The Environment in Modern Arabic Literature

Catalog description

With the rise of environmental concerns, the destruction of indigenous ecologies in the Arab world is a major theme of Arabic literature. In this course, we will look at how environmental and humanitarian crises are represented in a selection of novels, poems, short stories, paintings, films, and essays from the Arab world. We will examine how a variety of natural resources, like trees, deserts, bodies of water, and oil reserves, become sites of indigenous struggle against erasure by settler colonialism, war, and exploitative capitalist economies. Some authors and artists include: Mahmoud Darwish, Abdelrahman Munif, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani, Sliman Mansour, Tawfiq Zayyad, Hiba Abu Nada, and others. Primary and secondary readings are in English.