Winner, Arab American National Museum's 2015 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award
Tahrir Suite is a book-length poem that contemplates immigration, homeland, and diaspora in the twenty-first century. The poem, inspired by recent events in Egypt, cycles through the journey of two Egyptians moving across borders, languages, cultures, landscapes, and political systems while their life in the U.S. diaspora evolves and their home country undergoes revolutionary change.
Written from a perspective and about a place that is virtually unexplored in contemporary American poetry, Tahrir Suite works to capture the complicated essence of what it means to be from a specific place that is experiencing such radical change and how our understandings of “home” and “place” constantly evolve. Tahrir Suite is a musical meditation on what it means to be a global citizen in contemporary times.
One of the most obvious stylistic features of Athenian black-figure vase painting is the use of color to differentiate women from men. By comparing ancient art in Egypt and Greece, Tan Men/Pale Women uncovers the complex history behind the use of color to distinguish between genders, without focusing on race. Author Mary Ann Eaverly considers the significance of this overlooked aspect of ancient art as an indicator of underlying societal ideals about the role and status of women. Such a commonplace method of gender differentiation proved to be a complex and multivalent method for expressing ideas about the relationship between men and women, a method flexible enough to encompass differing worldviews of Pharaonic Egypt and Archaic Greece. Does the standard indoor/outdoor explanation—women are light because they stay indoors—hold true everywhere, or even, in fact, in Greece? How “natural” is color-based gender differentiation, and, more critically, what relationship does color-based gender differentiation have to views about women and the construction of gender identity in the ancient societies that use it?
The depiction of dark men and light women can, as in Egypt, symbolize reconcilable opposites and, as in Greece, seemingly irreconcilable opposites where women are regarded as a distinct species from men. Eaverly challenges traditional ideas about color and gender in ancient Greek painting, reveals an important strategy used by Egyptian artists to support pharaonic ideology and the role of women as complementary opposites to men, and demonstrates that rather than representing an actual difference, skin color marks a society’s ideological view of the varied roles of male and female.
Thutmose III was without question one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs. His 54-year reign was packed with momentous events as well as being unusually long. Thutmose III includes an overview of his life, and detailed examinations of civil administration, the religion and cults, the monumental architecture and royal building program, royal tombs and iconography, royal portraiture and ideology, the artistic production, the Northern and Southern campaigns, as well as the Aegean and other foreign visitors to Egypt during Thutmose's time. Finally, the book concludes with a look at the end of his reign and the accession of Amenhotep II.
This extensive treatment of a pivotal figure in the ancient Mediterranean world during the Late Bronze Age will provide a uniquely comprehensive view of one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs and will be of interest to a wide audience, including specialists in Egypt and the Near East, graduate and undergraduate students, and those with a general interest in Egypt.
Eric H. Cline is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology in the Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington University.
David O'Connor is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
In Egypt, singing and dancing are considered essential on happy occasions. Professional entertainers often perform at weddings and other celebrations, and a host family's prestige rises with the number, expense, and fame of the entertainers they hire. Paradoxically, however, the entertainers themselves are often viewed as disreputable people and are accorded little prestige in Egyptian society.
This paradox forms the starting point of Karin van Nieuwkerk's look at the Egyptian entertainment trade. She explores the lives of female performers and the reasons why work they regard as "a trade like any other" is considered disreputable in Egyptian society. In particular, she demonstrates that while male entertainers are often viewed as simply "making a living," female performers are almost always considered bad, seductive women engaged in dishonorable conduct. She traces this perception to the social definition of the female body as always and only sexual and enticing—a perception that stigmatizes women entertainers even as it simultaneously offers them a means of livelihood.
Drawn from extensive fieldwork and enriched with the life stories of entertainers and nightclub performers, this is the first ethnography of female singers and dancers in present-day Egypt. It will be of interest to a wide audience in anthropology, women's studies, and Middle Eastern culture, as well as anyone who enjoys belly dancing.
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