Adab Colloquium: Desire and the Diseases of Translation: The Metaphorology of Civilization in ‘Alas, I am Not a European’

How can notions of civilization and identity help us think about the politics of literature in the Nahda? This paper tackles Khalil al-Khūri’s definition of civilization (tamaddun) as an untranslatable element of the social body whose corruption threatens its own reproduction, and considers the implications of al-Khūri’s understanding of tamaddun for Arab literary and intellectual history.

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