Amira Hanafi

Last updated

Amira Hanafi (born 1979) is an American-born poet and artist who has published several works of electronic literature. She holds both American and Egyptian citizenship. A Dictionary of the Revolution , a creative work she completed in 2017, documents the 2011 Egyptian uprising. It was the winner of the 2018 New Media Writing Prize and Denmark's 2019 Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature. [1] [2] [3] Her electronic literature works are replayed and explored on Femmes Literature Electronique (French 2024). [4]

Contents

Biography

Born in Vermont in 1979, Amira Hanafi has been based in Cairo since 2010. [3] Her involvement in poetry, culture and art is focused on her interest in working with language. [1]

Works

Minced English (2010) is a collage based on associations with 29 terms for people of mixed race. The pages present sentences evoking the colour and violence of all the relationships which turn up, revealing how a dominant culture lay behind the language. [5] Similarly, Forgery (2011), drawing on language linked to the keyword "Finkl", centers on Chicago's 130-year-old steel forge founded by the German immigrant Anton Finkl of A. Finkl & Sons Steel. [6]

Published in 2020 in both English and Arabic, A Dictionary of the Revolution is designed to reveal details of the 2011 uprising based on meetings with 200 people from six Egyptian regions. Hanafi asked them to choose one of 160 words related to the revolution and express their reactions. Their responses were woven into a network of multi-voiced storytelling of the event. [7] In 2018, the work won the New Media Writing Prize in a collaboration between Bournemouth University and if:book uk. In May 2019, it was awarded the Danish Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature. [2] This work is featured in The NEXT Museum's exhibition Vision UnBound 2024. [8]

The CreaTures Glossary is "a set of tools for giving meaning to a lexicon of terms related to creative practice and transformational change." [9] A distinctive compilation that transcends traditional boundaries in creative discourse, the project asks you to redefine ordinary terms and provoke thought on the meaning of the words in a new context. Commissioned by the CreaTures Project (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) in 2021. [10] CreaTures Glossary was partned with a collaboration of Universities to grant funding to the project including: Alto University, the University of Sussex’s Sustainability Research programme, and Utrecht University. [11] CreaTures Glossary adds new meaning to old words by asking readers to engage in various thought exercises. Using language, the project makes readers take a closer look at everyday life. This closer look makes readers more sensitive to the things happening around them such as social interactions and climate change. [9] [10]

Related Research Articles

Electronic publishing includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes the editing of books, journals, and magazines to be posted on a screen.

A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. An example is "gosh" for "God", or fudge for fuck.

Hassan Hanafi was a professor and chaired the philosophy department at Cairo University. He was a leading authority on modern Islam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Millennium Technology Prize</span> Finnish technology prize

The Millennium Technology Prize is one of the world's largest technology prizes. It is awarded once every two years by Technology Academy Finland, an independent foundation established by Finnish industries, academic institutions, and the state of Finland. The patron of the prize is the President of Finland. The Millennium Technology Prize is Finland's tribute to innovations for a better life. The aims of the prize are to promote technological research and Finland as a high-tech Nordic welfare state. The prize was inaugurated in 2004.

Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms, on the World Wide Web or Internet, and as mobile phone apps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ahdaf Soueif</span> Egyptian novelist

Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator.

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

Sudanese literature consists of both oral as well as written works of fiction and nonfiction that were created during the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the territory of what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the independent country's history since 1956 as well as its changing geographical scope in the 21st century.

Mez Breeze is an Australian-based artist and practitioner of net.art, working primarily with code poetry, electronic literature, mezangelle, and digital games. Born Mary-Anne Breeze, she uses a number of avatar nicknames, including Mez and Netwurker. She received degrees in both Applied Social Science [Psychology] at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia in 1991 and Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in Australia in 2001. In 1994, Breeze received a diploma in Fine Arts at the Illawarra Institute of Technology, Arts and Media Campus in Australia. As of May 2014, Mez is the only Interactive Writer and Artist who is a non-USA citizen to have her comprehensive career archive housed at Duke University, through their David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literature</span> Written work of art

Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems, and including both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.

Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair at Columbia University, where he also served as co-chair of the Theater Ph.D. program. He now holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.

J. R. Carpenter is a British-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. She was born in Nova Scotia in 1972. She lived in Montreal from 1990 to 2009. She emigrated to England in 2010, and became a British citizen in 2019. She now lives in Southampton, England.

Māmari Stephens is a law academic best known for her work creating He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms, a Māori-English a bi-lingual dictionary of legal terms. She identifies as being of Te Rarawa and Ngāti Pākehā descent.

Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.

John Howland Cayley is a Canadian pioneer of writing in digital media as well as a theorist of the practice, a poet, and a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melissa Terras</span>

Melissa Mhairi Terras is a British scholar of Digital Humanities. Since 2017, she has been Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, and director of its Centre for Digital Scholarship. She previously taught at University College London, where she was Professor of Digital Humanities and served as director of its Centre for Digital Humanities from 2012 to 2017: she remains an honorary professor. She has a wide ranging academic background: she has an undergraduate degree in art history and English literature, then took a Master of Science (MSc) degree in computer science, before undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree at the University of Oxford in engineering.

Christine Ann Wilks is a British digital writer and artist whose work in electronic literature has been published in online journals and anthologies. Her interactive Fitting the Pattern (2008) depicting memories of her mother by drawing on dressmaking tools is considered to be a "born digital" work. Underbelly, presenting a digital account of women working in the pits of northern England, won the New Media Writing Prize 2010 as well as the 2010/11 MaMSIE Digital Media Prize. In 2021, Wilks earned a Ph.D. in digital writing from Bath Spa University with a thesis titled "Stiched Up in The Conversengine: Using Expressive Processing and Multimodal Languages to Create a Character-Driven Interactive Digital Narrative".

ReRites is a literary work of "Human + A.I. poetry" by David Jhave Johnston that used neural network models trained to generate poetry which the author then edited. ReRites won the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature in 2022.

A Dictionary of the Revolution is an electronic literature work created by poet and artist Amira Hanafi. Completed in 2017, the work consists of 125 different terms that describe the language of the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Participants of the work ranged from five different locations in Egypt.

References

  1. 1 2 "Amira Hanafi". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 16 September 2022.
  2. 1 2 "'A Dictionary of the Revolution' Wins 2 E-Lit Prizes". Arablit & Arablist Quarterly. 8 May 2019. Retrieved 16 September 2022.
  3. 1 2 Heisler, Eva. "Amira Hanafi, Cities and Dictionaries". Asymptote. Retrieved 16 September 2022.
  4. ↑ "Dossier final". Genially. Retrieved 2024-06-27.
  5. ↑ "Minced English". Goodreads. Retrieved 16 September 2022. [self-published]
  6. ↑ "Forgery". Goodreads. Retrieved 16 September 2022. [self-published]
  7. ↑ Hosny, Reham (2020). "Salon 4: May 12, 2020: Re-Weaving Digital Textualities with Amira Hanafi's "A Dictionary of the Revolution"". elmcip. Retrieved 16 September 2022.
  8. ↑ "Vision Unbound". the-next.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2024-03-21.
  9. 1 2 "CreaTures Glossary". CreaTures. Retrieved 2023-08-26.
  10. 1 2 "The CreaTures research project highlights how creative practices can contribute to the sustainability agenda | Aalto University". www.aalto.fi. 2023-01-12. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
  11. ↑ "CreaTures Grant" (PDF).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.