Zeina G. Halabi
(University of North Carolina)

Chair:Georges Khalil
(Forum / EUME)

Abstract 
Although the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum had reached unmatched fame early in her career, her ties with the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser added new political significations to her iconography. The synergy between the two towering figures of Egyptian music and politics captivated many, yet it provoked a wave of criticism that pointed to the dangerous entanglement of art and political power. As she examines the intertwinement of art, power, and subversion, Dr. Halabi explores the depiction of Umm Kulthum in the novels of Albert Cossery and Waguih Ghali and the poetry of Ahmed Fouad Negm. She shows how the three Egyptian authors desecrated and subverted the iconography of Umm Kulthum, thereby voicing a displaced critique of Nasser and Nasserism. Literary dissent emerges in these authors’ peripheral and sidelined narratives as a counter-discourse that deconstructs canonization processes and exposes ideological dissonance.  

Zeina G. Halabi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and was a EUME postdoctoral fellow in 2012/2013. In her current book project, Writing Melancholy: The Death of the Author in Modern Arabic Literature, she engages the elegiac writings of modern and contemporary Arab novelists and poets since 1967. An article on the poetics of mourning the postwar Lebanese intellectual appeared in Journal of Arabic Literature. Other articles in progress address topics ranging from the contemporary literary depiction Nahda intellectuals, music and political satire, to the revisiting of political commitment and exile in contemporary literature and film.