Comparative Literature Commons^™

Scénographier La Mémoire : Le Costume Théâtral Comme Archive Vivante. Retour Sur L’Exposition « Tisser Le Temps », Mohammed Amin Boudrika

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This article examines the role of theatre costume in constructing and transmitting the memory of the performing arts, drawing on the exhibition Tisser le Temps: Histoire et Création du Costume Théâtral Marocain (Weaving Time: History and Creation of Moroccan Theatre Costume), presented in 2024 as part of the National Theatre Festival of Tetouan. Given the ephemeral nature of theatrical performance, costume emerges as a material trace capable of preserving the memory of the production, of the actor's body and of the creative process. In this sense, it can be regarded as a genuine "living archive". The article also analyses the …

Archiver Le Théâtre Algérien : Itinéraire D’Un Chercheur, Ahmed Cheniki

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Undertaking research on theatre in Algeria, the Arab world or sub-Saharan Africa is by no means an easy task; it is closer to an obstacle course. It is far from the simple "intellectual adventure" it is so often imagined to be. It is a gruelling experience, patiently built up over time: the outcome of a long and delicate process, a lengthy journey made up of rewarding moments, to be sure, and genuine discoveries, but also of trial and error, self-questioning, refusals, closed doors and, at times, decisive encounters.

Résumé
Entreprendre une recherche sur le théâtre en Algérie, dans le monde …

Interview – رحلة في أرشيفات المسرح العربي مقابلة مع أ.د سيد علي إسماعيل, Ons Trabelsi

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This interview looks back on the career of theatre researcher and historian Sayed Ali Ismail and on his distinctive journey through the forgotten and marginalised documents of Arab theatre. The historian highlights the importance of archives in building a reinterpretation of the history of the performing arts in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt.

ملخّص
تتناول هذه المقابلة المسيرة المهنية للباحث والمؤرخ المسرحي سيد علي إسماعيل، بالإضافة إلى رحلته الفريدة مع الوثائق المنسية والمهمشة في مجال المسرح العربي. ويؤكد الباحث على أهمية الأرشيفات في إعادة قراءة تاريخ الفنون المسرحية في العالم العربي، ولاسيما في مصر

كلمات مفتاحية
الأرشيف، التوثيق، التاريخ، …

Palestinian Theatre Studies: The Emergence Of A Field, Noor Shihadeh

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This article analyses the emergence of Palestinian theatre studies, a field of research bound to the modern history of Palestine and to the settler colonial violence that marks it. This violence strikes people, their cultural production and the very possibility of preserving it, shaping in turn how scholarship circulates and where it can be conducted. Studies on Palestinian theatre have nonetheless appeared since the 1960s. The article examines them through a multilingual literature review (Arabic, English, French, Italian, Hebrew) and identifies three main lines of research: a historical-documentary approach, a socio-political and anthropological approach, and a body of studies devoted …

Héritages, Mémoires Et Transmissions Dans « Augures (LaʿAllā Wa ʿAsā) » De Chrystèle Khodr, Najla Nakhlé-Cerruti

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This article examines how Augures (Laʿallā wa ʿasā), a play created by Chrystèle Khodr in 2021 in Beirut and then presented in France, constructs an alternative historiography of the Lebanese civil war through theatre and its history. While the history of theatrical practice during this period remains largely unwritten in Lebanese historiography, the play draws on the intertwined memories of two iconic actresses, Hanane Hajj Ali and Randa Asmar had never converged before this production. Drawing on textual analysis, observation of the performance, and secondary sources, the article shows how Augures turns the stage into a space where history is …

L’Archive, Enjeu Et Miroir De La Structuration Du Mouvement Théâtral Indépendant En Égypte, Pauline Donizeau

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This article examines the link between the archives of the independent theatre movement in Egypt and the movement’s difficult journey towards structuring itself, from its formation in the late 1980s to the present day. For the artists involved in this movement, who create outside the structures and funding of official institutions, the archives represent a major challenge in political, economic and aesthetic terms.

Résumé
L’article s’intéresse au lien entre les archives du mouvement théâtral indépendant en Égypte et sa difficile structuration, depuis sa formation à la fin des années 1980 jusqu’à maintenant. Pour les artistes de ce mouvement, qui créent …

نقد معاوية نور لمسرح أحمد شوقي (1929-1932): قراءة في أرشيف مجهول, Essam Abu Elgasim Abdel Wahid

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Critiques of Ahmad Shawqi’s drama formed a prominent feature of the Sudanese critic Muawiya Muhammad Nur’s theatrical scholarship. Among the six articles he dedicated to analyzing theatrical works, Nur authored three pivotal essays on Shawqi’s theater published during the "Prince of Poets" life- time. The significance of these articles today lies in the fact that they remained "unknown" and absent from foundational references, leading to the omission of Nur’s contributions from studies documenting Arabic theatrical criticism in the pre-Mohamed Mandour era. This study serves as a call to re-read the history of Arabic theatrical criticism through a more precise and …

Introduction, Marianne Noujaim, Ons Trabelsi

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L’histoire du théâtre arabe est une histoire traversée par des silences, des lacunes, et des discontinuités qui relèvent autant des conditions de préservation des spectacles que des modalités de la mise en place d’une historiographie rigoureuse. D’aucuns infèrent de ces lacunes la carence de production des arts du spectacle dans le monde arabe. Dans la préface de son ouvrage Al-Masraḥ al-munawwaʿ, Tawfīq Al- Ḥakīm (1966) déplorait ainsi le fait que « notre création théâtrale contemporaine surgît ainsi de rien ou de presque rien, de quelques rares expériences […], œuvrant par-delà un abîme vertigineux que les efforts fournis au fil …

Des Arbres Comme Des Lignes De Vie – Pascale Cassagnau Et Suhaib Gasmelbari En Conversation, Pascale Cassagnau, Suhaib Gasmelbari

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As part of a study day organized in September 2025 at the University of Grenoble Alpes in partnership with the Centre National des Arts Plastiques entitled “The Loss of Images: Research and Creative Narratives,” Pascale Cassagnau and Suhaib Gasmelbari discussed his film Talking about Trees (2019), focusing on the film’s sources and structure, the history of Sudanese cinema that it reveals within the film itself, and the metaphors of trees and plants as lifelines and living archives at a time when images have disappeared.

Résumé
Dans le cadre d’une journée d’études organisée en septembre 2025 à l’Université Grenoble Alpes en …

Introduction – Carnets Filmiques, Carnets Sonores : Des Essais Intimes Et Collectifs, Robert Bonamy, Aude Fourel, Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau

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Le sens à attribuer à la notion de carnet filmique ou de carnet sonore suscite quelque indécision, en raison du caractère composite et mouvant des cas envisagés. L’enjeu principal ne paraît ainsi pas ici celui d’une définition serrée d’un objet, mais plutôt une attention accordée à des tentatives de réalisation. De surcroît, si la forme-carnet permet à peu près tout, elle n’interdit donc véritablement rien : l’esquisse, le brouillon, l’approximation, voire l’échec et l’interruption.
[...]

Du Journal De Deuil À L’Œuvre De Sépulture : « Lo » (Thanassis Vassiliou, 2021-2025), Marie Martin

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After his mother’s death in 2017, Thanassis Vassiliou returned to Greece and began filming. The instinctive act of recording aimed both to come to terms with the now definitive absence in places still filled with memories, and to document his own reactions, attempting to preserve them even if he could not fully understand them. These filmic notes could perhaps, later on, allow another perspective, according to the dynamic that Antoine Compagnon aptly analyzed as paradoxical in relation to Barthes’s Mourning Diary: “mourning and narrative are antinomic, but [...] only narrative [...] is capable of expressing the experience of mourning, …

« From Ground Zero » Et « Letters » : Carnets Polyphoniques En Quête D’Intersubjectivité, Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau

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The two polyphonic films From Ground Zero (2025, produced by Rashid Masharawi) and Letters (2025, produced by Josef Khallouf) bring together, in response to the war in Gaza, unique short films, letters and chronicles that address collective questions. How do these films take charge of the urgent need to problematize, aesthetically and politically, the relationship between subjectivity and the collective? From the Palestinian enclave or neighboring Lebanon, they seek irreducible singularities and intersubjective connections in the face of the horror of genocide. Caught in a complex combination of places and times, their address to our spectatorial gaze thus reveals the …

Le Vent Du Sud, « La Nuit Et L’Enfant » – Récit D’Une Vidéo-Correspondance Avec Zoheir Mefti, David Yon

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Entre 2011 et 2012, Zoheir Mefti et David Yon ont entretenu une correspondance autour de la réalisation filmique. A travers leurs échanges, ils questionnent la nécessité de l’image. Zoheir Mefti travaille un geste filmique de l’urgence, tandis que David Yon prépare un film en Algérie dans un temps plus long. Après les mots, ils partagent des images et des sons, tels des carnets filmiques, dans lesquels ils donnent leurs positions et interrogent les liens entre la vie et le cinéma.

Carnets De Bord. Tables D’Orientation « Tariq Teguia », Pascale Cassagnau, Tariq Teguia

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This interview by Pascale Cassagnau with Tariq Teguia puts into perspective the Algerian filmmaker’s work notebooks, which are both autonomous objects and working documents, linked to the film itself. A medium for thought, the notebook is a space for language, a score and a cartographic space that gives shape to the writing of the film in a graphic way. A discursive space parallel to the space of scriptwriting, the notebook accompanies the development of the film from its inception, collecting the writing of thought in no particular chronological order.

Résumé
Cet entretien de Pascale Cassagnau avec Tariq Teguia met en …

« Voi(E)X De L’Exil, Formes De La Pensée » : Le Cinéma-Essai De Borhane Alaouié », Elie Yazbek, Farah Alhashem

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This article offers a comprehensive study of Borhane Alaouié’s work, a central figure in modern Lebanese cinema, situating it within the tradition of the essay film. Through an analysis of Lettre d’un temps d’exil, À toi où que tu sois and Khallas, it examines how exile, wounded memory, and fragmentary thought shape the filmmaker’s aesthetic and ethical approach. Exile is explored not only as a geopolitical condition but as an interior state, a persistent uncertainty that structures voices, narratives and images. The study highlights the importance of voice-over, fragmentation, memory-driven editing and epistolary address, while positioning Alaouié’s work …

The Personal Is Collective: Egyptian First-Person – Documentary Cinema As Post-Revolution Diary, Eman Elharmeel

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The 2011 Egyptian revolution marked a watershed moment in the reconfiguration of individuality, autonomy and self-expression within Egyptian society. Challenging long-standing collectivist frameworks, the revolutionary moment opened new spaces for individual agency and subjective reflection. This paper examines how these shifts intersect with the rise of first-person documentary cinema as a powerful medium for articulating post-revolutionary subjectivity in Egypt.
Focusing on The Past Will Return (2015) by Dina Hamza, Happily Ever After (2016) by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir, and Little Eagles (2016) by Mohamed Rashad, the paper analyzes how filmmakers negotiate personal desires, familial pressures and collective belonging …

Triste Souvenir Et Sombre Avenir, « Lettre À Ma Sœur » (2006) De Habiba Djahnine, Boualem Khelifati

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This article explores how Letter to My Sister (2006), a film by director and poet Habiba Djahnine dedicated to her sister Nabila, a democratic and feminist activist who was murdered by Islamist terrorists in Tizi Ouzou in 1995, revisits the fate of the direct and indirect victims of Algeria’s dark decade of the 1990s and the repressive religious and state policies towards women. It employs a narrative structure that combines several film genres – film-letter, film-journey, film-poem, and film-archive – showing situations in which memories and pain are shared, as well as the necessary perpetuation of a struggle that is …

Beyrouth 1978-1982 : Le Fonds Photographique De Monica Maurer – Une Collection Contre L’Oubli Et La Destruction, Aude Fourel

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It was while searching for unused film footage on the Palestinian struggle for a documentary essay that I discovered the filmography of German director Monica Maurer and her work restoring and preserving Palestinian films. For the past four years, we have been working together to digitise and catalogue the photographs and documents she still keeps at home.
I reflect on the paths opened up by the writing of a film in the making, on the formatting of Monica Maurer’s photographic collection, and on the initial prospects for visual and historical studies of this material in the particular context of the …

Sonorisation De L’Anarchive Ou La Palestine Comme Projet Politique – À L’Écoute De « A Fidai Film » De Kamal Aljafari Et De « Partition » De Diana Allan, Judith Abensour

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Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film draws on Palestinian archives confiscated by Israel in Beirut in 1982. Diana Allan created Partition using archives from Mandatory Palestine held at the Imperial War Museum in London. The film notebook not only refers to a type of fragmentary editing, but also allows us to revisit the relationship between sound and image, thus offering an exercise in remembrance in the present. By adding sound to images, the two filmmakers question the contradictions inherent in archives, their erasure or their resistance to authoritative or propagandistic discourse. Thus, under the guise of sensory and sound anthropology for …

Videotracts For Palestine : Images Et Contre-Images, Lola Maupas

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This article examines the political and aesthetic gesture of Videotracts for Palestine, a collective founded on Instagram in November 2023 in the context of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Heirs to the ciné-tracts of 1968 and, more broadly, to international militant cinema, these very short anonymous films also mobilize contemporary digital tools and produce what might be called a counter-visuality of resistance. The study highlights how the collective situates itself within a tradition of images as weapons of struggle while inventing its own forms, shaped by the massive circulation enabled by the Internet and social media. The videotracts deconstruct …

Des Sons Pour L’Histoire. Correspondance Avec Mohammed Yaghi, Aude Fourel

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Sounds for History. Correspondence with Mohammed Yaghi
Mohammed Yaghi was born in 1992 and trained in sound engineering in Gaza. He has worked for UNRWA television and collaborated with Palestinian and international documentary film production companies.
These sound recordings for films, educational programs and interviews were the first step in the sound diary that he has kept on building on a daily basis.
[...]


Résumé
Mohammed Yaghi est né en 1992 et s’est formé aux métiers du son à Gaza. Il a travaillé à la télévision de l’UNRWA et collaboré avec des maisons de productions palestiniennes et internationales de films …

Introduction – Musiques Au Proche-Orient Après Le Tournant Numérique, Amr Abdelrahim, Thomas Michel, Nicolas Puig

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Le développement des pratiques du do it yourself, l’avènement des home studios et la multiplication des circulations sonores (samples, échantillons sonores, etc.) grâce aux supports numériques et aux plateformes d’écoute ont modifié en profondeur la production musicale au Machreq. Cette introduction dresse le tableau des études produites sur la musique au Proche-Orient depuis l’avènement du numérique au début des années 2000 ; elle passe en revue les différents paradigmes mobilisés et propose une approche centrée notamment sur les Science and Technology Studies pour comprendre le sens des évolutions en cours.
Elle décrit ensuite les différentes contributions qui alimentent ce …

Liminality And Monopoly: Contextualizing The Transformations Within The Egyptian Digital Music Scene After 2013, Fayrouz Karawya

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The echoes of the political upheavals, notably in Egypt post-2011 and elsewhere in the Arab world, have produced a supra-monopolistic structure of music production systems and streaming platforms, reflecting post-revolutionary political strategies amid autocratic restoration across the region. While the digital age initially offered greater freedom and creativity to a rising “mediated dissidence class” and countercultural music currents, post-2013 strategies increasingly instrumentalized digital platforms to impose authoritarian control and restrict musical expression. In parallel, social media platforms, which have become crucial for musical mediation, promotion, and marketing, have mirrored broader social and political polarizations that emerged in the post-2013 period. …

Contentious Culture: The Convergence And Contestation Of Class And Identity In Egypt’S Mahraganat Scene, Elisa Schouten

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Since its inception in the early 2000s, Mahraganat music has undermined traditional cultural gatekeeping and reshaped Egypt’s music scene, becoming one of the country’s most debated music genres in recent history. This paper aims to examine Mahraganat within the broader context of cultural identity formation and technological developments and contextualize the criticism of the genre and its makers. Building on research conducted in Egypt’s capital between 2019 and 2024, this paper explores the history of cultural gatekeeping and argues that social class lies at the core of the heated debate surrounding Egyptian music and Mahraganat in particular. It shows that …

Brehony Louis, "Palestinian Music In Exile: Voices Of Resistance", Le Caire, Auc Press, 2023 – El Rashidi Yasmine, "Laughter In The Dark: Egypt To The Tune Of Change", New York, Columbia Global Reports, 2023., Amr Abdelrahim

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The contributions of this special issue demonstrate a renewed scholarly interest in popular music in the Middle East in recent years. In the face of resilient Arab authoritarianism and the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, it is not surprising that many scholars seek to identify a glimmer of hope in the everyday cultural practices of the dominated. The two volumes under consideration are representative of this scholarly impetus, as well as the challenges it must overcome to attain a better understanding of “music in everyday life”: namely articulating art and politics without collapsing one into the other, and resisting …

The Independent Music Scene In The Levant Between 2003 And 2023: Do-It-Yourself With The Support Of Arts And Culture Organizations, Areej Abou Harb

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The beginning of the 21st century witnessed the rise of the internet and mobile technologies, as well as the expansion of the digital sphere and the emergence of the Do-It-Yourself music. Simultaneously, it experiences significant changes that reshaped the arts and cultural scene in general, and the music production in particular across the Levant. This period marked the institutionalization of arts and culture production and diffusion. It saw the formation of “intermediate” pan-Arab and regional organizations such as Culture Resource (Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy) and AFAC (The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture), as well as the establishment of small record labels, …

Sonic Acts Of Care: Friendship-Based Networks And Grassroots Activism In Beirut, Rim J. Irscheid

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The article examines a Beirut-based network of self-funded, independent musicians that translate memories and their emotions into artistic and activist practices. Drawing on musical albums created since the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the article explores the social and emotional impact of artist-run spaces for music production. Focusing on a friendship-based network around the collectively-run recording studio Tunefork Studios, it examines how care, trust, and solidarity with Lebanon’s citizens and music producers are translated into both their creative practices and their production and distribution strategies. I argue that Beirut-based musicians increasingly thematise the emotional toll and personal investment in political, infrastructural …

Le Stade Rotana De La Pop Arabe, Pierre France

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Rotana, owned by Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, has been a central and ambiguous player in the Arab music industry since the 1980s, yet its history remains fragmentary and elusive. More than a simple record label with a defined sound and aesthetic, it stands as an audiovisual group embedded within a large holding company linked to Gulf-style capitalism. Rotana has established a lasting model where music operates in close connection — or dependency, from a more critical perspective — with other economic sectors, shaping both artists’ career paths (conceived as buy/sell transactions and transfer markets) and how songs are produced. …

Promouvoir Son Image Et « Se Faire Un Nom » Dans La Scène Rap Proche-Orientale : L’Exemple De Soundcloud, Thomas Michel

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This article examines the role of the SoundCloud platform in building careers for independent rappers and producers in the Middle East, particularly in Jordan and Palestine. Based on an ethnographic survey conducted between Amman and Jerusalem, the author analyses how artists use this platform to make themselves known, distribute their music, and navigate a digitized musical ecosystem. The study draws on Popular Music Studies and studies of digital platforms to examine three main areas.
The first concerns visibility, through the recommendation tools and playlists offered by SoundCloud, which provide local and international exposure. The second looks at the forms of …

The Tragic Outlaw Hero In Modern Egyptian Fiction: A Case Study On Naguib Mahfouz’S "The Thief And The Dogs", Manar Ellethy

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This article examines the outlaw figure in modern Egyptian fiction

through the lens of the conceptual framework of social banditry and classical

tragedy. It offers a unique angle of analysis of one of Mahfouz’s most prolific

works that emerges in times of growing political anxiety following the Egyptian

Revolution of 1952. Reading the 1962 film adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s The

Thief and the Dogs directed by Kamal El-Sheikh as a projection of the socio-

political uncertainty of the post-revolution Nasser era, this paper considers the

outlaw figure within the condition of social alienation. Using the conceptual

borders set by Eric …