Organised by Susanne Klengel, project Border Temporalities and/in Literature, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities" in cooperation with the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. This event is part of the lecture series "Border Temporalities: Doing Literature in a World of Walls".

Speaker: Drew Paul (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

This lecture examines works of Egyptian fiction that use underground spaces and subterranean movement to articulate dissenting visions for the future in post-Arab Spring Cairo. Novels such as Mohammed Rabie’s Otared (2014) and Ahmed Haji’s Using Life (2014) go underground to imagine temporalities that resist and move beyond the present reality of proliferating blockages and walls. These futures range from the hopeful to the apocalyptic, yet they all turn to the underground as a site for imagining and staging transformations of the spatio-political order. 

Drew Paul is an Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. He received his PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. His research interests include the question of borders and related imaginaries in literature and film. His work has appeared in a number of key journals, including The Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif: A Journal of Comparative Poetics, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Scritture Migranti/Migrant Writings. In 2020 he published his study on Israel/Palestine: Representations of the Border in Literature and Film, Edinburgh University Press. More recently, he has worked on the Arab Spring and Egyptian literature.