Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship
Redrawing the Arab World
Fellows: Fadi “the fdz” Baki, Ghenwa Hayek, Omar Khouri
Course: Drawn Together – Comic Culture in the Middle East
Fellowship Description
This collaboration brings UChicago Associate Professor Ghenwa Hayek (Department of Middle Eastern Studies) together with Beirut-based artists Fadi “the fdz” Baki and Omar Khouri as they engage the roles of science fiction and comics within Arab cultures, and explore how they might be used to envision different futures in the Middle East.
The impetus for this project derives from a shared interest and a longstanding multidisciplinary engagement with questions of representation, mediation, and translation. Fdz and Omar Khouri are founding members of Samandal, a multilingual Beirut-based comics art collective at the forefront of the Arab graphic narrative movement. Ghenwa Hayek (Modern Arabic Literature) is a scholar whose work has often dealt with the manner in which emergent forms, including graphic narratives, instigate and reframe crucial social and cultural questions. She is also a translator, and has worked on translating Samandal from Arabic and French into English since its inception.
The project title suggests the stakes of this project: a temporal one, that attempts to hone in on the historical in its project to envision the future, and a political-representational one that intervenes in current contemporary debates about art from the Arabic-speaking world. Many of the issues raised in this proposal are open-ended questions that we would like to spend the next year (and beyond) tackling collaboratively.
Specifically, this project is theoretically invested in beginning to probe a series of inter-related questions: 1. Is genre (graphic) fiction a way out of the ethnographic/autobiographical impasse of graphic narrative – and fiction, more broadly construed – from the region? Does it disrupt external (mostly Western) expectations of what politically-engaged art from the Middle East, and what its subjects might be, or is this a delusion born of the excitement of the new? 2. Is science fiction, more particularly, this kind of intervention – and if so, what roles do the internal divisions of science fiction, represented in this project by the distinction between the two categories of hard sci-fi (Omar) vs. chaos fiction (Fdz), play? 3. How does this project, which takes the premises of science fiction seriously, also intervene in current debates around Arabofuturism and what it might look like – and, relatedly, how is the precedent of Afrofuturism both an inspiration and a provocation for a comparable Arab future-oriented science fiction project that is grounded in the recuperation/interrogation of a distant past? What does the term “Arab” even mean in this type of writing: is it a language, visual or textual? is it a shared history?
The project will be anchored by two main events that take place a year apart, in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020. The first is a collaboration organized around “Drawn Together: Comics Culture in the Middle East” (Spring 2019). We envision this class as the launchpad for a series of provocative questions and engagements that will inform and enrich our individual practices. Playing on the multiple meanings of the concept of being “drawn together”, this course brings a combined theoretical and practical lens to understanding the histories, politics, and practice of Middle Eastern comics. It does this through a collaboration between scholarly and artistic approaches to comicsComics, like all graphic narratives, are a hybrid form that draws the visual and verbal together into a dynamic interplay. Modeling this interplay, we will bring a dynamic simultaneity of theory, practice and translation into the classroom. In this class, we combine a theoretically informed historical engagement with the region, comics studies, and a comics practice that seeks to imagine and complicate the future. We will chart the dominant genres and practices of comics production in the Middle East from the points of view of both scholars and practitioners. At the same time, we will experiment in creating a hands-on workspace in which all we collaborate on all aspects of creating two ongoing comics projects – Nahḍa (Omar Khouri) and Jāhiliyya (fdz) – from the world-building to the characters, design, stories, and translation.
Following that, the second event will take place in Spring 2020, and bring us back together on campus in a reflective symposium that gathers us with former students and interlocutors on the local and international scenes. This symposium will allow us to gather and reflect, and will raise more provocations as we continue our individual and collective projects.
Course
Drawn Together: Comics Culture in the Middle East
NEHC 20615
Spring 2019
Instructors: Ghenwa Hayek, Fadi “the fdz” Baki, Omar Khouri
This is a course about the rise of the graphic novel and comics culture in the Middle East. We will apply key theoretical materials from the field of comics studies to help us understand the influences, motivations and interventions of these graphic narratives in their cultural contexts. While we will primarily focus on the Arabic-speaking regions of the Middle East, the course will also include texts from Iran, Turkey, and the US and Europe.
In English. No prerequisites.
Fellows
GHENWA HAYEK
Ghenwa Hayek is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. Her work deals with the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, with a specific focus on Lebanon. Hayek makes use of the formal techniques of literary scholarship to nuance and complicate our understandings of the processes through which these dynamic cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world.
Her first book, Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature, traces the modes of imagining the city of Beirut in Lebanese fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present, using an interdisciplinary engagement with literary and cultural studies, critical geography and studies of nationalism and identity. The book shows how anxieties about belonging to the Lebanese state have been articulated through metaphors of dislocation in Beirut, and argue that the shifting literary dynamics of space and place offer ways to frame and to interrogate notions of national identity and belonging.
Hayek’s current research project explores the affective impact of a century of ongoing emigration on Lebanese culture (c.1860-present), and the imaginaries and grammars that have been mobilized to express it across a wide range of cultural forms, from prose, to poetry, to cinema. She argues that diaspora is not a monolithic experience for emigrants, nor for their compatriots who choose to remain. Instead, diaspora is a complex constellation of experiences that gain and in turn produce specific cultural and social resonances. Because of the manner in which race, gender, and class anxieties intersect in its articulation, specific attention is paid to how Lebanon and its African diaspora have been yoked together in the Lebanese national imaginary since the late nineteenth century. Hayek argues that a close reading of these different texts that engage the African diaspora exposes a racial dialectic that has been used to highlight and sustain anxieties about the nation and national identity.
She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled ‘Carrying Africa,’ Becoming Lebanese: Emigrant Anxieties in Lebanese Culture. In 2020–21, she served as Interim Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.
FADI BAKI (The fdz)
Fadi Baki (The fdz) is a writer and director born in Beirut, 1977. A co-founder and co-editor of Samandal, one of the Middle East’s premiere comics magazines, and Beirut Animated, the Lebanese animation film festival, Fadi currently divides his time between teaching, motion graphics, comics and filmmaking.
Filmography
2000 – It Came from Almakkab (medium length mockumentary)
2006 – El Burro Magnifico (short)
2007 – A Headline Romance (short)
2007 – Cecil Balmond interview for Louisiana Museum exhibition
2013 – Jibni (music video) 2013 – the Beatdown (music video) 2013 – Balut (short)
2016 – Shatila (documentary)
2017 – Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow (short)
OMAR KHOURI
Omar Khouri was born in London, but spent his childhood in Lebanon. In 2002, he graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston with a BFA in illustration. After spending a year in Los Angeles working in cinema and television, he returned to Beirut. In 2006, Omar founded Samandal Comics Magazine, the first experimental comics periodical in the Arab world. He is currently Samandal’s Editor-in-Chief and one of its many international contributing artists. In 2010, Omar’s sociopolitical satire “Utopia” won Best Arabic Comic book at the Algerian International Comic Book Festival (FIBDA). Omar’s work spans many art forms including painting, comics, animation, theatre, film, and music. He lives and works between Beirut and London.