A wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary collection of essays that decenter, critique, and problematize predominant notions of the meaning of mortality for human creativity

This issue of Alif explores the ways in which humans have come to confront their mortality across time and space. Contributions question the nature of loss, grief, and the possibility of an afterlife. Is death only an interlude? Perhaps simply the end? How have people used literature and the arts to conceptualize its relentless presence in our existence?

The articles in this issue decenter, critique, and problematize predominant notions of the meaning of mortality for human creativity. They provide a wide scope of responses to mortality, anthropologically, philosophically, and psychologically. They shed light on different cultural receptions of loss, annihilation, and mortality, ranging from India to Yemen, Palestine to Iraq, the Island of Lampedusa to the war-ravished city of Beirut, among many other locales. Death is dealt with in an intimate fashion through the exploration and reinterpretation of modern and classical elegiac poetry, children’s picturebooks, fictional accounts of war, grief, and displacement, and dramatic treatments of dying and the afterlife.

Contributors:

Hajjaj Abu Jabr, Egyptian Academy of Arts, Cairo, Egypt

Karam AbuSehly, Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt

Hala Amin, Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt

Shaimaa El-Ateek, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Mohamed Birairi, Beni-Suef University, Beni-Suef, Egypt, and American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

Elliott Colla, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Saeed Elmasry, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt

Shaimaa Gohar, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Walid El Khachab, York University, Toronto, Canada

Yasmine Motawy, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

Dani Nassif, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

Andrea Maria Negri, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany

Marwa Ramadan, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt

Caroline Rooney, University of Kent, Kent, United Kingdom

Tania Al Saadi, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

May Telmissany, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Shahla Ujayli, American University of Madaba, Madaba, Jordan