Part of Europe? Colonial Geopolitics, Translation, and the Riddle of Origins in Egyptian Literary Culture, 1834-1930

Im Rahmen des Jahresthemas der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften tragen monatlich Fellows und Mitglieder des Forschungsprogramms Europa im Nahen Osten - Der Nahe Osten in Europa zu Aspekten der politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Verflechtungen zwischen Europa und dem Nahen Osten vor. Die Veranstaltungen finden in englischer oder in deutscher Sprache statt.

Dr. Shaden Tageldin

(University of Minnesota, Fellow des Forschungsprogramms Europa im Nahen Osten - Der Nahe Osten in Europa"

Part of Europe? Colonial Geopolitics, Translation, and the Riddle of Origins in Egyptian Literary Culture, 1834–1930

Between 1834 and 1930, the riddle of "origins"—racial, linguistic, literary—haunted Egyptian writers, translators, and intellectuals and consumed their explanatory energies. In the wake of the French occupation of 1798–1801 and the British invasion of 1882, measuring the distance of Egypt, Egyptians, and their language(s) from the empowered European assumed strange urgency. Very often this distance was measured in translational terms: Were Egyptians Europeans? How akin to French or English was Arabic? Where, within the new (Eurocentric) literary histories that Egyptians of the age encountered, did Arabic literature fall? Between conquerors and conquered, who translates whom, and is such translation driven by love or by war? This lecture will question depoliticized readings of the history and theory of translation and literature in modern Egypt. Beginning with a look at Rifa'a al-Tahtawi's decisive assignation of a new European "origin" to Arabic literature in 1834 and comparing al-Tahtawi's assumptions to those of Salama Musa, 'Abbas al-'Aqqad, and Taha Husayn in the late 1920s, I will show how the fact of European colonialism—however disavowed—motivated an intense preoccupation with originality and translation in Egypt from the nineteenth century onward, focusing especially on the post-1919 period.

Dr. Shaden M. Tageldin currently is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She is at work on a book titled Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt. For her doctoral dissertation, which she completed at the University of California, Berkeley, she received the 2005 Charles Bernheimer Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for the best U.S. dissertation in the field. She also has published several scholarly essays, most recently on nostalgia and the poetics of postcolonial migration.