Tarek El-Ariss is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature whose work delves into contemporary Arabic literature, visual culture, and new media. He also explores 18th- and 19th-century French and Arabic philosophy and travel writing. El-Ariss examines how political and societal shifts influence literary expression and digital platforms. His analyses offer readers a profound understanding of the Arab world's evolving cultural and literary landscape in the digital age.
The book explores the intersection of digital technology and cultural production in the Arab world, highlighting how activists utilize online platforms to challenge authoritarian regimes. Tarek El-Ariss connects contemporary activism to traditional cultural narratives, drawing parallels between modern leaks and historical storytelling. He introduces the concept of "the leaking subject," examining how digital consciousness reshapes political discourse and community identity. By situating these developments within the broader context of Arab modernity, the work reveals the evolving nature of dissent and knowledge in the digital age.
In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire. Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence. Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts
the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of
representation, translation, and cultural exchange to an engagement with a
genealogy of symptoms and affects embodied in texts from the nineteenth-
century onward.
