Arabs, Greeks, and Hebrews shared minority status in the late Ottoman empire. With the formation of the nation-state, the three literary traditions and languages ceased to be in direct contact, yet residues of their interaction remained. With this panel, we want to open routes of communication between the three cultures and explore shared practices, ideas, and forms. We want to help scholars enrich their scopes when working on literatures outside national literary canons and explore methodologies that allow them to explore intellectual possibilities that involve the feminine, the erotic, love, empathy, and inclusion. While there is a breadth of scholarship in all areas of Greek, Arab, and Hebrew literatures independently there is little scholarship that elaborates on new ways to engage literature outside the national paradigm.

The panel comprises four presentations engaging literary works that explore transnational, queer, and women’s literature in the Eastern Mediterranean. Arturo Monaco (La Sapienza) explores the reception of Classical Greek literature in Modern Egypt and the Mashreq as part of the cultural renaissance wave known as nahdah. The paper allows us to explore how Classical Greco-Roman literary imagination has impacted arab writers of this period. Christin Zurbach’s (Berkeley) paper explores gendered experiences in academia in 1920s Athens. The paper is a reading of the novel by an Egyptian Greek author Dr. Nelli Kaloglopoulou who moves from Egypt to Athens where he studies medicine and writes her first novel, Her Lover (1929). Apart from this autobiographical narrative of women loving women, Hadjipolycarpou’s (U of Illinois) paper explores impressions and modalities of the feminine in men’s autobiographical narratives in Palestine/Israel and Cyprus in the late 20th century. Nevine Abraham’s (Carnigie Mellon) paper explores Arab Israeli conflict from the perspective of Palestinian and Kurdish exiles. Each of these presentations offers comparative approaches and less commonly explored topics in World literature. The panel allocates 15 minutes at the end for unstructured discussion and gives each presenter 18 minutes to present their projects.

In terms of existing scholarship, thus far, the focus of scholars has been on Arabs in France, Jews in the Maghreb, and Arab and Jewish in Spain. The focus primarily in Classics, the early modern period, the Italian renaissance, the Victorian era, and less so in the 20th century. Greek studies, Arabic, and Jewish Studies have been thriving in their own merit but studies about literary exchanges of Arabs, Greeks, and Hebrews do not yet exist. A book that has successfully taken on the task to bring Turkish and Greek 1922 stories in conversation with each other is Humanism in Ruins Entangled Legacies of the Greek Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford 2018) by Asli Igsiz. Igsiz’s methodology offers us tools (i.e., “historicist humanism”) to think about nationalism, racism, and segregation practices tested during the population exchange in 1922 and then used during the holocaust.