00:00:00 Dr Nadeen Dakkak But basically this is. 00:00:02 Dr Nadeen Dakkak This is hassane's argument, and he identifies the South S paradigm that has been enabled by comparative literary studies as a small, recently emerging domain, but with much potential for challenging the boundaries and the verticality with which post colonial studies as well as Arabic theory studies tend to operate. 00:00:22 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And so the South S paradigm would make it possible to recognise horizontal links that are often overlooked in studies that reinscribe primacy in vertical relations that radiate unidirectionally between the Metropolitan Centre and each of its colony. 00:00:39 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Yes, and and so this horizontal comparative ISM that he talks about does not imply decontextualization from European colonialism, but a reconceptualization of these fields of study through a triangulated model of comparison. 00:00:57 Dr Nadeen Dakkak The east West dualism that hasn't talks about and the easy association of what about with what is typically perceived as the foreign and alienating West are manifest in the centrality of narratives of migration, exile, and basement in the West, and the marginality of narratives in which our estrangement is articulated in CLU. 00:01:16 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Less foreign places or even at home. 00:01:20 Dr Nadeen Dakkak This is just a brief run through of what I argue in this book. There there are 9 contributions covering different sort of aspects related to this location and the Arab world. So I just talked about my own bits in this book, but the other chapters are super interesting and I encourage you to look at them. 00:01:41 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And the final bit. 00:01:43 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Of this I I'm just gonna make a connection between this project and my own research in migration on the Gulf region, which I also situate within the South South Framework. 00:01:56 Dr Nadeen Dakkak So I'm interested in social, literary, and cultural implications of migration to the Gulf following the growth of oil economies in the region. Just gonna move. 00:02:09 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Sorry, I'm just gonna move in the slides. 00:02:16 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Yeah. Following the growth of oil economies in the Gulf region and this is the phenomenon reduced to political economic dimensions without much attention to the cultural implications of that, the Gulf tends to be exceptionalist because of its economic. 00:02:32 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And political reliance on oil and labour migration, as well as its restrictive migration policies, and this has not only led it to be approached as completely different from other migrant destinations, but it also resulted in the homogenization of migrants, visibly governmental and social structures that determine their experiences. 00:02:52 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And so I'm I'm invested in developing a more nuanced understanding of Gulf migration experiences through literature. 00:02:59 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And I have so far examined Anglophone or translated texts as well as popular culture. 00:03:06 Dr Nadeen Dakkak With the aim of investigating how writers and artists from different national and cultural backgrounds have documented and reimagined the place of migrants and gulf spaces. 00:03:17 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And I have here on the slide a few examples of some books, say written in English, that Taku that Taco Gulf migration. But I I I want to speak a little bit for a few minutes on my particular interest in looking at Arabic literature. And so my monograph currently in the making and is based on my PhD. 00:03:38 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Pieces is is called migration to the gulf in the Arab. 00:03:44 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Novel and it's on Arabic fiction published in the last three to four decades, and most of these Arabic novels, especially those responding to the rise of migration in the 1970s. 00:03:55 Dr Nadeen Dakkak They illustrate the difficulty of articulating the massive changes brought about by oil. 00:04:06 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And one of the I began one of the ways in which I I tried to talk about Gulf migration in literature, perhaps a useful beginning point is the famous essay of Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. It's an essay called Petrification the oil encounter in the novel, in which he reviews. 00:04:26 Dr Nadeen Dakkak The first two volumes of Abdul Rahman Munif's quintet, cities of salt, wooden and men, which was published between 1984 and 1989, and I I have that here. 00:04:39 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And so he, in this essay he wrote about the muteness of the oil encounter in works of fiction. 00:04:45 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Because he says, the oil encounter challenges the practise of writing as we know it. He loaded money's endeavour. He speculated about the scarcity of similar works of literature that tell the story of Wales beginnings and isolated deserts, which subsequently become incorporated as modern nation states into the capitalist world. 00:05:07 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And he noted the absence of a literary genre in which American or Western Western women write about their experiences in the Gulf. 00:05:17 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And also noted a similar literary barrenness on the Gulf side, because of the quirk of geography that caused oil to flow in areas that lie on the periphery of modern Arab literary and cultural production. And so he says, even writers from each from the region, like Egypt and the Levant, are no more likely to write about. 00:05:37 Dr Nadeen Dakkak The oil encounter than their Western counterparts. 00:05:41 Dr Nadeen Dakkak UM. 00:05:43 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And this he attributes this lack of interest in writing about oil and the Gulf. He attributes to the cultural peripherally, yet increasing economic superiority of the Gulf, where many are writers. 00:05:56 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Had to migrate for a living, but which was often perceived with resentment due to the politics of Gulf monarchies that held regional power. 00:06:07 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And and what I what I say in in, in my book is that if labour migration in a region with small local populations is one of the primary ways in which the changes brought about by by oil are registered in fiction. 00:06:20 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Gosh's observation on the challenge of writing about oil is useful as well for thinking of writing about migration even when when oil is just in. 00:06:30 Dr Nadeen Dakkak The background so. 00:06:31 Dr Nadeen Dakkak It's it is. 00:06:32 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Gauss himself writes about Gulf migration briefly, and his novel The Circle of Reason. It's partially set in an unnamed coastal gulf city, and he refers to this attempt, and in this essay, in which he talks about the challenge. 00:06:46 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Of writing about oil. 00:06:49 Dr Nadeen Dakkak I want to quote. 00:06:50 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Gosh, because his observation on the inadequacy of traditional realist literary forms for registering the everyday experiences that oil. 00:07:00 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Created is useful for appreciating the alienation, the incoherence, the placelessness, and that are so predominant in the few narratives that do take on the task of writing about Gulf migration. 00:07:12 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And I have that the next slide. 00:07:19 Dr Nadeen Dakkak He says as one of the few people. 00:07:22 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Who have tried to write about the world of oil. I can bear witness to its slipperiness to the ways in which it tends to trip fiction. 00:07:31 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Into incoherence. 00:07:33 It's the craft. 00:07:34 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Of fighting itself, or rather, writing as we know it, that is responsible for the newness of the oil encounter, the experiences that oil generated run counter to many. 00:07:46 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Of the historical imperatives that have shaped writing over the past decades, and it's and given it its distinctive forms, the territory of oil is bafflingly multilingual, while the novel, with its conventions, you know, it's it's, it's mostly at home, within monolingual speech and so on. I'm I'm not going to continue that. 00:08:04 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Is it's a long quote but and so basically what I find interesting here is how this difficulty of writing about the gulf, how that makes us think. 00:08:13 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Of it it it helps me think of the form of the novels that I've tried to do. 00:08:17 Dr Nadeen Dakkak That and this is a a point that I take as I as I try to approach the different early narratives particularly which gosh doesn't all acknowledge in in his essay. So he says in the essay he loads many novel and he mentions his son, kind of on his men. 00:08:37 Dr Nadeen Dakkak In the sun, but they're actually aside from these, they're they're a few Arabic novels that do take on the task of writing about Gulf migration with the with oil being very visibly in the background. And these novels are published in the 1980s. 00:08:53 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And some in the 1990s as well, the most famous, of course, and and as he mentions, is, and the earliest perhaps Gulf migration narrative is losang can find these men in the sun. It's a 1962 novella that depicts the story of three Palestinian. 00:09:13 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Refugees, I think in. 00:09:19 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Refugees in Jordan, I think making their way from to to Kuwait in order to pursue a living and and it's a quite tragic story that really again reminds us of how much Palestinian dispossession remains at the heart of of Arabic literature. 00:09:38 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And and and this is also relevant to. 00:09:42 Dr Nadeen Dakkak So the other work that I I I talk about in, in my, in my book with which is a Jordanian Palestinian poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah's Nasrallah's novel prayer is a fever, but which was published in 1985. 00:10:00 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And and this is also the story of a Palestinian. 00:10:06 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Refuge Palestinian displaced person so we know that he's not migrating from Palestine and who pursues that and living in Saudi Arabia. But his experience is dominated by alienation and and oil is very much in the background to that experience. So I'm just gonna read. 00:10:26 Dr Nadeen Dakkak How Nasralla begins his novel this and it's it's an experimental book in the sense that it's fiction, but it's also very poetic. It's it's not someone's very first novel after having written a few volumes of poetry. 00:10:41 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And this is how he begins. He's he says, southward southward, where the Red Sea is and the white sharks. And I'll come for the. 00:10:48 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Southward, southward were sticky swarms of flies, black in the coffee bar tables, and the cities main streets terminate, and the void and the water is rushing from the heights of Faceit project themselves in vain towards the blue southward southwards, men poured down from the north, or flow back to it, and the only harvest that ravaged them was a murderous. 00:11:09 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Isolation and exhilarated anguish. 00:11:13 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And so here you can see how the repetitive use of southward emphasises the distinctive and unprecedented nature of this migration flow that differs from the more commonly documented routes that usually take Arab migrants to European or Western cities in the north. 00:11:30 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And so I want. 00:11:31 Dr Nadeen Dakkak To connect this with the first part of my. 00:11:32 Dr Nadeen Dakkak My talk, one of the main questions of my research on the Gulf, raises one of the questions that my my research on the golf raises is whether narratives of golf migration speak thematically and formally to Arab representations of migrant encounters with the West, which have received substantive attention and scholarship. 00:11:52 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And Arab literature and culture, particularly from post colonial perspectives and obviously the main point that we need to think of is. 00:12:00 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Is the idea of temporariness being at the heart of Gulf migration the fact that legal belonging is not an option for people and the for migrants in the Gulf, and this all makes their experiences quite far from traditional understandings of diaspora. 00:12:16 Dr Nadeen Dakkak As the permanent settlement of emigrants in a new country and also there is the point on the geographical proximity of Arab migrants in and the Gulf and also the cultural proximity, the cultural affinities that Arabs that Arabic speaking people have. 00:12:32 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Of these factors may suggest that Arab migrants in the Gulf, and hence their literature, may not be, you know, as as May may be different, say, from the writings of Arabs working on migration or displacement in Western or or or different. 00:12:52 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And locales and and so conceptualizations. Obviously one of the the points that I seek to do in this book is to highlight how conceptualizations of estrangement, exile, diaspora, and Arab literature and culture have been developed precisely through the encounter with the West. 00:13:10 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And colonial and post colonial periods. 00:13:13 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Because of the integral rule of this encounter in the our project of modernity, as I said before, when I was talking about the edited collection and all of this may have contributed to lack of attention to the social and cultural applications of Arab migration to the Gulf. But what I want to say is that these Arab affinities cannot be taken for granted. 00:13:34 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And they are in fact challenged in novels depicting alienation and cultural tensions between golf and non golf. 00:13:42 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Herbs and everyday encounters and experiences, and so contrary to the public, and until recently as well, contrary to scholarly perception of the Gulf migrant as a temporary figure who exists solely as an economic actor. 00:13:59 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Effective encounters with the Gulf in these novels, such as Nicholas, but many others that I write about these encounters, generate unique migrant subjectivities that are irreducible to this perception that tries to see the Gulf migrant as merely temporary. And so in in this book and and and in my research in general, I hope to demonstrate. 00:14:20 Dr Nadeen Dakkak How examining Arab migration narratives in the Gulf makes it possible to both reduce understandings to both contest reductive understandings of the figure of the Gulf migrants, and to rethink exclusion exclusions built into the conceptual tools by which experiences of migration and alienation. 00:14:40 Dr Nadeen Dakkak Are understood in Arabic literary studies, so it might be it might be a sort of a project that necessitates questioning what we even mean by again diaspora and exile. These tools that we use to understand these narratives and in the field of of Arabic literal. 00:14:55 Dr Nadeen Dakkak OK. I think yeah. I mean, I think I took all my time, so I'm gonna stop here. 00:15:02 Dr Nadeen Dakkak And I'll stop sharing as well. I'll stop sharing my slides. 00:15:10 Zhen Yang Thank you very much for your interesting and inspiring talk. And Despite that, you're not feeling your best. Thanks very much for your effort and we are now turn move to discussion part. So anyone who has questions you can just unmute yourself. 00:15:30 Zhen Yang Or you can text in the chat box.