Recontextualizing Resistance
Resistance is a concept that rose to the forefront of several areas of study when Max Weber made careful distinctions between authority, force, violence, domination, and legitimation. It gained strong attention when the well-known Palestinian journalist, activist, fiction writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972) published a study entitled the Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948–1966, a work that contributed to postcolonial theories of power, race, ethnicity and gender, and second generation theories of orientalism, feminism, and disability. Initially identified by philosophers, historians, and social critics as a focal point for situations in which oppressors brutally destroy the identity or subjectivity of the oppressed, resistance has been transformed by fiction writers, filmmakers, lyricists and speechmakers into a process in which responses and counter-responses to some type of injustice create difficult situations with complicated nuances. These works now form the foundation for what has come to be recognized as “resistance art.” This book gathers the insight, knowledge, and wisdom found in different manifestations of this art to further our understanding of the impact of resistance on contemporary life.
Loubna Youssef is Professor of Comparative Literature and Vice Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the Faculty of Arts of Cairo University, Egypt, where she has taught since 1979. She has published over twenty book chapters, articles and studies and edited several volumes, including Cairo Studies and Towards, Around, and Away from Tahrir: Tracking Emerging Expressions of Egyptian Identity (2014). She has translated several Egyptian children’s stories and two books: My Father, An Egyptian Teacher (2014) and the Egyptian bestseller A ¼ Gram (2009). She has hosted two cultural programs on “Egyptian Treasures” and “21st Century Egypt” for the Local European Service of Cairo Radio for eighteen years.
Emily Golson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Colorado, USA. Her current interests are in colonial and postcolonial fiction, rhetoric, and creative nonfiction. She has co-authored one book on adolescent rhetoric, and co-edited two collections of essays Towards, Around, and Away from Tahrir: Tracking Emerging Expressions of Egyptian Identity (with Loubna A. Youssef) and Negotiating a Meta-Pedagogy: Learning from Other Disciplines (with Toni Glover). She has also published over 30 juried articles in journals, studies, and books.
"Resistance? To what? Why? To injustice and ignorance. For change, even more to show how others are only ourselves in different contexts. These themes, addressed thoughtfully here, are for today and also for a better tomorrow."
Charles E. Butterworth Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland
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