Contemporary Arab Women Writers' Reconfigurations of Home and Belonging Ghadir Khalil Zannoun University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
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University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 8-2011 Postmodern Subjects and the Nation: Contemporary Arab Women Writers' Reconfigurations of Home and Belonging Ghadir Khalil Zannoun University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Zannoun, Ghadir Khalil, "Postmodern Subjects and the Nation: Contemporary Arab Women Writers' Reconfigurations of Home and Belonging" (2011). Theses and Dissertations. 102. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/102 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. POSTMODERN SUBJECTS AND THE NATION: CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN WRITERS’ RECONFIGURATIONS OF HOME AND BELONGING POSTMODERN SUBJECTS AND THE NATION: CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN WRITERS’ RECONFIGURATIONS OF HOME AND BELONGING A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies By Ghadir Zannoun Birzeit University Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, 1997 University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts in Literary Translation, 2004 August 2011 University of Arkansas ABSTRACT A lot has been said about the declining status of national paradigms. Most recently, the forces of change have been located in the transnational and global phenomenon. Contemporary Arabic literature, however, identifies globalism as only one among many factors undermining the existing national formations in the Arab countries. Among these factors is the postcolonial condition, and in the case of Palestine, the struggle against the continuing military occupation of Palestinian lands, wholesale and unsystematized modernization, and complex internal social, cultural, religious and racial differences exacerbated by neo-colonialism. The contemporary Arab women writers’ fiction analyzed in this dissertation posits yet another dimension that can be said to dismantle the concept of the nation as an imagined and constructed political community from within. This fiction implies that the limited and independent aspects of the nation are its most imagined/false characteristics. The falsity of imagining the nation as such (limited and independent) becomes even clearer when we examine the nation’s subjects, whose identities, by contrast, are fluid and unfixed. The argument proposed in this study is that the contemporary Arab women writers’ fiction gnaws at the concept of the nation as a limited and fixed political entity, by depicting the individual identities of the national subjects as similarly constructed and therefore constantly reconstructed and unfixed. The writers discussed in this dissertation insist, thus, on the dynamics inherent in the act of construction—that is its constant reconstruction and resignification, resulting from the enactment of identity. This Dissertation is approved for Recommendation to the Graduate Council Dissertation Director: _________________________________________ Dr. Mohja Kahf Dissertation Committee: _________________________________________ Dr. Joel Gordon _________________________________________ Dr. Susan Marren DISSERTATION OF PUBLICATION RELEASE I hereby authorize the University of Arkansas Libraries to duplicate this dissertation when needed for research and/or scholarship. Agreed ___________________________________________ Ghadir Zannoun Refused ____________________________________________ Ghadir Zannoun ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am heartily grateful to my dissertation advisor Professor Mohja Kahf, for the encouragement, guidance, and insight she has given me and for being an infinite source of inspiration throughout the years. I am grateful to her for believing in me and for her patience. Without her, this achievement would not have been possible. I am thankful to Professor Joel Gordan for his unabated support and to Professor Susan Marren for being on my dissertation committee. My endless thanks go to Professor Aseel Sawalha for reading parts of this work and giving me valuable feedback and for her support throughout my study in the United States. She was my first inspiration in life, for her hard work and many achievements. And of course, I would not be where I am today if it had not been for my mother, Fatima, my father, Khalil, who left us too soon, and brothers and sisters, who no matter in which part of the world they were, I always found them around. I am eternally indebted to my husband, Mohammad Zannoun, for his endless support and love, and to my precious children Hamzah, Hisham, and Abdelrahman for their patience and understanding—for most of the time— despite their young age, throughout the years. The list of friends who accompanied me on this journey until I have completed my dissertation is endless. Special gratitude is due to my best friends Nadine Sinno and Fatina Taha for their continuous support and kindness. I am grateful to my friend Manal Al-Natour for helping me in so many ways and for Assad Al-Saleh for always being there to answer my questions. Last but not least, I am indebted to the King Fahf Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies for funding my study in the US for the most part of my graduate education. v DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Fatima Sawalha-Shaheen, Marwa, Umm Jamal, the many persons in one, who had set me early on on the path of learning and education. She has been my shams (the sun) that has illuminated my world for many years. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. CHAPTER ONE 20 III. CHAPTER TWO 71 IV. CHAPTER THREE 128 V. CHAPTER FOUR 179 VI. CONCLUSION 224 VII. NOTES 232 VIII. REFERENCES 237 vii INTRODUCTION The Writers, their Texts and Contexts A lot has been said about the declining status of national paradigms. Most recently, the forces of change have been located in the transnational and global phenomenon. Contemporary Arabic literature, however, identifies globalism as only one among many factors undermining the existing national formations in the Arab countries. Among these factors is the postcolonial condition, and in the case of Palestine, the struggle against the continuing military occupation of Palestinian lands, wholesale and unsystematized modernization, and complex internal social, cultural, religious and racial differences exacerbated by neo-colonialism. The contemporary Arab women writers’ fiction analyzed in this dissertation posits yet another dimension that can be said to dismantle the concept of the nation as an imagined and constructed political community from within. As Benedict Anderson suggests, the nation is especially imagined as “both inherently limited and sovereign” (15). The limited and independent aspects of the nation, then, are its most imagined/false characteristics. The falsity of imagining the nation as such (limited and independent) becomes even clearer when we examine the nation’s subjects, whose identities, by contrast, are fluid and unfixed. The argument proposed in this study is that the contemporary Arab women writers’ fiction gnaws at the concept of the nation as a limited and fixed political entity by depicting the individual identities of the national subjects as similarly constructed and therefore constantly reconstructed and unfixed. The writers discussed in this dissertation insist, thus, on the dynamics inherent in the act of construction—that is its constant reconstruction and resignification, resulting from the enactment of identity. 1 In his article, “The Nation as a Contested Construct,” Emmanuel Yewah rightly maintains that, disillusioned by the broken promises of their post-independence rulers and their dictatorships, postcolonial writers “have turned their creative endeavors into weapons to challenge, indeed to deconstruct … ‘any signifier that could correspond to the nation’. Such subversive activities of de-centering the nation, of questioning established national boundaries, have taken various forms” (45). In similar terms, the Arab women writers discussed in this dissertation de-center the nation, undermining its fixity and various boundaries (geographical, cultural, historical and racial), by depicting characters who not only transcend these boundaries but who reenact and their identities but never in the same way each time. More importantly, as depicted in these writers’ fiction, agency and community-sustaining abilities are contingent on this aptitude to repeat identity with a difference. By depicting the national subject as such, the Arab women writers foreground the nation as “having a shifting and unstable significance” (Yewah 45). In this study, I highlight the models of constructed identities in four novels, analyzing how they manage, or fail, to gnaw at the Arab nationalist imagined communities and at the essentialist representations of the Arab and Muslim subjects, men and women, but especially the latter, in both nationalist and western hegemonic discourses. These identities, this study shows, prove indispensable as grounds for agency, at both the individual and collective levels, during the times of crisis depicted by the writers. The novels that constitute the primary texts in this analysis are Radwa Ashour’s Granada, Zeina B. Ghandour’s The Honey, Huda Barakat’s