Animals populate the Arabic canonical tradition. The word hayawan, ‘animal’, invokes a number of classical Arabic texts and treaties. One may argue that Arabic letters encompass an encyclopaedic genre that is devoted to exploring, commenting on, or surveying sources on animals, ranging from Al-Jahiz, Al-Qazwini, Ibn Qutayba, and Ikhwan al-Safa to Al-Damiri. More specifically, pre-Islamic and oral poetry’s zoopoetics embody essential formulations about the primal identification with the animal, the role of wildlife, and the structuring of sociality, revealing an extraordinary bond between the human and the animal while testing the limits of human knowledge. This class aims to uncover and rethink the status of the animal in Arabic literary tradition.
What does the animal define and how can we read its voice or cry? What type of non-human and animal elegizing do we find in classical and modern texts? How can we begin analyzing the evocation of the animal as a lament of the lost, pre-modern world in its dramatic transition to modernity? Is it possible to address the vanishing animal and the wildlife as a result of global colonialism, urbanization, and drilling for oil and raw material?
This class will address the non-human other in Middle Eastern literature. Does globalization mark the other as animal to the extent that the notion of “identity was disengaged in terms of who was and who was not human,” according to Spivak’s speculation? What are the effects of wars in the Middle East on refashioning the “human” category?
Finally, if Western philosophical articulation of subjectivity depends on the superiority of the human over the animal, how does Arabic literary and philosophical tradition differ from the western discourse of species? This class will reconsider and analyze these rich meditations on animality.
About Professor Khayyat
My research interests include contemporary Arabic literature, Arabic poetry, cultural memory studies and literary theory.
My interest in memory studies dovetails with my own life experience growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) and my desire to revisit this experience academically. At Columbia University I was part of the Engendering Archives Working Group Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD) where I was in conversation with a diverse group of scholars on an interdisciplinary research project that explored the making of archives, specifically, the knowledge they afford and the question of what exceeds their grasp.