Transcolonial Maghreb

Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization
Herausgeber: Harrison, Olivia C

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Arguing that Palestine has come to signify the colonial, broadly conceived, in the decolonizing world, this book offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. November 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804796828
• ISBN-10: 0804796823
• Artikelnr.: 42800876

Autorenporträt

Olivia C. Harrison is Assistant Professor of French and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Palestine as Metaphor
chapter abstract
The Introduction situates the invocation of Palestine as rallying cry
during the Arab Spring within a decades-long history of "transcolonial
identification" with Palestine in the region: processes of identification
that are rooted in a common colonial genealogy and a shared perception of
(neo)colonial subjection. Elaborating on Mahmoud Darwish's image of
"Palestine as metaphor" and Edward Said's reflections on the utopian
dimensions of Palestine, the Introduction argues that Palestine has become
the figure par excellence of the colonial, broadly conceived, in the
purportedly postcolonial present, from the decolonizing Global South to
minority communities in the Global North. After a brief discussion of the
history of transcolonial identification with Palestine in the Maghreb, it
concludes with an overview of the corpus and a summary of the six chapters
and epilogue of the book.
1Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture
chapter abstract
Chapter One analyzes the representation of Palestine in the bilingual
Moroccan Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas (1966-1971), the first
text explicitly to connect cultural change in the Maghreb to an engagement
for Palestine. It shows that Palestine was a central interlocutor not only
in the journal's increasingly militant political positions against the
Moroccan regime, but also in its efforts at "cultural decolonization,"
including the recovery of the Arabic language and the development of
experimental literary forms independent from both French and Arabic canons.
Abdellatif Laâbi's translations of Palestinian poetry in particular became
the site of a reflection on the politics of culture, displacing the
journal's founding mission-the elaboration of an autonomous Moroccan
literature-onto the Palestinian context. If the poets who launched
Souffles-Anfas could only write in the colonial tongue, Palestinian poetry
in Arabic provided the model for cultural decolonization in an imperfectly
decolonized Morocco.
2Transcolonial Hospitality: Kateb Yacine's Experiments in Popular Theater
chapter abstract
Chapter Two analyzes the figure of Palestine in Kateb Yacine's Algerian
Arabic play, "Mohamed arfad valiztek" (Mohamed pack your bags) as the
vehicle of a two-pronged critique of the postcolonial Algerian state and of
French and Israeli colonial discourses. The play compares France-Algeria
and Israel-Palestine to condemn both anti-immigrant racism in France and
Israel's treatment of its Palestinian subjects. Aimed at a popular Algerian
public, it also satirizes the Algerian state's instrumentalization of the
Algerian and Palestinian revolutions to rally popular support. Kateb's
popular theater begins to make evident the convergences and overlaps
between two apparently antithetical discourses, which will be the focus of
the final three chapters of Transcolonial Maghreb: the discourse of
assimilation, characteristic of French colonial discourse (Algeria is
France), and the principle of separation that undergirds Zionism and the
Israeli state (Jews/Arabs).
3The Transcolonial Exotic: Allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi's
Algerian Trilogy
chapter abstract
Chapter Three analyzes the best-selling author Ahlam Mosteghanemi's
Algerian trilogy, which deploys the figure of the Palestinian guerrilla
fighter and poet as a transnational allegory of revolution in the era of
postcolonial disillusionment, reversing the classic nationalist trope of
nation as woman. Mosteghanemi's contrapuntal allegories of Algeria and
Palestine are symptomatic of "the transcolonial exotic": a marketing of the
margins (Algeria and Palestine) for consumption at the center (Beirut and
Cairo). This is even more evident in the Syrian television series based on
her first novel, which aired during the 2010 Ramadan in Tunis, months
before the onset of the Tunisian revolution. Partly due to the constraints
of the teledrama genre, the series goes even further than the original in
exoticizing Palestine and Algeria for mass consumption, removing all traces
of criticism of national allegory and postcolonial Algeria in the interest
of pan-Arab patriotism.
4Portrait of an Arab Jew: Albert Memmi and the Politics of Indigeneity
chapter abstract
Against the critical tendency to read Albert Memmi's texts on colonialism
and Zionism separately, Chapter Four examines his pro-Israeli essays
through the lens of his theoretical analyses and fictional representations
of the colonial separation between Jews and Arabs. Memmi's early critique
of colonial minority politics seems to disappear from his later work, which
endorses the colonial (and Zionist) separation between Jews and Arabs in
order to claim Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. Yet even his most
pro-Israeli essays make surprising comparisons between Palestinians and
Maghrebis, including those he hesitantly calls "Arab Jews." Despite Memmi's
apparent about-face from anticolonialism to Zionism, his later writings
betray a transcolonial understanding of Palestine.
5Abrahamic Tongues: Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida
chapter abstract
Chapter Five begins by examining Abdelkebir Khatibi's 1974 pamphlet, Vomito
blanco. A violent polemic against Zionism, this treatise is markedly
different in tone and genre from Khatibi's later writings, and in
particular, his exchanges with the Jewish Egyptian psychoanalyst Jacques
Hassoun and the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida on the topic of
"the Abrahamic," the tie that binds Jews and Muslims in spite of
colonial/Zionist efforts to separate them. Revisiting Khatibi's fiction in
light of his Abrahamic reflections, this chapter argues that he deploys
bi-langue-the in-between language he is compelled to practice as a result
of the imposition of French-to resist not only assimilation, but also the
separation between Jews and Arabs. The crossed reading of Khatibi and
Derrida further reveals that the latter's little known writings on
Palestine and Israel are rooted in his experience of French colonialism in
Algeria.
6Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other
chapter abstract
Chapter Six begins with an explicit refutation of Memmi's position on Jews
and Arabs by the Moroccan Jewish writer Edmond Amran El Maleh. The chapter
argues that El Maleh's representation of Jews in Morocco is inseparable
from his disidentification with Israel and his rejection of the European
and Zionist construction of Jews and Arabs as opposite terms. Focusing on
El Maleh's novel Mille ans, un jour, the chapter further shows that his
Judeo-Arabization of the French language works simultaneously against
colonial assimilation and the divide and rule policies aimed at separating
Jews and Arabs. Yet in pointing to the distance that remains between
Maghreb and Palestine, El Maleh also articulates transcolonial
identification against identity, revealing the intimate connection, both
historical and structural, between Palestine and the Maghreb without
collapsing these heterogeneous figures.
Epilogue: Palestine and the Syrian Intifada
chapter abstract
The Epilogue returns to the use of Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial
during the mass protests of the 2010s with a close reading of the Syrian
novelist Samar Yazbek's memoir of the Syrian uprising. Without effacing the
important contextual and historical differences between and amongst current
and past forms of transcolonial identification with Palestine, the Epilogue
shows that Samar Yazbek's comparison between Palestinian refugees and
Syrian subjects of Bashar al-Assad's regime participates in a decades-long
political imaginary of Palestine as the figure par excellence of the kind
of subjection epitomized in colonial rule, including in its post- and
neo-colonial guises.