Browsing by Subject "Postcolonial literature"

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Entangled languages : intimacy, desire, and love in the multilingual Maghrebi novel
(2022-04-15) Goodstein, Liza Morrow; Grumberg, Karen; Allan, Michael; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Wettlaufer, Alexandra
What does it mean to love in more than one language in a postcolonial, multilingual context? Entangled Languages considers this question through Maghrebi novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, analyzing representations of multilingualism as they relate to love, intimacy, and desire. The linguistic situation of literature in the Maghreb since decolonization has often been discussed in terms of violence and trauma. I argue that this critical focus has overlooked desire, intimacy, and love as equally significant themes in representations of language. This project focuses on works by Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian authors to trace the ways in which Maghrebi novelists writing in French and Arabic have portrayed multilingualism through intimate metaphors. Using a scaffolding of close reading, historical analysis, affect and queer theory, and linguistic philosophy, I compare the representations of multilingualism in these novels across language, place, and time. The first chapter explores love and the personification of language in three seminal novels from the early 1980s: Abdelkebir Khatibi's Amour bilingue, Assia Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia, and Abdelwahab Meddeb's Phantasia. The second chapter investigates the different ways that two Algerian novelists writing in the 1990s, Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Nina Bouraoui, ascribe gender to Arabic in their work, and the relationship between the gendering of language and desire. Finally, the third chapter looks at the failures of intimacy within metaphoric guest/host relationships in two early-2000s narratives of immigration by Mahi Binebine and Habib Selmi. Entangled Languages demonstrates how writers have used intimacy, desire, and love to reimagine the “linguistic drama” of the Maghreb.
Revising resistance : historical violence in the globalized postcolonial imaginary
(2018-12) Gorman-DaRif, Meghan; Hoad, Neville; Carter, Mia; Hindman, Heather; Cox, James H
Revising Resistance: Historical Violence in the Globalized Postcolonial Imaginary examines contemporary Anglophone texts from India and Kenya, focusing on their representations of historical revolutionary violence. I show how this literature navigates between postcolonial romanticization and ethnonationalist nostalgia, to chart a revision of historical resistance narratives that emphasizes complexity and solidarity across the lines of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. The fields of history and anthropology have increasingly focused on demythologizing revolutionary violence and on understanding the roots of contemporary large-scale ethnic and terrorist violence. However, this kind of reevaluation has yet to happen in global Anglophone literary criticism, even though literature presents a uniquely productive site of study because of its narrative capacity to link the historical with the contemporary in its representations of the violence of the dispossessed. Through a comparative south-south analysis of the entangled temporalities of more recent literary representations of the Maoist-inspired Naxalite Movement in India and the anticolonial Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, Revising Resistance argues that this canon productively interrogates the national project, ethnic tensions and their histories, and gender roles in the context of war. In excavating the novels’ investments in solidarity, I articulate how narratives can be read to support a project of healing and unification through alternative histories that value complexity and contradiction over flattening narratives of nostalgia on both ends of the political spectrum.
Unruly voices : narration of communal memory and the construction of gender and communal identity in Assia Djebar’s Far from Madina
(2012-05) Davey, Jennifer Lynne; Spellberg, D. A. (Denise A.); Shirazi, Faegheh
Assia Djebar’s Far from Madina retells the stories of the women who appear on the margins of the earliest sources of Islamic history from a contemporary Muslim feminist’s perspective. Djebar uses formal elements of early Islamic historiography and relies upon classical Sunni sources. These techniques place her novel in conversation with classical Islamic tradition and bring legitimacy to her subversive project which aims to shift the boundaries of that canon. Though crafted in relation to classical sources, Djebar’s critique of gender identity is also addressed to the discourses and institutions of Islamic authority that evolved over the centuries and that continue to delineate narrow roles for women, up to and including contemporary regimes. In chapter one I argue that by grounding her critique of circulating discourses on Muslim women within a project that appropriates canonical Sunni historiography, Djebar refuses the disjunction between feminism and Islam, critiquing normative Islamic discourse on women in contemporary Algeria without framing the conflict in terms of an East/West or a religious/secular binary. Chapter two examines Djebar’s treatment of Fatima in particular. I consider Djebar’s selection of classical sources and compare the earliest canonical Sunni renderings of Fatima and those found in the novel. I argue that the vision of empowered women in the first Muslim community posited in Far from Madina destabilizes the ideal of gender identity constructed in early Islamic historiography. Far from Madina focuses on the moment after the death of Muhammad when Muslims were left to interpret their scripture and recall their Prophet’s words and deeds. Djebar constructs the novel around the question of what role Muslim women would play in this process, a move which foregrounds her own choice to write the novel and embrace her role as witness and transmitter of the stories of these early women. Chapter three examines the reflexive character of Far from Madina and considers how Djebar’s narrative strategies and hermeneutical approach facilitate the articulation of identity through difference. I argue that the narrative is Djebar’s performance of contemporary Muslim identity and an example of “lived Islam.”