Book Chapters by Micah Robbins
Reviews by Micah Robbins
Conference Papers by Micah Robbins
This paper examines how writer-illustrators Magdy El-Shafee (*Metro: A Story of Cairo*), Amir So... more This paper examines how writer-illustrators Magdy El-Shafee (*Metro: A Story of Cairo*), Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib (*Zahra’s Paradise*), and Leila Abdelazaq (*Baddawi*) use the comic form’s radical heteroglossia to interrogate topics ranging from religion to politics to sexuality in increasingly novel and challenging ways. The analysis focuses on how these artists work through the interplay of texts and images to present multiple, simultaneous contexts within a single narrative, thus engaging in a sophisticated narratological approach to what has always been a popular medium. In this way, these graphic novelists transform comics, traditionally understood as a juvenile and ephemeral mode of pop-art, into mature texts that capture aspects of life too often relegated to the margins of representation.
Papers by Micah Robbins
Drawing on the work of contemporary Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, especially his novel How to Ge... more Drawing on the work of contemporary Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, especially his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, this chapter argues that transnational literature not only makes cultural difference available to a global readership, but that it also encourages readers to confront their own positionality within an increasingly glocalized world. Throughout his work, Hamid expresses a critical transnational consciousness that insists upon the singularity of experience, even as it asks readers to recognize that they exist as part of a global multitude that transcends discrete categories of national, cultural, or linguistic identity. He accomplishes this by narrating his novel in the second person, thus collapsing the distance between the singular experiences of his character and the multitude of global readers who encounter the work across space and time. In other words, the narrative’s unrelenting “you” not only provides an opportunity for an encounter with difference, but it also creates a context within which the reader’s sense of identity is thrown into crisis. But this is a necessary crisis, for it is only through a more critical interrogation of the self that we will be able to arrive at a more complex empathy for our global neighbours. It is precisely in complicating the discourse of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that Hamid is able to cultivate a productive discomfort with easy notions of communicability and commonality, and thus to encourage a more critical (re)negotiation of the tensions that exist between the global and the local.
Intelligence and national security, Dec 7, 2022
Intelligence and national security, Dec 7, 2022
Drawing on the work of contemporary Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, especially his novel How to Ge... more Drawing on the work of contemporary Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, especially his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, this chapter argues that transnational literature not only makes cultural difference available to a global readership, but that it also encourages readers to confront their own positionality within an increasingly glocalized world. Throughout his work, Hamid expresses a critical transnational consciousness that insists upon the singularity of experience, even as it asks readers to recognize that they exist as part of a global multitude that transcends discrete categories of national, cultural, or linguistic identity. He accomplishes this by narrating his novel in the second person, thus collapsing the distance between the singular experiences of his character and the multitude of global readers who encounter the work across space and time. In other words, the narrative’s unrelenting “you” not only provides an opportunity for an encounter with difference, but...
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Book Chapters by Micah Robbins
Reviews by Micah Robbins
Conference Papers by Micah Robbins
Papers by Micah Robbins