“From Cairo to Camagüey: Ibn Daniyal’s The Shadow Spirit, Sarduy’s Cobra, and Rojas’s Celestina as a Bawd Between the Arab World and Latin America,”

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Article by Robert Myers in Comparative Literature Studies, published by Penn State University. The article will be included in the forthcoming collection of essays edited by Robert Myers entitled Latin America, al-Andalus and the Arab World. Forthcoming in 2019.

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Monologues for Actors of Color

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The opening monologue from Against My Heart, Robert Myers’s play about the British actress Fanny Kemble, is the first monologue in Monologues for Actors of Color: Men, published in 2016 by Routledge. In the monologue, Jefferson Davis’s escaped slave, William Jackson, thanks textile workers in Britain for boycotting cotton picked by American slaves. The collection contains monologues by George C. Wolfe, Anna Deveare Smith, Will Power, Stephen Adly Guirgis and Ismail Khalidi.

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Revolutionary Theatre of the Absurd

The China Tree, published in 1995 in the anthology Modern Arabic Drama, is the first play of a trilogy written between 1963 and 1967. The trilogy also includes The Dictator (al-Dictatur), translated into English for the first time here, and Saadoun the King (Sa’dun Malikan).

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Sufism and Shakespeare

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It is hardly surprising…that the last major work by one of Syria’s, and the Arab world’s, most significant twentieth-century playwrights, Sa‘dallah Wannus…is also infused from the beginning, both structurally and thematically, with motifs and dramaturgical manifestations of transformation.

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Playing Arab

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Slaves in Algiers represents but one of several theatrical chapters in the relationship between ‘West’ and ‘East’ from the 18th- to the 20th-century… on closer examination it becomes clear that they embody complex and contradictory threads…in the relationship between the U.S. and the Arab/Muslim world.

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Blood on Both Hands: Baghdadi Bath

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The play tells the story of Maiid and Hamiid, the latter who suffered severely under Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the former who, although he obsequiously attempts to accommodate to the country’s U.S. occupiers, will undergo a similarly traumatic experience at the hands of American soldiers.

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Gertrude Bell and the Pacification of Iraq

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Bell is of interest to anyone who studies the occupation of Iraq not only because from 1917 to 1924 she met its cultural and political leaders on an almost daily basis but because she wrote a number of official reports and voluminous letters – which constitute almost a daily diary – to her father and stepmother in England.

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Translation: Chaos and Splendor

It is sufficient to review the collective imaginary of the end of this century — from fiction to music, from cinema to theatre, from biology to technology — to have an idea of the point at which the world has arrived…to have an idea of the metamorphosis of human culture.

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