New Blog to Watch: Arab Arts Blog

Tasnim Qutait gave herself a wide berth when she named her new blog project, begun last fall, the “Arab Arts Blog.”

While she defines the Arab & arts parts of the project, she leaves “blog” up to your imagination.

AAB has mostly discussed fiction, but there are also sections for theater, sculpture, performance art, film, visual art, documentary, poetry — and the literature section also salts in literary scholarship.

Qutait said, in email, “I recently read Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field, edited by Tarik Sabry, and I guess this blog is my own way of mapping the field.”

The most posts have all been about Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, offering a portrait both of the writer and his books. The posts are not just summaries or boosterism; Qutait gathers scholarship and weaves it with her own reflections.

Although Qutait says the project was sparked by her doctoral dissertation on the rewriting of history in Anglophone Arab literature (so Jabra is very relevant here), her interests also range much further.