https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/123385 2026-04-14T23:33:33Z 2026-04-14T23:33:33Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/27666 2024-06-03T05:15:28Z 2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

Title: About our contributors [Antae Journal, 5(1)] Abstract: Short biographies of the contributors in this issue.

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z Keyrouz, Laure https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/27665 2024-06-03T05:16:05Z 2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Weaving a descriptive tapestry of war, a language composed of two fragile and precious threads : a review of the works of Zeina Abirached Authors: Keyrouz, Laure Abstract: Beirut, an immensely historically and culturally rich city, can be described as a city of birth, destruction, and rebirth. Using comparative literature, I will be discussing how the works of Zeina Abirached use words and images to describe the people, places, and events of the civil war which occurred there in the 1970s and 80s. I will start by briefly describing each book. As this review progresses, I will focus on the individual as well as universal human behavior through graphic narration and storytelling. This is essential to the understanding of the totality of the situation in the text. The question to be analysed is how she—as an author of comic books—writes about the Mediterranean (in particular, Beirut) through the study of its characters as well as their stories and origins. Zeina Abirached was born in Beirut, in 1981, when the civil war had already begun; she was already 10 years old by the time it ended in 1990, and her childhood memories were shaped by living through its horrific events. Going on to study graphic arts and commercial design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), she was awarded the top prize at the International Comic Book Festival in Beirut in 2002 for her first graphic novel Beyrouth-Catharsis. She moved to Paris in 2004, where she attended the National School of Decorative Arts. From among her illustrated books, I chose three: A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return, I Remember Beirut, and Le piano oriental.

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z Aloui, Amira https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/27661 2024-06-03T05:16:44Z 2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The space of dissent in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It Authors: Aloui, Amira Abstract: The Humanist episteme cherished individualism and mapped a world picture that places every object in its space and displaces any attempt of dissent. Shakespeare, then, produces As You Like It to invest in a new project that is not only a translation of its culture, but, above all, acts as an agent that maps and reshapes the episteme that has produced it. The characters, instead of ascending to the level of angels, choose to descend in space and time to the forest in an era marked by an opposition between the city and the country, or court and forest. The playwright thus becomes a mapmaker and the text a cartography of an alternative world. The physical displacement of characters to the alternative world of the forest spells out the playwright’s examination of the possibility of an anarchic “state” that negates all forms of corruption and policing; family, gender, class and even poetic orthodoxies. This hypothesis suggests the failure of the embryonic capitalist state, or a shared anxiety towards it. The interlude in the greenwood contrasts the immobility of time to a spatial mobility. Greenwood, thus, marks the longing for an alternative and a rejection of an authoritarian world, that of the city and the court. In this essay, I will study the revolutionary dimension of the text through an examination of poetic, political, and theatrical (dis)spatiality.

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z Betik, Bailey https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/27660 2024-06-03T05:17:55Z 2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Behind the backs of borders : diaspora microspace in Imtiaz Dharker’s poetry Authors: Betik, Bailey Abstract: A self-described ‘“Scottish Muslim Calvinist’”, poet Imtiaz Dharker uses her collections to vividly depict everyday life ‘between borders’. Dharker’s cultural identity, one indubitably rooted in hybridity, displays itself in the shattering of binaries between Other and indigene throughout her body of work. However, factoring in the changing sociopolitical climate and attitudes toward Muslim women in the Western world, heightened in the aftermath of 9/11, and comparing her collections I Speak For the Devil and The Terrorist at My Table, one can see Dharker’s imagery of hybridity drastically shift. To better unpack the notion of existing in a perpetual life between borders, I propose a notion of “diaspora microspace” that combines Avtar Brah’s definition of a ‘diaspora space’ with Homi Bhabha’s ‘inter’ of the Third Space. Diaspora microspaces then act as frames of examination for the manifestations of diaspora narrative in everyday spaces of identity—where collapsed borders echo through quotidian spaces like dinner tables, doorways, and the home. Pre-9/11, these diaspora microspaces in the former collection begin as thresholds of optimistic negotiation, understanding, and translation, but in the latter, post-9/11, more often end in mistranslation, power struggle, and misrepresentation. Drawing upon Brah and Bhabha’s aforementioned theories alongside Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, I will chart how Dharker blurs Other-indigene and public-private binaries with this imagery, as well as how her agency over her disaporic cultural identity waxes and wanes.

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z