Stories from under Occupation: Performing the Palestinian Experience
A plethora of research has been done on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; however, few have ventured to investigate and theorize its subjects or the articulation of Palestinian culture. Theatre and drama in the Arab world are under-researched, and when cultural production is studied, Palestinian theatre is nowhere mentioned. The history of Palestinian theatre dates back to 1850 when it was in tune with the neighboring cultural centers of the Arab world, i.e. Beirut and Cairo. Occupation since 1967 has had a great impact on Palestinian theatre, which has become a vehicle for asserting Palestinian identity and collective memory in the face of cultural annihilation. Through the use of al-Hakawati (the traditional storyteller) combined with narratives of memories, current theatre aims to portray life in turmoil caused by the political situation and the frustrations of the peace process with Israel.
Modern Arabic Literature
Editorial note Chronological table of events Map of the Arab world 1. Introduction: I. The background M. M. Badawi II. Translations and adaptations 1834-1914 Pierre Cachia 2. The Neo-classical Arabic poets S. Somekh 3. The Romantic poets R. C. Ostle 4. Modernist poetry in Arabic Salma Khadra Jayyusi 5. The beginnings of the Arabic novel Roger Allen 6.The mature Arabic novel outside Egypt Roger Allen 7. The Egyptian novel from Zaynab to 1980 Hilary Kilpatrick 8. The modern Arabic short story Sabry Hafez 9. Arabic drama: early developments M. M. Badawi 10. Arabic drama since the thirties Ali Al-Ra'i 11. The prose stylists Pierre Cachia 12. The critics Pierre Cachia 13. Arab women writers Miriam Cooke 14. Poetry in the vernacular Marilyn Booth Bibliography Index.
Rubik's for cryptographers
Hard mathematical problems are at the core of security arguments in cryptography. In this paper, we study mathematical generalizations of the famous Rubik’s cube puzzle, namely the factorization, representation and balance problems in non-Abelian groups. These problems arise naturally when describing the security of Cayley hash functions, a class of cryptographic hash functions with very interesting properties. The factorization problem is also strongly related to a famous long-standing conjecture of Babai, at the intersection of group theory and graph theory. A constructive proof of Babai’s conjecture would make all Cayley hash functions insecure, but on the other hand it would have many positive applications in graph theory and computer science. In this paper, we classify existing attacks against Cayley hash functions and we review known results on Babai’s conjecture. Despite recent cryptanalytic progress on particular instances, we show that the factorization, representation and balance problems presumably remain good sources of cryptographic hard problems. Our study demonstrates that Cayley hash functions deserve further interest by the cryptography community.