Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:12:00 +0000

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history. Following a concise preface synthesizing the extraordinarily broad and encompassing history of the relation shared by homosexual communities and cities, she fittingly opens with a chapter tracing the lesbian body throughout urban and literary history, exploring Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal and Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The author acknowledges her challenge to recent assumptions regarding “the union of homosexuals and cities, namely, that the homosexuality of the city is always male,” and emphasizes an often overlooked facet of urban studies. Her treatment of the legibility of the lesbian and her privileging of this body is an important and refreshing contribution to LGBTQ studies.

Abraham is a Professor of literature and of LGBT Studies and Metropolitan Lovers evidences a marked emphasis on the relevance of literary perspectives to sociological interpretations of the city. She notes that it is in fact literature that has taught us how to “read” urban homosexuality and alludes to literary/philosophical figures such as Susan Sontag to enhance her portrayal of the theatricality of urban social life. A generous number of photographs and illustrations offer a satisfying visual element that becomes crucial to understanding the complexities of gaze and spectacle in the formulation of the modern city. Events such as Stonewall are not left unexamined in Abraham’s study as she attempts to portray as comprehensive history of the Western urban landscape through the lens of LGBTQ theory.

The tone of Metropolitan Lovers is a bit less erudite than it would appear to be based on Abraham’s scholarly career and university publisher. Her writing is lucid, accessible, perhaps more to the casual reader interested in a general introduction to an LGBTQ study of Western cities than for an academic researcher. This is not to say, however, that Abraham does not offer an insightful survey highlighting the relevance of homosexuality to the construction of the modern city. The work also provides an implicit introduction to the exercise of “queering” texts previously understood in heterocentric terms and will most certainly contribute to and stimulate future scholarship and interrogations of what it means to be urban and queer.

Written by: Melissa McCarron, June 30th 2009

The Blue Manuscript

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:29:00 +0000

By Sabiha Al Khemir

Verso

The Blue Manuscript, featuring an indigo cover laced with gold detail, aesthetically embodies its elusive subject, a legendary medieval copy of the Quran. Al Khemir's novel traces the archaeological expedition in search of the manuscript yearned for by collectors and scholars alike. Led by the enthusiastic Professor O'Brien, the eclectic group of researchers meets in Cairo as they prepare to embark upon a collector funded expedition in the remote village of Wadi Hassoun.

Donatella (an Italian archaeologist), Mark (an American project manager), Kodama San (Japanese site surveyor), Hans (the German conservator playfully nicknamed "Glasses" by a flirtatious Donatella), Alan (the professor's prized British student) and Mustapha (an Egyptian guide) compose the mosaic of expedition participants, which expands throughout the novel as more local figures (including the go-between Rayyed Ahmed and the young boy Mahmoud) become associated with the group. Zohra, the English-Tunisian interpreter, perhaps best echoes the life of the author as she occupies a privileged (albeit at times frustrated) narrative position within the novel.

Upon arriving in Cairo, each of the expedition's members experiences his or her own unique sense of foreignness. None of them, aside from the professor, are intimately familiar with the region yet all are crucial to the project's research, being at once at home and foreign within their new surroundings. Al Khemir delicately captures moments of meeting and simultaneous intimacy so common to the dynamic of international research projects: "Different people, of different races, cultures, and from different social backgrounds, thrown into a primal situation, the only link between them the buried past of a civilization alien to them."

Zohra's role, as interpreter is least related to the research at hand and for this, she feels an outsider among outsiders. She struggles with the notion of belonging in the face of cultural and linguistic hybridity; she describes herself as "being in-between," "Half-half. Rarely did people want to know about both halves, about her other half. The other half was always the other, depending on where she was." Zohra finds the role of intermediary dissatisfying and rejects her "in-betweenness." She longs for a voice of her own and dreams of writing a novel as she patiently waits for the words to emerge from the dictionary that she guards by her bedside.

Upon reading The Blue Manuscript, the reader departs on her own expedition where what is unknown overshadows what has already come to light. Al Khemir's writing is seductive; her mosaic cast of characters develops alongside the expedition itself. Descriptions are at first sparse, even frustrating to the reader, leaving her to excavate her own meaning and anticipate further discovery. Detailed physical descriptions of the characters, for example, are not revealed until well into the work, forcing the reader to partake in her own journey of discovery.

Interspersed within the tale of the expedition in the search of the Blue Manuscript are first-century fictional narratives depicting the writing of the document, creating a rich tapestry of voices that at once embrace and dissolve differences and contribute to a kaleidoscopic rendering of one of the most treasured documents in Islamic history.

Written by: Melissa McCarron, March 6th 2009