As Mark Twain wrote on New Year’s Day in 1863, “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” Before readers embark on that treacherous path, Jadaliyya Culture offers a selection of 2013 highlights for a preemptive enrichment of souls and minds.
Below are twenty-five entries that have sharpened critical readings of culture. Stay tuned for more reviews, essays, excerpts, translations, featured artists, and interviews in 2014!
Saadi Youssef: Genesis 34, translated by Sinan Antoon
Sargon Boulos: Two Poems, translated by Sinan Antoon
Omar al-Kikli:Prison Sketches, translated by Sebastian Anstis
Nazik al-Mala'ika's Revolt Against the Sun, translated by Emily Drumsta
Negm Mat by Chris Stone and Elliott Colla
Amir Tag Elsir's Ebola '76, translated by Maia Tabet
Two from the Counter-Revolution, short stories by Sherif Thabet, translated by Elliott Colla
Ibrahim Aslan's Slice of Family News, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Rabai al-Madhoun's Returning to Khan Yunis, translated by Elliott Colla
Remembering A Baghdad Elsewhere: An Emotional Geography by Ella Habiba Shohat
Derrida and the Crisis of French Zionism by Andrew Ryder
Regarding the Torture of Others in "Zero Dark Thirty" by Elisabeth Jaquette
Ben Affleck's "Argo": A Movie about a Movie by Hosam Aboul-Ela
The Square: So Close Yet So Far by Hélène Barthélemy
A Leopard in Winter: An Interview with Syrian Director Nabil Maleh by Alia Yunis
Continuity from Rupture: Deir Yassin’s Absent Presence in an Unmade Film by Hanan Toukan
Permission to Caption by Amahl Bishara
“The awakening of a radical reality”? Reflections on PhotoCairo 5 by Yasser Alwan
A Portrait of Tunisian Artist Nicene Kossentini by MedrarTV
Allegory of a Revolution: José Clemente Orozco’s “The Trench” by Maymanah Farhat
Alexandria Re-Imagined: The Revolution throughArt by Amro Ali
Zaha Hadid: Black Square, White Cube, and the Twenty-First Century Museum by Maymanah Farhat
Under Morsi, Red Lines Gone Gray by Jonathan Guyer
More about the featured artist:
Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco (otherwise known as Giorgione) was an Italian painter during the High Renaissance in Venice who is widely credited with creating the first landscape in Western painting (The Tempest, 1508)—the importance of which lies in the dramatic move away from art in the service of the church or with direct reference to the state. Little is known about the life of the Italian master, as it is believed he died at the age of thirty-three, making the documentation of his modest yet historically significant oeuvre particularly difficult. Among the handful of works attributed to the painter, several are thought to have been also worked on by Titian, the towering colorist and equally refined draftsman whose portraits, historical compositions, and mythological scenes established the Venetian school and later influenced generations of European painters. Giorgione’s subject matter has perplexed scholars for centuries, including that which appears in Three Philosophers.