The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics (SYRASP)
The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics (SYRASP)
SYRASP documents and analyzes historical and contemporary narratives, images, and cultural, musical, and artistic practices that represent incarceration and forced disappearance under the Assad regime, which ruled Syria from 1970 to late 2024. In close collaboration with Syrian writers, intellectuals, activists, and artists based in the European Union, SYRASP builds on the growing canon of Syrian prison literature and its associated scholarship. An interdisciplinary and collaborative project, SYRASP is poised at the intersection of academia and civil society, promoting the sharing and development of scientific practices with Syrian-led organizations in the contemporary diaspora. In so doing, SYRASP hones a new academic approach that foregrounds the changing meanings of Syrian prison narrative as a hub for debate on Syrian collective memory and shared political futures, both in diaspora and in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime.
The project draws on the methods of literary studies, as well as cultural anthropology (e.g., interviews, the study of material culture), data ethics, and the digital humanities (e.g., data collection and mapping). Across its research activities, SYRASP approaches prison literature as only one set of outcomes from a diverse and largely undocumented network of practices that began inside Syria’s prison cells in the 1980s and that live, in myriad forms, in Syria and the countries of its diaspora today. The practices of prison narrative span a range of actions, including memorizing stories and illegally harvesting paper from cigarette packs to write them down inside prison; creating and sharing YouTube testimonies, films, and podcasts about the imprisoned and disappeared in Syria; eliciting and circulating memories of imprisonment with others; engaging in protest around artistic installations outside Germany’s historic trial of Syrian regime officials in 2020; and creating archival websites and databases to store and share information on incarceration in Syria.
By treating prison narratives as mobile, multimedia, and constantly evolving practices, SYRASP explores how Syrians use them to narrate the political past in Syria, the years of diaspora after 2011 (including the fashioning of imaginative relationships to political violence and justice in Europe), and the horizon of a just future for all Syrians.
This project is an investigation funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 851393), hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien (Forum), and related to EUME.
Anne-Marie McManus
Principal Investigator
+49 (0)30 89001 424
anne.marie.mcmanus(at)trafo-berlin.de
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Eylaf Bader Eddin
Postdoctoral Researcher (July 2022-June 2024)
+49 (0)30 89001 431
eylaf.bader.eddin(at)trafo-berlin.de
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Nahed Samour
Ethics Advisor & DPO
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
nahed.samour(at)rewi.hu-berlin.de
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Christian Boulanger
Ethics Advisor & DPO
Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
boulanger(at)lhlt.mpg.de
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Publications
Bader Eddin, Eylaf, Sijniyya: New Prison Songs in Sednaya, in: Regards 32 (2025), pp. 105-174.
McManus, Anne-Marie, Towards Syrian-led Transitional Justice, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 19 December 2024.
Bader Eddin, Eylaf, السجنية السورية: موسيقا ما بعد السجن , in: عقد ٌ من الفنون: أوراق بحثية عن اإلنتاج الفني السوري, ed. حنان قصاب حسن, Damascus/Etterbeek, 2024, pp. 17-124.
CLCweb Special Issue “Comparative Approaches to Prison Literatures in the MENA and its Diasporas”, edited by Anne-Marie McManus and Brahim El Guabli, including these articles:
- McManus, Anne-Marie, New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011, in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 25.1, June 2023.
- Baker, Jaber, Prison as a Living Being: ‘Assad’s Syria’ as a model for the Imprisonment State, in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 25.1, June 2023.
- McManus, Anne-Marie, The Networks of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality and Making Narrative in Asad’s Syria, in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 25.1, June 2023.
Bader Eddin, Eylaf, Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution (2011/12), De Gruyter, 2023.
Barakeh, Khaled and Anne-Marie McManus, VOCAL. On the MUTE Installation, in: Wolfgang Kaleck and Patrick Kroker (ed.): Syrische Staatsfolter vor Gericht. Syrian State Torture on Trial, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2023, pp. 122- 135 (Arabic version on pp. 96-109, German version on pp. 134-179).
McManus, Anne-Marie, Al-nuzuh: Displacement as Keyword, in: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 15:4, 8 November 2022, pp. 455-466.
Bader Eddin, Eylaf, Al-Abad: On the Ongoing, in: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 15:4, 8 November 2022, pp. 367-376.
McManus, Anne-Marie, Trauma and the 1980s in Arabic Literary Studies, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 9 June 2022.
McManus, Anne-Marie, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights. R. Shareah Taleghani (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021), in: International Journal of Middle East Studies,53:4, 2021, pp. 705-707. (Book Review)
McManus, Anne-Marie, On the Ruins of What’s to Come, I Stand: Time and Devastation in Syrian Cultural Production since 2011, in: Critical Inquiry, 48:1, Autumn 2021, pp. 45-67.
McManus, Anne-Marie,Death is Hard Work: Insolvent Violence and the Persistence of Literature, in: Read Respond, July 2021.
McManus, Anne-Marie, Becoming Assemblies in Contemporary Syria, in: Books and Ideas, 22 February 2021.
News
Interview with Anne-Marie McManus by Yezid Sayigh:
The Assads’ Houses of Death, Diwan, 13.01.2025.
Hannah El-Hitami on a SYRASP workshop:
Syrische Kultur in Deutschland: Töne der Menschlichkeit bewahren, taz.de, 08.08.2023.
Ex-Syrian Prisoners Reunite With Music as Their Balm, New Lines Magazine, 08.08.2023.
Repost on the TRAFO Blog on 24.08.2023
Episode of the Justice Visions Podcast on The Syrian Gulag: Reality and Narratives about the Prison System, hosted by Brigitte Herremans, guests: Artino, Jaber Baker, Uğur Ümit Üngör and SYRASP PI Anne-Marie McManus (30 June 2022).
Call for Expressions of Interest: SYRASP Working Group 2022-2023: Prison Narrative and the Archive
Call for Papers: Special Issue "Comparative Approaches to the Prison Literatures of the Middle East, North Africa, and Their Diasporas" of CLC Web (Comparative Literature and Culture), edited by Anne-Marie McManus (PI of SYRASP) and Brahim El Guabli (Williams College)
SYRASP Working Group 2022-2023 – Prison Narrative and the Archive
20 Oct 2022, 2-4 pm | Introductory Session
24 Nov 2022, 2-4 pm | Samad Alavi (University of Oslo): Lyric Testimony, Fictive Memory: Remembering and Forgetting the 1988 Prison Massacre in Iran
08 Dec 2022, 2-4 pm | Carceral Humanitarianism: A Discussion of the Film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, moderated by Basit Iqbal (McMaster University)
16 Mar 2023, 2-4 pm | Nour Al-Halabi (American University of Beirut): Archives of the Disappeared, Made Visible Again
27 Apr 2023, 2-4 pm | Adélie Chevée (European University Institute, Geneva): Narratives of Imprisonment in Syrian Protest Archives
11 May 2023, 2-4 pm | Yasmin Kherfi (London School of Economics): Collective Memory at the Margins: The Struggle Against Forced Disappearance in Transnational Perspective
15 Jun 2023, 2-4 pm | Gizem Sivri (Freie Universität Berlin / Stanford University): Tracing Ottoman Prison Reform (1840-1918): Failed or Achieved?
13 July 2023, 2-4 pm | Gasser Abdel-Razeq & Rim Naguib (Forum Transregionale Studien / EUME Fellow): Sign al-Nisa: A Conversation About Experiences of Women in Egypt's Prisons, Past and Present
14 Sep 2023, 2-4 pm | Charlotte Al-Khalili (University of Sussex): Ethnographic Explorations of the Syrian Revolution and its Carceral System: Methodological Challenges and Theoretical Propositions
12 Oct 2023, 2-4 pm | Reading Session (texts by Fadi Bardawil)
14 Dec 2023, 2-4 pm | Reading Session (texts by Ayah Kutmah, Tamar Ghabin, Basil Farraj and Hasem Abushama)
01 Feb 2024, 2-4 pm | Discussion of Stéphanie Latte Abdallah's book A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web
29 Feb 2024, 2-4 pm | Eylaf Bader Eddin (SYRASP Postdoc): Imagined Syrian Prison Songs
28 Mar 2024, 2-4 pm | Tadmor, film discussion with Monika Borgman (UMAM Documentation & Research)
18 Apr 2024, 2-4 pm | Yasmine Kherfi (London School of Economics and Political Science): Translating Revolutionary Aftermaths into Cultural Production
30 May 2024, 2-4 pm | Reading Session (Mamdouh Adwan's حيونة الإنسان)
20 June 2024, 2-4 pm | Nour-Sadate Benhima (Sultan Moulay Slimane University): Between Bars and Borders: Anglophone Syrian Memoirs of the 2011 War as (Other) Archives
11 July 2024, 2-4 pm | Reading Session (Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime by Dylan Rodriguez)
Description of the Working Group
Please register in advance via syrasp(at)trafo-berlin.de.