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Galerie 68

Galerie 68
Editor-in-chiefAhmed Morsi
CategoriesLiterary magazine
Founder
Founded1968
First issueMay–June 1968
Final issue1971
CountryEgypt
Based inCairo
LanguageArabic

Galerie 68 (Arabic: جاليري 68, romanized: Gallīrī 68) was an avant-garde literary magazine which was headquartered in Cairo, Egypt. The magazine existed in the period 1968–1971 with a one-year interruption and produced a total of eight issues.

History and profile

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Galerie 68 was founded in Cairo by a group of ten Egyptian artists, including Ahmed Morsi and Edwar Al Kharrat.[1] The other figures linked to the magazine were Bahaa Taher, Sonallah Ibrahim, Ibrahim Aslan and Yahya Taher Abdullah.[2] The first issue was dated May–June 1968.[3] Morsi was the editor-in-chief in the early issues, but later assumed the role of artistic editor and supervisor.[1]

It frequently featured short stories, and each issue was controlled by the Ministry of Culture.[1] Ahmed Morsi reports that two ministers, Tharwat Okasha and Badr Al Din Abu Ghazi, were very flexible and tolerant about the content of the magazine.[1] However, later the license of the magazine was revoked by the ministry in 1970.[1] Although the publication resumed, it folded in 1971 after publishing eight issues.[4] Of its ten founders only Ahmed Morsi continued to work for the magazine until the last issue.[1]

Mission and content

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Galerie 68 was started as a protest over the defeat of Egypt in the war against Israel in 1967[1] and offered several aesthetic solutions to this incident.[5] However, it did not function as a political organ.[3][6] Instead, the magazine was a publishing platform for those whose writings and work were not accepted for publication in the mainstream magazines.[6]

In addition, Galerie 68 was a forum for experimental literary forms.[4] The founders of the magazine declared that it would not follow the established literary genres.[6] Therefore, it did not support two dominant literary approaches in Egypt at that period: namely, the Romanticism adopted by Ihsan Abdel Quddous and Abdel Halim Abdellah and the Realism represented mainly by Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris.[7]

Galerie 68 featured translations from Vietnamese literature which was very common among the Arabic literary magazine of the period.[5]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g Hala Halim (2017). "Intermediality and Cultural Journalism. Interview with Ahmed Morsi". Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (37): 288–312. JSTOR 26191822.
  2. ^ Ewa Machut-Mendecka (2007). "Literature-Untamed element (A proposal of a typology of the modern Arabic prose)". Studia Arabistyczne i Islamistyczne. 13: 51.
  3. ^ a b Yasmine Ramadan (2012). "The Emergence of the Sixties Generation in Egypt and the Anxiety over Categorization". Journal of Arabic Literature. 43 (2–3): 409–430. doi:10.1163/1570064x-12341242.
  4. ^ a b Elisabeth Kendall (July 1997). "The Marginal Voice: Journals and the Avant-Garde in Egypt". Journal of Islamic Studies. 8 (2): 232–234. doi:10.1093/jis/8.2.216.
  5. ^ a b Rebecca C. Johnson (2021). "Cross-Revolutionary Reading: Visions of Vietnam in the Transnational Arab Avant-Garde". Comparative Literature. 73 (3): 361. doi:10.1215/00104124-8993990.
  6. ^ a b c Elisabeth Kendall (2003). "The Theoretical Roots of the Literary avant-garde in 1960s Egypt". Edebiyat: Journal of M.E. Literatures. 14 (1–2): 41. doi:10.1080/0364650032000173334. S2CID 162339439.
  7. ^ Riat Ismat (2019). Artists, Writers and The Arab Spring. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 91. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-02668-4. ISBN 978-3-030-02667-7. S2CID 166205673.