This panel addresses the urgency of critique in the context of Arab and Arabic writing, theory, literature, and art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If critique, and if also critical theory, emerged in relation to particular social forms and traditions of intellectual practice and life in Europe, this panel asks into the ways in which critique travels across languages, contexts, media, and forms, and how it emerges in literature, art, theory, editorial, video, and installation: it asks into critique as a practice of translation—across media and languages—in the context of global social thought. This panel will examine critique as it takes place in the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952), in the Palestinian critic, novelist, anthologist, and militant Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), and in the Lebanese critic and philosopher Husayn Muruwwa (1910-1987) and the inheritance of his project in the performances, video lectures, and interviews of his grandson Rabih Mroué (b 1967). The work presented here studies critique as a matter to be elaborated and a form to be invented through practices of language and art. Critique is not, in these contexts, a “theoretical” problem or a mode of abstract conceptualization that would seek to articulate a relation between “theory” and “practice,” because this separation is not, in the Arab and Arabic contexts discussed here, presupposed. This work makes visible the parochial and even “provincial” dimension (to borrow Chakrabarty’s word) of the tradition that we continue to recognize as “critical theory,” because in the contexts under consideration here there has a never been a tradition of “critique,” which took itself to be a locus for the binding or separation of thought from life, intellection from sociality, or critique from practice. This theme works through each of this panel’s papers and is made explicit in Jeff Sacks’s talk, on Hatoum and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), where Sacks underlines the distinctive form of life, which Adorno presumes even as he offers a critique of identitarian thought—what Sacks calls “settler life.”

The question of critique is addressed concretely in Nouri Gana’s talk on Kanafani. Gana underlines that, in Kanafani, “commitment,” “iltizām,” is not “a choice that can be either exercised or renounced,” as Gana describes in his abstract—and as it had been represented in journalistic and critical debates in Arabic and in Anglophone, Arabic-studies scholarship—but rather is a “predicament.” This predicament is elaborated through language, and Gana demonstrates, in a careful study of Kanafani, that “his shifts in style from modernist to realist and his experimentation with different genres of writing from the short story to the Op-Ed (under a penname) reveal a complex and multidirectional understanding of aesthetics in tandem with political praxis.” There is in Kanafani, Gana shows, already a being-in-tandem in relation to what critical theory recognizes as “theory” and “practice,” and so these terms, in the Arabic context, intersect and, in a certain way, indefine each other, because they will never have been separated in the first place. Maya Kesrouany, in a parallel gesture, which deepens the question of critique in non-European and colonial and settler-colonial contexts, studies the inheritance of the sense of “critique,” “naqd,” in Muruwwa and its inheritance in Mroué. In particular, Kesrouany underlines the formation of a critical object in Muruwwa’s literary critical and philosophical studies—and in his multi-volume study entitled Materialist trends in Arabic-Islamic Philosophy—and Muruwwa’s theorization of the term “the people,” “al-sha‘ab,” as an abstraction, in relation to Mroué’s formulation of a collective scene of address in his artistic work and videos. “Mroué eschews Muruwwa’s terms,” Kesrouany writes, “and focuses instead on the singular interlocuter while still insisting on a collective grammar that renders his work legible.” In this insistence, and with what Kesrouany calls “tensions” in their work, she notes a continuity and what we may recognize as an inheritance, which exceeds the work of both figures, and which offers critique as a non-localizable practice for the transformation of sociality and the critique of hegemonic, colonial forms. This is made manifest in Hatoum’s art (as discussed in Sacks’s paper), where art and installation destabilize the distinctions between matter and form, and temporality and sense, and where Hatoum’s work—as read through the terms offered in a critical essay about Hatoum by the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli—gives place to a collective subject of inidentical social form. In all this, critique emerges—as it is translated across idioms, languages, forms, and media—as an effort in form and matter to dissolve the privileged terms for colonial and settler colonial life, what one might call critique as decolonial praxis.