Kathryn Medill (University of Washington - Seattle)
kmed@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This session is dedicated to the literatures of the Middle East (western Asia and northwest Africa), from the texts of ancient cultures to those of the present day. Papers may examine Middle Eastern religious texts as literature (whether from Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or other traditions); or may engage with the numerous other types of texts written and transmitted in this region. This year, in line with the conference theme, papers dealing with questions of class, power, and conflict are particularly invited.

The peoples of the ‘Middle East’ (western Asia and northwest Africa) have been producing texts for over five thousand years. By the time of Hammurabi and of Abraham, the Middle East was already home to multiple vibrant textual traditions. Even though writers and transmitters of text were of various backgrounds; and would have classified themselves as coming from different religious, cultural, political, and ethnic identities, they created their texts in conversation with those of other traditions. For example, the writers of the Hebrew Bible borrowed from and subverted the textual traditions of Egypt and Mesopotamia to emphasize the primacy of their God; the medieval kings of Ethiopia defined their dynastic identity using a story from ancient Judah; and a modern author writing in Arabic might use Persian traditions of the Thousand and One Nights to make a sociopolitical point. Through this five-thousand-year conversation, Middle Eastern authors have debated questions from the character of God, to the proper exercise of power, to the nature of knowledge and beyond. In a time when the ‘Middle East’ is often discussed as a cultural monolith, it is all the more important to recognize and examine the diverse voices of ‘Middle Eastern’ authors, whether ancient, medieval, or modern. This session provides an opportunity for this conversation to continue.