A Lecture by Kifah Hanna

This lecture examines queer Arab cultural production as an archive of feeling: a body of work that transforms rage, grief, and the imperative to remember into acts of survival, commemoration, and political resistance. Reading the work of Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine, I argue that queer Arab cultural production does not simply represent loss: it produces archives of lives that dominant culture deems unworthy of mourning. Alameddine’s fictional characters—gay Arab men living between San Francisco and the Arab world, navigating the AIDS epidemic, civil war, and drone strikes simultaneously—embody this archival imperative with rage, grief, and dark wit. Drawing on Douglas Crimp’s understanding of mourning and militancy as inseparable, I argue that contemporary queer Arab cultural production traces a single affective current running from rage to grief and back, forging a transnational archive of resistance and survival. 

Kifah Hanna is an Associate Professor of Arabic and the Chair of the department of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut. She earned her MSc and PhD in Comparative and General Literature and Middle East Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her research interests broadly include twentieth and twenty-first century Arabic literature, gender and sexuality, queer theory, (trans-)cultural studies, cinema studies, postcolonial theory, war literature, comparative literature, and world literature. Her scholarly work has appeared in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Intercultural Studies (JICS) and Journal of World Literature (JWL).

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