{"word_count": 362, "character_count": 2600}
This issue features a wealth of historical and contemporary insights on comedy, art, music, land, and labor. Carmen Gitre traces the vaudeville and comedy of the playwright Najib al-Rihani in early-twentieth-century Egypt. Reformers charged Rihani and his Everyman character, Kishkish Bey, with endangering the patriotic health of the newly independent nation. Gitre traces Rihani’s alternative moral and ethical vision of the nation, unfolding the Egyptiana theater as a shared liminal space of catharsis and imaginative transformation. Sarah Johnson takes us to mid-twentieth- century Iraq, where the work of artist Hafidh Druby married archeological practice with representational painting. Tracing Druby’s rise and fall as a pinnacle of art and theory, Johnson excavates blind spots in the history of modern Iraqi art, bringing to light multifaceted interpretations of modernity in Baghdad. Weaving performance ethnography, geography, and sound studies, Leila Tayeb explores post-Qaddafi Libya. She reveals how music is one of many quotidian sonic practices that produce militia power. Interrupting the conventional narration of Libya’s statelessness and its ostensibly bereft institutional landscape, Tayeb shows the audible and palpable ways that militias claim sovereignty. . . [read more]Table of ContentsARTICLES10. Nonsense and Morality: Interwar Egypt and the Comedy of Najib al-RihaniCarmen Gitre30. Impure Time: Archaeology, Hafidh Druby (1914-1991), and the Persistence of Representational Painting in Mid-Twentieth-Century Iraq (1940-1980)Sarah Johnson64. Militia Soundscapes in Post-Qaddafi LibyaLeila O. Tayeb84. Paradise Lost: Land and Labor in 1950s Galilee​Lily Eilan REVIEWS112. City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk by Arbella Bet-ShlimonReviewed by Gabriel Young117. Gouverner la mer en Algérie: Politique en eaux troubles by Tarik Dahou​Reviewed by Thomas Serres122. The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora by Yasmeen HanooshReviewed by Amy Fallas127. Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond by Kay DickinsonReviewed by Ada Petiwala132. City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut by Robyn CreswellReviewed by Huda Fakhreddine REVIEW ESSAY138. In Search of Algeria: Between Literature, History, and Cultural StudiesIdriss Jebari Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism: 1988-2015 by Patrick Crowley, ed. The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 by Valérie K. Orlando Algérie, les écrivains dans la décennie noire by Tristan Leperlier Site de la revue