Diasporic Networks Narrate Social Suffering a Dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Francophonie and Human Rights: Diasporic Networks Narrate Social Suffering A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Simona Liliana Livescu 2013 © Copyright by Simona Liliana Livescu 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Francophonie and Human Rights: Diasporic Networks Narrate Social Suffering by Simona Liliana Livescu Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Efrain Kristal, Co-Chair Professor Suzanne E. Slyomovics, Co-Chair This dissertation explores exilic human rights literature as the literary genre encompassing under its aegis thematic and textual concerns and characteristics contiguous with dissident literature, resistance literature, postcolonial literature, and feminist literature. Departing from the ethics of recognition advanced by literary critics Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, my study explores how human rights and narrated lives generate larger discursive practices and how, in their fight for justice, diasporic intellectual networks in France debate ideas, oppressive institutions, cultural practices, Arab and European Enlightenment legacies, different traditions of philosophical and religious principles, and global transformations. I conceptualize the term francité d’urgence , definitory to the literary work and intellectual trajectories of those writers who, forced by the difficult political situation in their home countries, make a paradoxical aesthetic use of France, its ii territory, or its language to promote local, regional, and global social justice via broader audiences. The first chapter theorizes a comparative analysis of human rights literature produced at a global diasporic site by transnational authors circulating between several locations - Middle East, North Africa, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France and the United States - that inform their cultural identities and goals. The second chapter reframes the works of the Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi and Iraqi-Saudi ‘Abd ar-Rahman Munif by exploring the ways in which two renowned Arab writers uniquely give voice to the suffering of the outside while writing from the inside of a Moroccan and Iraqi prison, respectively, under the regimes of Hassan II in Morocco and the Baath Party in Iraq. The analysis of the Cold War literary output of Eastern European and Cuban cultural diasporas in France (based on the works by Paul Goma, Lena Constante, Eduardo Manet, and Reinaldo Arenas) completes this critical excursus. Through the writing of dissident, feminist, resistance, dictatorship and prison literature, world exiles, expatriates, refugees, and former prisoners of conscience in France reconfigure cosmopolitan networks and cultural centralities far away from the native centers that matter to them. These exilic writers propose alternate histories, identities, and modes of interaction and map a critical model of understanding global cultural nodal points that can be applied to other world cultural centers or metropoli as well (London, New York, or Madrid are only several examples). Similarly to postcolonialism, authoritarian political systems and coerced migrations unwittingly create new world systems such as the literary and political Francophonie (or Anglophonie ), through which narratives of abuses and rights are filtrated; by and large, these are systems in motion, regionally and globally inflected, and actively involved in the movements of contemporary history. In this process of Francophone cultural remodeling, the disputed universalism of the French language and space gets surprisingly validated by the universal iii language of rights that diasporic writers in France advance in their efforts to counteract the language du bois of the world republics of fear with the human rights lingo of the republic of letters. iv The dissertation of Simona Liliana Livescu is approved. Nouri Gana Katherine C. King Efrain Kristal, Committee Co-Chair Suzanne E. Slyomovics, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 v For my mothers, Ana (you lovingly bought me the six hundred books of my childhood) and Rodica (you lovingly brought in the master teachers) vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: A Multiethnic Literature of Human Rights in France 1 Chapter 1: Francophonie and Human Rights: A New Concept of Francité 8 - Histories of “Francophone” and “ francophonie ” 9 - Who speaks Francophone? 16 - La Francité d’urgence 24 - Human rights narratives 27 - A Francophone Arabic literature of human rights 28 - A Francophone East European literature of human rights 31 - A Francophone Cuban literature of human rights 33 - Francophonie and human rights 36 Chapter 2: Human Rights East of the Mediterranean 46 - A Multivocality of rights 46 - The Poetics and politics of Arab human rights 50 - ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif: fictionalizing prison 56 - Betrayal and self-betrayal 59 - Mothers and sisters of resistance 61 - Peripatetic vulnerability 65 - The French dimension of suffering and redemption 67 - Mission impossible accomplished 68 - A Morrocan “fool for hope”: Abdellatif Laâbi 71 - The Palm at the end of Laâbi’s mind 75 - Betrayal and self-betrayal: a political prisoner’s dilemma 80 - Laâbi, poet of Moroccan women’s rights 83 - “A Fool for hope”: remembering the future 91 vii Chapter 3: East European “Theses and Antitheses in Paris” 94 - The “Meanness” of the anti-totalitarian writers 94 - Eastern Europeans in France post-WWII 95 - The French Left 99 - Paul Goma: “A Romanian Solzhenitsyn” 101 - The Genealogy of a word 106 - Gherla , or the authentication of testimony 108 - The Truth of memory: subclass history 114 - The Portrait of the communist jailer, interrogator, and torturer 116 - East-ethics of radicalization 120 - The Color of the Rainbow ’77 122 - Departure for France and surveillance on foreign soil 127 - Fear, betrayal, and non-betrayal 134 - Writing in non-Romanian for non-Romanians 138 - Francophone exceptionality: women’s prison literature in French 139 - Lena Constante, The Silent Escape 141 - The Impossible Escape 151 - The Romanian contribution to the French literature of human rights 159 Chapter 4: The Cuban Literature of Human Rights in France 161 - Cuban writers in Paris post-WWII 161 - Cuban exiles face the French Left 163 - Eduardo Manet: A Cuban in Paris 168 - Manet fictionalizes the communist East 171 - The Forbidden Zone 172 - The Portrait of the communist citizen 175 - Building the memory of a nation: communist child-informers and political police 179 - Reinaldo Arenas: “I scream, therefore I exist” 186 - Before Night Falls : the intestinal writing of Reinaldo Arenas 188 - The Cuban literature of human rights and its French connection 190 viii - Communist megalomania 194 - Arenas, chronicler of Castro’s parameterized Cuba 196 - Castroism, betrayal, and self-betrayal 199 - Castro’s coup : the Mariel boatlift 205 - Arenas’ exile and the Western Left 206 - Cuba within, Cuba without 213 Conclusion 217 Works Cited 225 ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest thanks go to my doctoral committee: Professors Nouri Gana, Katherine King, Efrain Kristal, and Susan Slyomovics. This dissertation could not have happened without the unwavering enthusiastic support of Professors Susan Slyomovics and Efrain Kristal, my co- chairs. I am deeply grateful for the ways in which they extended their dedicated scholarly expertise, along with their tremendous trust, energy, and time. I express immense gratitude for the committed, rigorous, and generous guidance of Prof. Susan Slyomovics all throughout my doctoral career; well beyond this dissertation, her collegiality has been for me a source of meaningful intellectual stimulation. I am deeply thankful to Prof. Efrain Kristal for trusting me to carry out his project from an incipient idea to a final phase and also for his warm, invaluable mentorship that remains imprinted on me as a twenty-first century comparativist. I express my gratitude for the guidance of the late Professor Michael Henry Heim, who has supervised, before his untimely passing, Chapter Three of this dissertation and helped shape my graduate career at UCLA. I have been very fortunate to be advised and supported by Professor Nouri Gana’s astute and energetic mentorship over the years and thank him for his kind contribution to this dissertation and my overall academic education. Professor Katherine C. King has been for me a superb academic mentor long before serving in my dissertation committee and for her deeply inspiring personal, professional, and activist example, I will forever be grateful to her. Special thanks to Jacques Moreillon, Eduardo Manet, Marie-France Ionesco, Matei Visniec, Cosmin and Anca Pop, and Josep Puig Montada for enabling my research in France, Switzerland, and Spain. Also, my gratitude goes to Professor Michael Cooperson, who has generously supported my scholarly living in Arabic on two continents. I thank also my friends and colleagues with whom I shared intellectual conversations x over the years: Jacques Aymé, Natalie Abou Shakra, Safoora Arbab, Svetlana Ariton, Awad Awad, David Bennett, Florin Berindeanu, Bernadette Beroud, Whitney Braun Arnold, Pablo Carbajosa, Talar Chahinian, Catalin Cioaba, Richard W. Cline, Maria Condrea, Allison Crumly van Deventer, Sylviane Didnée, Magdalena Edwards, Tarek El-Ariss, Alexander Elinson, Rita Emanouilidou, Anna Eriksson, Stephanie Fauver, Myriam Ferrier, Lisa Felipe, David A. Fieni, Marian Gabra Kahsay, Marie-Janne Gales,