*CFP* "HUMOR, THE ABSURD, AND THE ABJECT IN MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION", SPECIAL ISSUE, CLCWEB: COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE

From the films of Elia Suleiman to the cartoons of Ali Ferzat, humor and the absurd have long permeated the landscape of literary and cultural production across the Middle East and North Africa. Writers, artists, and intellectuals have employed an aesthetics of humor in a myriad of forms- from lampooning caricatures and songs, to a cinema of the absurd and satirical theater. While some of the recent scholarship in Middle East humor studies has focused on the role of humor and satire in the Arab uprisings and other mass protest movements as well as the lampooning of contemporary Islamist extremists as forms of resistance, this special issue will focus on new scholarship on the relationships between humor, the absurd, and the abject in works of literature, music, and visual culture.

Our aim is to bring together scholars who are focusing on 20th and 21st cultural production in the region and who are working on one or more of the following questions: How and why do particular forms of literature, music, and visual culture articulate the imbrication between the humorous and the tragic through the figure of abject or by evoking tropes of abjection? In what ways do specific cultural producers mediate the tension between the abject and the absurd to comment on history and specific historical events? How can such commentaries be read both within and beyond frames of resistance, subversion, and the carnivalesque for those who are, in Kundera’s words "far from power?” How and to what effect do artists employ an aesthetics of humor? 

To what extent do such aesthetics perform a conservative function that merely reinforces, normalizes, or becomes complicit with the status quo? How and why do particular forms of humor and the absurd reflect on the distribution of power in a given society, and how are distributions of power embedded within the structure of the humorous? How are satirical forms evoked to articulate a vision of a dystopian present against a utopian future or vice versa? To what extent, if at all, does humor, following Bergson, provide a corrective vision and restore a sense of humanity and a capacity to feel in the face of a dystopian present? How and why do performances of the risible reflect, in Burke’s terms, the “forensic complexity” and ambivalence of comedy by refusing to represent the finality and coherence of particular events, and how do they subject political life to complex interrogations?

We invite original contributions that explore these and related questions for a special edition on humor, the absurd, and the abject in all forms of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern cultural production. Please send abstracts of no longer than 250 words, a 100 word biography, and 5 keywords by April 30th, 2021. Full articles of 5,000-8,000 words or critical reviews of 3,000 words will be due by October 1, 2021.

Please contact special issue editors Dr. Yasmine Ramadan (yasmine-ramadan@uiowa.edu) and Dr. R. Shareah Taleghani (rtaleghani@qc.cuny.edu) for abstracts and/or questions.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (1999-) is a peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access journal that publishes new scholarship in theory and criticism, comparative literature, and cultural studies.