TTTTT Jfcn>H»liWlllT«»l» u Ottawa S/Universite canciflienne Canada's university FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES 1=1 FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES L'UniversU6 canadienne Canada's university AtePLaouyene "MEURMLXTH^E7XUTH6R"6FTHESTS" Ph.D. (English Literature) GRADE/DEGREE Department of English FACULTE, ECOLE, DEPARTEMENT / FACULTY, SCHOOL, DEPARTMENT The Postexotic Arab: Orientalist Dystopias in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction TITRE DE LA THESE / TITLE OF THESIS Cynthia Sugars EXAMINATEURS (EXAMINATRICES) DE LA THESE / THESIS EXAMINERS Chris Bongie _ David Jarraway Craig Gordon _ Bernhard Radloff Gary W. Slater Le Doyen de la Faculte des etudes superieures et postdoctorales / Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The Postexotic Arab: Orientalist Dystopias in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction Atef Laouyene Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the PhD degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University Ottawa © Atef Laouyene, Ottawa, Canada, 2008 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-48401-2 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-48401-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non­ sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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Canada TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i Acknowledgments ii Introduction: Toward an Aesthetic of Postexotic Arabness 1 Chapter One: Odalisque Re-visited: Harem Erotics in Leila Sebbar's 25 Sherazade Chapter Two: Arab-Canadians and Multicultural Exoticism in Ann-Marie 66 MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees Chapter Three: Andalusian Poetics: Salman Rushdie's The Moor's 120 Last Sigh and the Limits of Hybridity Chapter Four: Gastro-Exotics: Loss, Exile, and Signifying culinaria in 164 Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent and The Language ofBaklava Conclusion: Arabs and the Exoticization of Terror 196 Endnotes 200 Bibliography 216 ABSTRACT This dissertation draws on modern theories of the exotic in order to critique racialized, consumer-oriented representations of Arabs. Such representations often betray an exoticist and neo-colonial discursive pattern in which things Arab figure essentially as an index for a threateningly attractive otherness. Reading the texts of Leila Sebbar's Sherazade (1982), Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996), Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1996), and Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (2003) and The Language ofBaklava (2005), I argue that contemporary postcolonial fiction displays a patently self-conscious, self-parodic engagement with the constitutive paradoxes of the discourse of exoticism, especially when this discourse takes the Arab figure as its subject. I avail myself of "postexotic Arabness" as a tropological descriptor for such an engagement. Postexotic Arabness thus designates the creation of narrative dystopias that not only ironically recycle Orientalist configurations of things Arab but also implicate both authors and readers in an ultimately self-parodic re­ assessment of the Arab exotic. The strategic exoticization of Arab otherness in these works, I argue, is also coterminous with a historically conscious critique of global consumer culture and unequal social relations of power. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Cynthia Sugars, for her insightful and speedy feedback, her painstaking revisions, and her valuable advice. My deepest gratefulness to Professor Donald Childs, whose unwavering support in difficult times, professional guidance, and belief in my work helped me see this dissertation through. Copious thanks also go to Professor Bernhard Radloff whose support and occasional chats were greatly appreciated. Special thanks must also be extended to the thesis examiners, Professor Chris Bongie, Professor Craig Gordon, Professor David Jarraway, and Professor Bernhard Radloff. Finally, I cannot be grateful enough to my parents who have never ceased to lavish on me their love and prayers. To them and to every member of my family, I dedicate this dissertation. ii Introduction: Toward an Aesthetic of Postexotic Arabness This dissertation draws on contemporary theories of the exotic in order to critique the exoticist subtexts that continue to inform literary and visual representations of Arabs. Focusing on the works of Leila Sebbar, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Salman Rushdie, and Diana Abu-Jaber, I highlight narrative sites where the exoticization of the Arab figure deconstructs the Orientalist binaries of Self/Other, White/Black, and Center/Periphery, which have constituted the epistemological underpinnings of traditional exoticist discourse from the Renaissance onward. The narrative exoticizations of the Arab figure in contemporary postcolonial fiction are strategic in two ways: while they unsettle the Orientalist foundations of the exoticist discourse, they offer ways of salvaging Arab otherness, not by grounding it in a politics of originary identity, but rather by foregrounding the socio-political and historical contingencies that determine its discursive and cultural configurations. Traditionally, exoticism indicates a deliberate narrative process whereby the effect of the exotic is achieved. However, since this process can operate discernibly in colonial and postcolonial fiction, as well as in a variety of literary genres and ethnographic texts, I use instead the concept "postexotic," where the prefix "post-" refers specifically to a subversive strategy in postcolonial narrativization of the Arab Other. In this respect, the "post-" in postexoticism is equivalent to the "post-" in Anthony Kwame Appiah's use of postcolonialism, which "like that of postmodernism" is one "that challenges earlier legitimating narratives" (98-99). I deploy the prefix "post-" in postexotic, not as an indicator of prepositional chronology, but as a marker of disruptive epistemology (hence my disposal of the hyphen). And by the "postexotic 1 Arab" I refer to a set of tropes expressive of a revised sense of Arabness, one that is repeatedly constructed and re-constructed out of de-exoticized revisions, not reversions, of traditional Orientalist metanarratives. I conceive of the Arab Other in postcolonial fiction as both growing out of and ironically departing from the confining epistemes of Orientalism. The postexotic tropes that I identify in the novels I propose to examine in this thesis partake in what Gyan Prakash calls post-Orientalist histories that do not merely invert the Hegelian dialectic but transcend it in such a way as to articulate "constructed and contingent [postcolonial] identities" ("Writing" 876). The purpose of this thesis is not to evoke an "authentic" sense of Arabness and read it against "inauthentic" Western representations of it. Rather, the thesis shall be informed by the need to understand cultures and identities, Arab or otherwise, as polymorphous phenomena subject to continuous processes of construction and deconstruction, processes that themselves are contingent upon specific historical conjunctures and socio-economic and geo-political contingencies. Lest it be read as an apologia for identitarian pan-Arabism gone wrong, my thesis will insist that identities are evolving, heterogeneous constructs locatable within and sustainable through narratives that are themselves crisscrossed by a variety of inter-cultural trajectories and enunciated at different historical junctures. By this I mean that identity cannot be construed independently of narrative. As much as it determines narrative, narrative also determines it. Identity is not constituted simply by the sum of lived experiences within a certain collectivity in a certain era. It is also constituted by the way it is narrativized, conceptualized, and transmitted across what Stanley Fish calls different "interpretive communities."