2020-2026
The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics (SYRASP)
SYRASP explores the sociopolitical, legal, and cultural significance of the diverse networks and practices by which Syrians and their allies have produced, and continue to produce, prison narratives: works of literature, testimonies and oral histories, artworks, archives, protests, images, films, and digital and audiovisual works that represent incarceration, torture, and forced disappearance under the Assad regime, which ruled Syria 1970-2024. At their core, prison narratives respond to that regime’s carceral system – one of the most sustained and brutal assaults on human rights in modern history. The project documents and analyzes past and contemporary prison narratives as acts of resistance, solidarity, and memory that continue to shape Syrians’ struggle for truth, dignity, and justice.
Working with Syrian writers, intellectuals, activists, and artists in the European Union, SYRASP builds on the growing canon of Syrian prison literature and its evolving scholarly and civic importance. As an interdisciplinary and collaborative project, SYRASP employs methods from literary studies, cultural anthropology, ethics, and critical data studies. It bridges the worlds of academia and civil society to promote knowledge exchange and joint research with Syrian-led organizations in Europe. The project tracks the political, aesthetic, and affective lives of prison stories across diverse platforms and networks. Examples of works under study include names and memories smuggled out of detention centers; published memoirs; courtroom testimonies; narratives shared via YouTube, films, TED Talks, and podcasts; artistic and civic protests in Europe and Syria; and archival websites that preserve and analyze prison testimonies. By approaching such narratives as dynamic, living practices, SYRASP traces how Syrians use them to remember the political violence of the past, to reimagine identity and belonging inside and outside Syria, and to envision a more just and inclusive future.
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.
2016/ 2017
Of Other Languages: Arabic Literature and the Poetics of Regionalism (1956-2011)
Of Other Languages argues that the creation of cross-regional ties and circulation networks connecting North Africa and the Middle East was central to literary imaginings of decolonization in Arabic. The book traces the flowering of a postcolonial print culture through journals (e.g., Souffles-Anfas, al-Adab) that fostered transnational and multilingual exchange, rhetorics of Arab discovery and renewal, and aesthetics of greeting over distance. However, these acts were not limited to celebratory representations of, for example, the Algerian war of independence in Syrian short stories published in Beirut. Rather, the book excavates forgotten networks that led writers and intellectuals to criss-cross the region - from Morocco to Egypt, from Iraq to Algeria - between the 1950s and 1970s as teachers and students of the Arabic language. At the heart of the book’s argument is a series of literary readings that demonstrate writers’ critical and even ambivalent relationships to the geographies in which they participated in print and deed. Of Other Languages shows that in the heyday of decolonization and pan-Arab ideology, writers devised a range of materialist linguistic practices. They did so to make of Arabic literature a subversively transnational site – one that promised to counter the spread of postcolonial authoritarianism between Morocco and Iraq.