Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypts second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts, Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination, and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011. Literary writing, this book argues, has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken-for-granted of a societal milieu, and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.

Hersteller:
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
De Gruyter GmbH
[email protected]
Genthiner Strasse 13
DE 10785 Berlin

Samuli Schielke, Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany; Mukhtar Saad Shehata, Alexandria, Egypt.