Home/ Publications/ Books/ ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins

Relentlessly uncompromising and sometimes exasperating, Toufic’s radical and visionary poetics gird the reader to forge ahead into uncharted territory.… Although sometimes couched in what looks like the language of critical theory, Toufic’s formal hybridity and poetic methods sharply distinguish Forthcoming from most other titles on those shelves labeled Cultural, Poststructuralist, or Postcolonial Studies.… One could not find in current film theory anything as suggestive or useful as Toufic’s writing on the relationship of medieval Islamic philosophy to certain contemporary Central Asian and Middle Eastern cinematography.… Toufic’s interest in figures and movements sometimes considered heretical in the Islamic and Jewish traditions (the Nizaris, certain Shi'ites, the cabalists) opens the way to significant reevaluations of entire historical eras and relationships between languages, cultures, and peoples. In his insistence upon treating the dead as a great part of the potential force of this world, Toufic plumbs the poetics of disaster and recuperation in ways that remain both incredibly suggestive and relentlessly radical.
Village Voice Literary Supplement, April 2001

“Toufic is at the core of a small but staunch group of Beiruti artists who have — collectively and separately — made a strong case for there being an intellectually rigorous, critically engaged, and ultra-contemporary platform for cultural practice developing in Lebanon and in the region. Toufic has been instrumental not only as an artist in his own right but also as an instigator or catalyst, someone known to push his colleagues and students to create better, more complex, and more probing work.… Toufic is one of the most active and ambitious figures in the Arab world who — book by book — has endeavored to sculpt a critical, theoretical language of the Arab world.”
The Daily Star, Lebanon, 21 August 2004



   

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