This event is part of our Mighty Magazines Online Series.

About the event

The cultural magazine Mawaqif (1968-1994) occupies a central position in Arab periodical history of the late 20th century. It was founded in Beirut in the ‘moment of 1967’ by the acclaimed Syrian poet Adunis and edited by a changing group of well-known Arab writers, artists and thinkers, among them Khalida Said, Hisham Sharabi, Halim Barakat, Elias Khoury, Kamal Boullata, and Edward Said. Since its launch in 1968 and until the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Mawaqif passionately joined the intellectual struggles of Beirut’s roaring Sixties, when it tried to walk the line between an ideological alignment with the Arab New Left, that centered around the Palestinian resistance movement, and a distinction from the liberal heritage of Adunis’ former journal project Shi’r. Putting emphasis on the magazine’s first publication period, when the Palestinian question led to discrepancies not only outside, but also inside Mawaqif and its editorial group, the talk will sketch Mawaqif’s intellectual biography until the end of the 20th century – a trajectory, that was as trembled as that of the intellectual generation that produced it.

About the speaker

Yvonne Albers is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Arabic Studies, at Philipps-Universität Marburg in the DFG-funded research group “Figures of Thought/Turning Points”. Her current research is concerned with the cultural magazine as an intersection of material culture, literary history, and intellectual history in the Arab 20th century and is driven by a deep interest in the periodical as form. It engages with the (spatio)temporal dimension of the periodical and its function in shaping other (spatio)temporal concepts like revolution, modernity or exile; the periodical’s worldliness and its relation to ‘world literature’; the periodical as a self-fashioning practice of the modern intellectual and as an object/fetish of contemporary intellectual nostalgia. Her forthcoming book on the intellectual biography of the cultural magazine Mawaqif (1968-1994) will be published with Brill (Wilhelm Fink) in 2022. (Full list of publications: see here)

Albers is also co-founder and editorial board member of the academic open-access journal Middle East – Topics & Arguments.

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Moderator: Prof. Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh (PalREAD)

Series Coordinator: Ibrahim Abdou (PalREAD)

Dissemination: Marcel Gadia (PalREAD)