Anticipating the 2011 Arab Uprisings ─ Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies

This study examines the ways in which the relationships between the creative power of revolutionary people and the revolutionary power of creative artists, especially writers, are evident in the on-going Arab uprisings. Bringing together literature, cultural geography, and human rights discourse, it explores a range of recent novels and memoirs from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. These works sought to unravel the political geographies of injustice and popular discontent and thus 'anticipated' or imaginatively envisioned as well as participated in some of the major current upheavals in their particular national contexts. By revealing socio-economic divisions and spatial injustice, disappearances and political prisons, surveillance and exile as well as the revolutionary spirit of oppressed populations and the dangers of counter-revolutionary forces, civil strife, and fundamentalism, they variously re-imagine the realities that triggered the transformations we are now witnessing.

Rita Sakr is Research Associate at the University of Kent, UK. She has published on Middle-Eastern studies and literatures and geographies of conflict. She is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (2011); with Caroline Rooney, she co-edited The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (2013).