PEN/Opp publishes “Crisis and unrepresentability” – a new written lecture by the Syrian author, thinker and the Tucholsky Prize winner Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. The lecture was previously presented in Sweden on the 28 of August at the School of Gerlesborg and the 29 of August at the World Culture Museum as part of a conversation…

Henna The Atrocious and Its Representation: Deliberations on Syria’s Distorted Form and Its Tumultuous Formation, by Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, was recently published by Dar al-Jadeed. The Lebanese writer, publisher, and intellectual Luqman Salim had been supervising the editing of this book when he was assassinated in Lebanon, February 4th, 2021. Salim was shot…

Al-Jumhuriya   Dedicated to Kelly and Steve. In the West today—and, consequently, around the world—there are three dominant discourses about Syria (and the Middle East more generally). The first is geopolitical; the second culturalist or civilizationist; and the third might be called top-down anti-imperialist. In analyzing these three, along with the ways in which Syria’s…

DAWN- dawnmena.org Before the Syrian uprising ten years ago, there was a scarcity of literature by Syrians about the country during the long decades of the Assad family rule. No doubt, this scarcity in cognitive representation derived from the void in political representation, especially during the decades of the 1980's and 1990's, a brutal and…

Qantara.de A tradition is unchanging rules that govern human action, while a revolution is a transformative event that follows no predetermined path. As far as a "revolutionary tradition" is a contradictory term, it also tends to obliterate the revolutionary event and impose its rules upon it. This is remarkably evinced in the communist "hard tradition",…

Versopolis Review By March 2021, a whole decade will have passed since the popular uprising in Syria started, and a titanic tragedy has been unfolding itself. What is so crushingly peculiar about these ten years is that Syrians have no promises whatsoever that things will be better, or even that the worst is already behind…

Al Jumhuriya [Editor’s note: The below has been adapted from a talk given by the author on 10 November, 2020, at an event co-organized by the University of Cologne and the MENA Prison Forum founded by the activists Lokman Slim and Monika Borgmann, who attended the online discussion. Slim was assassinated earlier this month in…

Al Jumhuriya [Editor's note: This article is the fifth in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] A tradition is unchanging rules that govern human action, a revolution is a transformative event that follows no predetermined path. As far…

Al Jumhuriya [Al-Jumhuriya Editor’s note: In April, the Syrian writer and Al-Jumhuriya co-founder Yassin al-Haj Saleh was invited to join the advisory council of the Progressive International, a new movement seeking to “unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces” around the world, involving well-known figures such as Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, and Yanis Varoufakis. The below…

Al Jumhuriya According to recent UN estimates, some 90% of the Syrian population lives under the poverty line of US$2 a day. 9.3 million Syrians need food assistance, while 1.4 million suffer from basic nutritional shortages. At this juncture, it is no exaggeration to talk about an imminent threat of famine; it may even be…