Do. 23 Jan. 2025

New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

Photo by Zeina G Halabi 2024

In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. Their literary, cultural, and theoretical works and practices are marked by razor-sharp political consciousness; multilingualism; diversities in positionality, media choice, and political views; and savvy uses of digital media that were forged during the uprisings of 2010-2011. 

 

This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared. In prison memoirs and archived testimonials, in art galleries and on social media pages, prison survivors and the families of the disappeared are advocating for accountability and knowledge of their loved ones’ fates. Syria’s disappeared have been at the forefront of these campaigns, and in recent years Europe has hosted high-profile uses of universal jurisdiction as a legal framework to prosecute Syrian carceral perpetrators and events in the name of victims who live in diaspora. In 2022, for example, Germany’s Koblenz court convicted two Syrian regime officials for crimes against humanity, and in late 2023 Canada and the Netherlands initiated proceedings with the International Court of Justice against the Syrian state to halt all acts of torture in its carceral system.2 Such demands for justice across the MENA have brought the topic of prison, as well as its significant place in literary and cultural work, into world literary circuits, media awareness, and political discussion in new ways. In turn, the present special issue, produced between 2022 and 2024, aims to open conceptual pathways to address the shifting constellations of MENA prison writing today.

Full text 

Part of the special issue “Comparative Approaches to Prison Literatures in the MENA and its Diasporas”, edited by Anne-Marie McManus and Brahim El Guabli. 

Read the special issue

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