities are full of weapons since a large area of the urban space is inhabited by the buildings …
From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021),
2025
University of Oslo
From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …
Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist,
2025
University of Navarra
Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …
Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature,
2025
Williams College
Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article captures the literary shift that accompanied the transformation of the nature of political imprisonment in Morocco in the last twenty years. Focusing on the new victims of state violence, who fall within two categories: prisoners accused of terrorism and those accused of heinous sexual crimes, this article argues that the emergence of these new criminal profiles has led to the establishment of a transnational “Multimedia Prison Literature” (MPL). Drawing on the cases of Ali Arras, a Belgian-Moroccan whom Spain delivered to Morocco for terrorist charges, and Mohamed Hajib, a German-Moroccan citizen whom Germany extradited to his country of …
The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives,
2025
University of Abdelmalek Essaadi
The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …
Captivity, Resistance And Political Consciousness In Walid Daqqa’S Prison Literature,
2025
Birmingham City University
Captivity, Resistance And Political Consciousness In Walid Daqqa’S Prison Literature, Ashjan Ajour
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article examines the prison literature of the Palestinian intellectual Walid Daqqa who has been serving a life sentence for resistance since 1986 in Israeli prisons. From the depth of his experience he writes about his conceptualization of captivity, colonial violence, the resistance of the Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system and the construction of Palestinian national imagination in his book Consciousness Molded: or The Re-Identification of Palestinian Torture (2010) Published in Arabic and his first young adults novel The Story of the Oil’s Secret (Ḥikayat Sir al-Zeit) published in 2018 in Arabic. Daqqa has become …
Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing From Captivity,
2025
Birzeit University
Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing From Captivity, Basil Farraj
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article discusses writings by Palestinian political prisoners and the broader body of prison literature situating them as practices of ‘smuggling freedom’ from Israel’s carceral regime, shedding light onto their political and social meaning. Through discussing writings by prisoners, the article points to a long history through which Palestinian prisoners confronted the Israeli regime’s torture and violent practices, and its broader project of eliminating the political nature of captivity. The article argues that prisoners’ writings reveal much about the dynamics of carceral power and violence, and the logic behind the confrontation practices used by prisoners in Palestine and beyond. These …
New Approaches To Mena Prison Literatures After 2011,
2025
Forum Transregionale Studien
New Approaches To Mena Prison Literatures After 2011, Anne-Marie Mcmanus
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
The Role Of Film And Media In Cultivating Hope: A Conflict Resolution Platform,
2025
Nova Southeastern University
The Role Of Film And Media In Cultivating Hope: A Conflict Resolution Platform, Lizyvette Ramos, Alexia Georgakopoulos
Peace and Conflict Studies Journal Conference
The Role of Film and Media in Cultivating Hope: A Conflict Resolution Platform: The role of film is that it not only provides humans with a visceral experience when we watch atrocities of war and injustices to innocent humans, but films also provide humans with a pause to consider alternatives as we reimagine conflict from a different trajectory with a future that includes peace and conflict transformation. This session will allow participants to gain insight into how to approach films and media from the positive side in that they offer people an opportunity to learn and that people themselves have …
