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Angela Giordani, Mortal Designs, Warda, and My First and Only Love, The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 992–998, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae242
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Extract
Reem Bassiouney. Mortal Designs. Translated by Melanie Magidow. Cairo, EG: The American University in Cairo Press, 2016.
Sonallah Ibrahim. Warda. Translated by Hosam Aboul-Ela. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.
Sahar Khalifeh. My First and Only Love. Translated by Aida Bamia. Cairo, EG: Hoopoe Fiction, 2021.
In scholarship on the Arab Uprisings, rarely does a contribution begin without recalling how profoundly surprising they were. One authoritative study even characterizes the revolutionary events of late 2010 and early 2011 as unthinkable, as they “emerged onto the political stage at a time when the very idea of revolution had been dispelled.”1 The disillusionment with revolution broadly characteristic of the post–Cold War era indeed proved acute in the Arab world, which had transformed with disorienting speed over the 1970s from a site of multiple revolutionary struggles for anticolonial liberation and popular sovereignty into a den of brazenly autocratic reactionary regimes.2 After the Camp David Accords—widely seen as the nail in the coffin of revolutionary Arab nationalism—the famous Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous wrote an editorial describing postcolonial Arab politics as a funeral procession in which the Arab citizen is both the deceased and mourner.3 Such is the tragic outcome of the Arab revolutionary age, he suggests, where whoever survived is trapped in a melancholic march to the tune of a liberation that wasn’t.
