2020-2026
The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics (SYRASP)
SYRASP documents and analyzes historical and contemporary narratives, images, and cultural, musical, and artistic practices that represent incarceration and forced disappearance under the Assad regime, which ruled Syria from 1970 to late 2024. In close collaboration with Syrian writers, intellectuals, activists, and artists based in the European Union, SYRASP builds on the growing canon of Syrian prison literature and its associated scholarship. An interdisciplinary and collaborative project, SYRASP is poised at the intersection of academia and civil society, promoting the sharing and development of scientific practices with Syrian-led organizations in the contemporary diaspora. In so doing, SYRASP hones a new academic approach that foregrounds the changing meanings of Syrian prison narrative as a hub for debate on Syrian collective memory and shared political futures, both in diaspora and in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime.
The project draws on the methods of literary studies, as well as cultural anthropology (e.g., interviews, the study of material culture), data ethics, and the digital humanities (e.g., data collection and mapping). Across its research activities, SYRASP approaches prison literature as only one set of outcomes from a diverse and largely undocumented network of practices that began inside Syria’s prison cells in the 1980s and that live, in myriad forms, in Syria and the countries of its diaspora today. The practices of prison narrative span a range of actions, including memorizing stories and illegally harvesting paper from cigarette packs to write them down inside prison; creating and sharing YouTube testimonies, films, and podcasts about the imprisoned and disappeared in Syria; eliciting and circulating memories of imprisonment with others; engaging in protest around artistic installations outside Germany’s historic trial of Syrian regime officials in 2020; and creating archival websites and databases to store and share information on incarceration in Syria.
By treating prison narratives as mobile, multimedia, and constantly evolving practices, SYRASP explores how Syrians use them to narrate the political past in Syria, the years of diaspora after 2011 (including the fashioning of imaginative relationships to political violence and justice in Europe), and the horizon of a just future for all Syrians.
This project is an investigation funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 851393), hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien (Forum), and related to EUME.
2016/ 2017
Of Other Languages: Arabic Literature and the Poetics of Regionalism (1956-2011)
Of Other Languages argues that the creation of cross-regional ties and circulation networks connecting North Africa and the Middle East was central to literary imaginings of decolonization in Arabic. The book traces the flowering of a postcolonial print culture through journals (e.g., Souffles-Anfas, al-Adab) that fostered transnational and multilingual exchange, rhetorics of Arab discovery and renewal, and aesthetics of greeting over distance. However, these acts were not limited to celebratory representations of, for example, the Algerian war of independence in Syrian short stories published in Beirut. Rather, the book excavates forgotten networks that led writers and intellectuals to criss-cross the region - from Morocco to Egypt, from Iraq to Algeria - between the 1950s and 1970s as teachers and students of the Arabic language. At the heart of the book’s argument is a series of literary readings that demonstrate writers’ critical and even ambivalent relationships to the geographies in which they participated in print and deed. Of Other Languages shows that in the heyday of decolonization and pan-Arab ideology, writers devised a range of materialist linguistic practices. They did so to make of Arabic literature a subversively transnational site – one that promised to counter the spread of postcolonial authoritarianism between Morocco and Iraq.
