In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing

In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing PDF Author: John Waldmeir
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004382542
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
For the writers and artists in In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing, contemporary Muslim American identity is neither singular nor fixed. Rather than dismiss the tradition in favor of more secular approaches, however, all of the figures here discover in Muhammad’s revelation resources for affirming such uncertainty. For them, the Qur’anic notion of a divine “sign” validates creation, even that creativity born of contrasting if not competing assumptions about identity. To develop this claim, individual chapters in the book discuss Muslim faith in the work of poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Kazim Ali, Tyson Amir and Amir Sulaiman; novelists Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, and Willow Wilson; illustrator Sandow Birk; playwright Ayad Akhtar; and the online record of the 30 Mosques in 30 Days project.

Northern Light

Northern Light PDF Author: Kazim Ali
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571317120
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
An examination of the lingering effects of a hydroelectric power station on Pimicikamak sovereign territory in Manitoba, Canada. The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, the celebrated poet and essayist finds himself thinking of the boreal forests and lush waterways of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational? When Ali goes searching, however, he finds not news of Jenpeg, but of the local Pimicikamak community. Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, they have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the dam on Cross Lake. In a place where water is an integral part of social and cultural life, the community demands accountability for the harm that the utility has caused. Troubled, Ali returns north, looking to understand his place in this story and eager to listen. Over the course of a week, he participates in community life, speaks with Elders and community members, and learns about the politics of the dam from Chief Cathy Merrick. He drinks tea with activists, eats corned beef hash with the Chief, and learns about the history of the dam, built on land that was never ceded, and Jenpeg, a town that now exists mostly in his memory. In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power?and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to. Praise for Northern Light An Outside Magazine Favorite Book of 2021 A Book Riot Best Book of 2021 A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2021 “Ali’s gift as a writer is the way he is able to present his story in a way that brings attention to the myriad issues facing Indigenous communities, from oil pipelines in the Dakotas to border walls running through Kumeyaay land.” —San Diego Union-Tribune “A world traveler, not always by choice, ponders the meaning and location of home. . . . A graceful, elegant account even when reporting on the hard truths of a little-known corner of the world.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Ali’s] experiences are relayed in sensitive, crystalline prose, documenting how Cross Lake residents are working to reinvent their town and rebuild their traditional beliefs, language, and relationships with the natural world. . . . Though these topics are complex, they are untangled in an elegant manner.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

Ali Kazim

Ali Kazim PDF Author: Mallica Kumbera Landrus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910807514
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
* The book focuses mainly on the artist's recent works and his engagement with the Ashmolean's collections* Published to accompany an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 5 February to 26 June 2022In 2019 Ali Kazim, one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Pakistan today, became the first South Asian artist-in-residence at the Ashmolean Museum. Drawing inspiration from the objects in the Eastern Art collections, and their contextual history, he saw his time in the Museum as an opportunity to reimagine the objects in his own work and practise. Thus, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue will focus mainly on Kazim's engagement with the Ashmolean collections and the works created between 2019 and 2021. Widely exhibited and collected internationally (including the British Museum, V&A, Metropolitan Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, etc.), Kazim lives and works in Pakistan. The exhibition and book provide the Museum an opportunity to engage wider diverse audiences, while also presenting the works of a contemporary multidisciplinary artist who reflects and draws strength from the Ashmolean collections.

Bright Felon

Bright Felon PDF Author: Kazim Ali
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819569933
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
This groundbreaking, transgenre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Mad Heart Be Brave

Mad Heart Be Brave PDF Author: Kazim Ali
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472053507
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
New essays, both personal and critical, on the work of beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali

Bestiary

Bestiary PDF Author: K-Ming Chang
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0593132602
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets. “Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel is utterly alive.”—O: The Oprah Magazine FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth—and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood. Praise for Bestiary “[A] vivid, fabulist debut . . . the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.”—Publishers Weekly

Silver Road

Silver Road PDF Author: Kazim Ali
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936797998
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Autobiographical and journalistic essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments pursue a path through quantum physics, sculptures of the sixth-century Chola Empire, challenges of literary translation, climate change catastrophes, and the destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid these shards from multiple histories and geographies the author finds the cosmological in the quotidian.--

New Moons

New Moons PDF Author: Kazim Ali
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781636280066
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
A dynamic collection of contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by North American Muslims.

Resident Alien

Resident Alien PDF Author: Mohammed Kazim Ali
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472072910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Kazim Ali uses a range of subjects—the politics of checkpoints at international borders; difficulties in translation; collaborations between poets and choreographers; and connections between poetry and landscape, or between biotechnology and the human body—to situate the individual human body into a larger global context, with all of its political and social implications. He finds in the quality of ecstatic utterance his passport to regions where reason and logic fail and the only knowledge is instinctual, in physical existence and breath. This collection includes Ali’s essays on topics such as Anne Carson’s translations of Euripides; the poetry and politics of Mahmoud Darwish; Josey Foo’s poetry/dance collaborations with choreographer Leah Stein; Olga Broumas’ collaboration with T. Begley; Jorie Graham’s complication of Kenneth Goldsmith’s theories; the postmodern spirituality of the 14th century Kashmiri mystic poet Lalla; translations of Homer, Mandelstam, Sappho, and Hafez; as well as the poet Reetika Vazirani’s practice of yoga. “Ali has a vibrant and generous personality that lets one hear the inner music that makes us remember what it is to be human.” —Painted Bride Quarterly

Fasting for Ramadan

Fasting for Ramadan PDF Author: Kazim Ali
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781932195941
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
To go without food from dawn to dusk for the whole month of Ramadan - how does this feel? What do we become when we deny our major appetites during the hours of daylight, and in what ways does this transform the nights? In these absences, what new presences, what illuminations and revelations arise? After many years of not practicing, acclaimed writer Kazim Ali has re-embraced the Ramadan tradition, and he brings a poet's precision and ardor to these brilliant meditations on an ancient and yet entirely contemporary ritual. Jane Hirshfield has said, "Kazim Ali - a writer whose powers astonish in everything he puts pen to - has made in FASTING FOR RAMADAN a book that is hybrid, peregrine, and deeply, quietly revelatory. Ali's meditations on the month-long ritual fast unfold, across cultures and spiritual practices, the deep meaning of a chosen foregoing. These journal-born pages are both intimate and public, at once ecumenical, particular, daily, and eloquently learned; planted on the deep roots of tradition, they breathe this moment's air. Is it possible for a work to be at once modest and an undeniable tour de force? This book proves: it is."

In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing

In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing PDF Author: John Waldmeir
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004382542
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the writers and artists in In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing, contemporary Muslim American identity is neither singular nor fixed. Rather than dismiss the tradition in favor of more secular approaches, however, all of the figures here discover in Muhammad’s revelation resources for affirming such uncertainty. For them, the Qur’anic notion of a divine “sign” validates creation, even that creativity born of contrasting if not competing assumptions about identity. To develop this claim, individual chapters in the book discuss Muslim faith in the work of poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Kazim Ali, Tyson Amir and Amir Sulaiman; novelists Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, and Willow Wilson; illustrator Sandow Birk; playwright Ayad Akhtar; and the online record of the 30 Mosques in 30 Days project.