Approaches and Perspectives in MENA Studies (411-0-1)

Topic

The Nahda

Instructors

Rebecca Johnson
847/467-1365
University Hall 225

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

The Nahda

This course is an introduction to Arabic literary production of the long nineteenth century as it engages the "nahḍa" (awakening), understood variously as a discourse on modernity, a utopian social project, and an epistemological rupture wrought by colonialism and capitalism. With special emphasis on the genealogies, practices, and problematics of Arabic literary modernity, this course will introduce students to the major works of Arabic literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the major debates, social changes, and material developments that attend the period, including (but not limited to) language reform, migration, print capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In short, we will try to understand how these authors, through their texts, both produced and theorized modernity for their readers in the localized contexts of Imperial influence and control on the one hand, and the global-though uneven-nineteenth-century processes of social, political, economic, and technological change.
Primary texts will all be available in English translation, but those able are encouraged to follow in Arabic. A separate section can be arranged for discussing the Arabic-language versions.

Evaluation Method

Short paper, seminar paper

Class Materials (Required)

Rifa' al-Tahtawi, Imam in Paris [The Extraction of Gold from a Description of Paris] (1826)
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, vols. 1-2 and 3-4 (1855)
Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What Isa Ibn Hisham Told Us (1907)
The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahḍa, ed. Tarek El-Ariss (2018)
Qāsim Amīn, The Liberation of Women (1899), The New Woman (1900)