In this paper we explore the interaction between Maghrebi Darijas and Romance languages from the perspective of both historical and contemporary evidence. As Caubet 2002, following Lahlou 1991 argues, among contemporary educated populations in urban centres across the Maghreb, bilingual/multilingual interaction is the norm not the exception. Historical evidence tells us this was also the case in 11th century al-Andalus, though it is of course impossible down the centuries to reconstruct the actual interaction. We will however argue that certain surviving texts can provide an indication when analysed in terms of the constraints on conversational codeswitching such as is provided by Aabi. We start from the position that Maghrebi Darija is a special case of linguistic permeability due to its politico-geographic location on the frontier and given its thousand year history of close contact with Romance. To investigate this phenomenon in both its historical and contemporary manifestations we draw on the current construct of translanguaging, an alternative perspective on multilingual interaction to code switching as expounded in Baynham & Lee (2018) and the notion of convivencia as elaborated by Bossong in his study of linguistic conviviality and coexistence in mediaeval Andalusian poetry (Bossong 2010). We then go on to analyze this in two time slices: examining evidence of the productive convivencia/coexistence of romance and dialectal Arabic i) in the kharjas of 11th century al-Andalus as discussed by Bossong and others and ii) in the modern Maghreb music and performance scene (cf. Caubet 2002; Baynham & Gintsburg 2022). We do this here through analysis of a song by the Algerian singer Talyani and a performance of the Moroccan comedian Hanane el-Fadhili, using in both time slices translanguaging and Bossong’s notion of convivencia in our analysis. We then conclude by arguing as Heath (2020) does that for effective research into such varieties as Maghrebi Arabic, both currently and historically, it is necessary for cross disciplinary work between researchers in Arabic and its Romance contact languages, in order to fully address its sociolinguistics. We understand this as a form of disciplinary translanguaging to be undertaken in order to establish the dynamics of the convivencia/coexistence of Arabic and Romance elements in this type of data.

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further developing and redefining the questions related to imprisonment raised by Dostoyevsky. These four writers, whose works were translated into Arabic, were and still remain popular in the Arab world.One of the Arab writers, whose style was shaped to a large degree by the famous four Russians, was the renowned Egyptian writer Khairy Shalaby (1938-2011). In this paper, I cover the following points: 1. Provide a brief critical review of literary works of Khairy Shalaby and the role Russian/Soviet literature had in them; 2. Present The City of the Enslaved (2007), the only political novel by this prolific writer, dedicated to the topic of imprisonment and prison tortures of Egyptian political activists in the Sadat era; 3. Focus on particular themes in the novel that bear clear connotations of the themes raised in Russian/Soviet prison literature (the executioner-victim relationship, belief in transformation, and compassion for victim).

Spiritual, sometimes directly imbued and sometimes indirectly suggestive of religiosity, poetic genres are common in all corners of the Arab world. While authored religious poetry in Arabic is fairly well studied, oral, unauthored poetic traditions remain somewhat under-researched, although the latter represents an intriguingly complex microcosm infused with local systems of beliefs and traditions. In my study, I propose to examine one such tradition – from the region of the Jbala (northern Morocco). This tradition is generally regarded as consisting of three genres (ayta, ayyu, and ughniya). Textually, however, all three genres are very similar, and entire beyts freely migrate from one genre to another. Although Jebli poetry cannot be classified as religious, much of it is contextually linked to religious aspects of life of the Jbala people – most notably, pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints, as well as lifestyle shaped by Islamic faith. In addition, this tradition draws from the heritage of the famous sixteenth-century Moroccan Sufi Abderrahman el-Mejdoub. In this article, I will demonstrate how Jebli's poetic texts are built on Islamic cultural code and how the readability of this code depends on the religious identity of the audience. To do so, I suggest analyzing the available corpus of Jebli poetry.

Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). He was a Visiting Professor at York St John University (2020-2023) and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2019-2022). His recent publications include: Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (with R. Breeze and S. Gintsburg, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Translation and Translanguaging (with T. K. Lee, Routledge, 2019). In retirement he has become engaged with writing and translating poetry and various types of performance. He translates from Spanish and Arabic mainly and has published translations of the poetry of the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika (Baynham 2020). He is currently translating the poetry of the Moroccan zajal poet Adil Latefi and the Kurdish Syrian poet Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by Adil was awarded second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Competition. He works as a poetry editor at The Other Side of Hope magazine, setting up a bilingual poetry section, working title Other Tongue/Mother Tongue. In this interview, Mike first elaborates on the reasons behind his involvement with narrative studies and how it became clear that the Labovian model of narrative is not always valid with all types of narrative data. He then reflects on the definition of narrative, the role space and time have in it and offers, as an example of non-linear narrative a "picaresque" story, in the Arab tradition of storytelling. In conclusion Mike offers his vision of the future of narrative studies.

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been examined by Soviet and Russian Arabists, their research remains largely unknown to Western comparativists. The mutual influence between these two literary traditions goes beyond mere literary translation while also transcending a straightforward bilateral relationship. Building on the ideas of David Damrosch, I summarize the impact of Maksim Gorky and his literary works on contemporary Arab literature. In the Arab world, Gorky remains one of the most popular and influential Soviet Russian writers, even legendary. There was a popular belief among Arabs that Gorky learned to read from the Russian translation of The Thousand and One Nights, even that the writer had Eastern origins. As one of the Russian writers most widely translated into Arabic, Gorky reappears in new translations even today. This chapter offers a brief critical review of his works translated into Arabic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, followed by an examination of his influence on the Egyptian writer Khairy Shalabi (1938- 2011), and the Franco-Egyptian writer Albert Cossery (1913-2008). By including Francophone Arabic writing, I show the complex trajectory of Gorky’s influence on Arab literature and beyond.

The Covid-19 pandemic posed many problems for politicians worldwide, but it also offered an opportunity for some politicians of a populist nature to exploit public fears and tensions by scapegoating migrants, minorities or other countries. In this chapter we follow Moffitt's (2016) analysis of 21st century populism, in which he shows how crises are constructed discursively by populist leaders, who then stir up antagonism against certain out-groups whom they hold to be responsible for the crisis, and exploit the ensuing polarization in order to gain support. We examine four cases of political exploitation of fake news in which migrants were held responsible for spreading the Covid-19 virus or benefiting from treatment or vaccines before members of the in-group. These four cases are from very different cultural settings (Germany, Spain, Lebanon and India), and they all focus on multimodal evidence. Our analysis shows how each populist leader exploits existing cultural tensions and multimodal repertoires to persuade his/her audience. Although populist politicians draw on a wide range of different visual and textual manifestations embedded into different cultural settings, it is possible to identify certain common key strategies that characterize populist communication in times of crisis.

The Covid-19 pandemic posed many problems for politicians worldwide, but it also offered an opportunity for some politicians of a populist nature to exploit public fears and tensions by scapegoating migrants, minorities or other countries. In this chapter we follow Moffitt’s (2016) analysis of 21st century populism, in which he shows how crises are constructed discursively by populist leaders, who then stir up antagonism against certain out-groups whom they hold to be responsible for the crisis, and exploit the ensuing polarization in order to gain support. We examine four cases of political exploitation of fake news in which migrants were held responsible for spreading the Covid-19 virus or benefiting from treatment or vaccines before members of the in-group. These four cases are from very different cultural settings (Germany, Spain, Lebanon and India), and they all focus on multimodal evidence. Our analysis shows how each populist leader exploits existing cultural tensions and multimodal repertoires to persuade his/her audience. Although populist politicians draw on a wide range of different visual and textual manifestations embedded into different cultural settings, it is possible to identify certain common key strategies that characterize populist communication in times of crisis.

With this paper, we aim to look into the issue of identities among the immigrant population living in the West using an integrative multimodal approach. Although this topic has been in fashion for quite some time, most studies analyze either the political or mass-media discourse related to immigrants or reflect on how immigrants see themselves, on the basis of textual analysis of immigrants’ narratives and interviews. Our study takes a different approach and analyzes a video recorded and published on YouTube, focusing not only on the text but also on by analyzing non-verbal manifestations of changing positions on the part of the narrator. In particular, we examine identities/positions that the main protagonist, a Moroccan immigrant named Omar, assumes in the course of the story. We show how one particular gesture (pointing), coupled with other verbal and non-verbal markers, can signal a change of identity/position.

ABSTRACT In this article, the author continues to apply cognitive reading to oral traditional poetry, addressing the kopla zaharra—a short improvisational poetic genre from the Basque Country that is now extinct. In order to understand how this genre once functioned, the author draws her experience in working with ayyu—a living poetic tradition from Morocco, which has a strikingly similar structure. The analysis sets out from the historical evidence showing that the kopla zaharra was indeed once an improvisational genre. She then explains the notions of frames, or topics or themes, and scripts, or possible scenarios manifested at least partly in form of formulaic language, which are triggered by these, to analyze the typical cognitive structure of the kopla zaharra. Her analysis shows that on the cognitive level the kopla zaharra offers a structure similar to the Moroccan ayyu, where the first two lines work to activate a frame and the last two lines generally complete a script. This confirms the conclusion that although ayyu and kopla zaharrak are separated by a wide cultural and linguistic rift, the cognitive mechanisms behind the process of their creation are highly analogous.

The aim of this chapter is to open an academic discussion on the linguistic identities of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean, specifically by focusing on people of African ancestry inhabiting the island of Soqotra, the largest of the four in the homonymous archipelago. The territory is located 380 kilometers south of the Arabian Peninsula near major shipping routes and is politically part of the Republic of Yemen. This case study is of specific interest because it focuses on a complex case of linguistic identities of an ethnic minority (African Soqotris) within another ethnic minority (Soqotris) while at the same time contributing to existing and emerging literature on the diverse ethnic minorities inhabiting the Arab world. To shed light on this understudied topic, this chapter first outlines the sociolinguistic situation on the island of Soqotra and the history of African diasporas in the Indian Ocean region. It then presents the data collected during fieldwork conducted in Soqotra and discusses the methodological approach chosen for this chapter. Further, a three-part discussion of the findings is presented, along with some preliminary conclusions.

Abstract Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE (1933, Derry, Northern Ireland) took a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, then joined the Open University of which she is now an Emeritus Professor. Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), and Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation (2011). Ruth Finnegan was interviewed by Sarali Gintsburg (ICS, University of Navarra) and Luis Galván Moreno (University of Navarra) on the occasion of an online lecture delivered at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. In this trialogue-like interview, Ruth tells about the childhood experiences that were decisive for her interest in orality and storytelling, about her education and training as a Classicist in Oxford, the beginnings of her fieldwork in Africa among the Limba of Sierra Leone, and her recent activity as a novelist. She stresses the importance of voice, of its physical, bodily dimensions, its pitch and cadence; and then affirms the essential role of audience in communication. The discussion then touches upon several features of African languages, classical Arabic and Greek, and authoritative texts of Western culture, from Homer and the Bible to the 19th century novel. Through discussing her childhood memories, her assessment of the development and challenges of anthropology, and her views on the digital transformation of the world, Ruth concludes that the notion of narrative, communication, and multimodality are inseparably linked.

This article invites the reader to revisit the ancient and universal genre of the lullaby. We start by pointing out that the lullaby has almost never been studied in its natural settings: instead, it is often approached exclusively as a heavily proofread literary text stripped from its context. Further, we focus on tendana, a lullaby from the island of Soqotra. The tendanas used for our analysis were collected from a largely preliterate, non-media-exposed culture and in natural settings. By running a comparison between tendanas and lullabies from a number of other cultures, we conclude that, although there are a number of similarities between them, tendanas also have several unique traits, among them a different sense of safety and danger, only sporadic use of onomatopoetic vocabulary, and an absence of cumulative and counting elements.