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Throughout his distinguished career devoted to the study of Arabic language and literature, Geert Jan van Gelder sustained a particular interest in humour and irreverence: in mujūn, broadly understood as literary expressions of indecency, encompassing the obscene, the profane, the impudent, and the taboo.
About the author
Marlé Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS University of London where she teaches classes on Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern and North African cinema. She is the author of
The Tale of al-Barraq Son of Rahwan and Layla the Chaste: A Bilingual Edition and Study (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the award-winning monograph
Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women's Poetry in Context (Oxford University Press, 2010). She also edited
Arabic Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2014). Having studied film modules at Columbia University in New York and The American University in Cairo, she started teaching about Arabic-language cinema in 2006 and began integrating it into her research in 2007, when she was awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University to explore representations of ancient female poets in modern Arabic literature and film. This led to her publication of studies of two films: Togo Mizrahi's
Sallama (1945) and Bahiga Hafez's
Layla, Daughter of the Desert (1937). She has also authored a book chapter on the role of the kiss in Egyptian film language of the 1940s. Her work at the archival collection of (primarily Egyptian) film scripts at the New York State museum in her home town of Albany, has enabled her to 'reconstruct' bowdlerized films, such as Yusuf Wahbi's
Love and Revenge (1945), the subject of Chapter 1.3, and have informed the regional essays at certain junctures. Whilst this 'expertise' has been focused on Egypt, over a decade of teaching of teaching on the subject of Arabic-language cinema more generally has resulted in her researching the cinemas of North Africa and the Eastern Arab world rather extensively.
Summary
Throughout his distinguished career devoted to the study of Arabic language and literature, Geert Jan van Gelder sustained a particular interest in humour and irreverence: in mujun, broadly understood as literary expressions of indecency, encompassing the obscene, the profane, the impudent, and the taboo.
