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Modernity, Dissensus, and the Political Subject in the Postcolonial Arab World D

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Modernity, Dissensus, and the Political Subject in the Postcolonial Arab World D UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Unruly Bodies: Modernity, Dissensus, and the Political Subject in the Postcolonial Arab World DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Ghada Mourad Dissertation Committee Howard Baskerville Professor Nasrin Rahimieh, Chair Associate Professor Dina Al-Kassim, Co-Chair Chancellor’s Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan Chancellor’s Professor Aijaz Ahmad 2017 © 2017 Ghada Mourad DEDICATION To my parents ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CURRICULUM VITAE ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: ‘THE ROMANTICISM OF STRUGGLE 39 IS OVER’: DISSENSUS AND/AS MODERNITY IN SONALLAH IBRAHIM CHAPTER 2: ‘DIEU A CRÉÉ LA BEAUTÉ COMME UNE FITNA’ : 78 MODERNITY IN THE MAKING IN MOHAMED LEFTAH’S LE DERNIER COMBAT DU CAPTAIN NIMAT CHAPTER 3: ‘THE SUFFERING OF THE RULE IS US’ : UNRULY 111 BODIES IN HODA BARAKAT’S AHL AL-HAWA AND HAJAR AL-DAHIK BIBLIOGRAPHY 147 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest appreciation goes to my co-advisors, Dina al-Kassim and Nasrin Rahimieh, without whose guidance, encouragement, and mentorship this dissertation would not have taken shape. I am very grateful to Dina Al-Kassim who believed in me since we first met, and remained my most incisive reader. This dissertation proudly carries her imprint, but the mistakes and limitations are certainly my own. Despite the distance, she has always had the right words to say at the right time, and I have always held her words, coming from afar, near and dear. Nasrin Rahimieh has been for me a caring mentor every graduate student dreams of having. I feel so fortunate to be her advisee and to have met her. She has always been very much a reassuring support throughout many of my trepidations and doubts. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan has encouraged me to believe in my work with his enthusiastic feedback. I am very grateful for Aijaz Ahmad’s encouraging and edifying reading. I thank Mr. Schaeffer for the funding he provided me with the Schaeffer fellowship in literary translation. I also thank the Humanities Collective at UC Irvine for the grant that allowed to conduct research at the American University of Beirut. The Department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine has provided me with much support, and I am most grateful for Rei Terada for being there whenever I was desperate for help and advice. She is the compass that guides every lost soul, and certainly has been my compass in so many ways. Bindya Baliga has provided me with much-needed organization through her constant reminders. I thank Karen Friedlander at the UCI Graduate Resource Center for her unwavering support and camaraderie. Maryse Mijalski has provided a much-needed guidance and wisdom throughout my teaching in the French department. With her, Laura Klein, and Ann Rosen, I had the chance to shamelessly share all my embarrassing moments and much-needed laughs. I thank Alexander Jabbari for including me in his reading groups, and Sina Salessi for his insightful reading and comments. I have been exceptionally fortunate to meet Sonallah Ibrahim and have many rich exchanges with him. I thank Richard Jacquemond for putting me in touch with him, and I am very grateful for Mr. Ibrahim’s detailed and candid answers to my questions, and most of all for his meticulous reading and enthusiastic feedback on my work. I have also been fortunate to have met Nezha Leftah, the daughter of the late writer Mohamed Leftah. I am humbled by the trust Nezha has put in me, answering my questions, and providing me with the resources I needed for my research. I thank my Moroccan friends who have persistently provided me with support and guidance. I thank Mohamed Hmoudane, Kenza Sefrioui, Touriya Fili, and Ayoub Mouzaine, for assisting me in every step of my work on Mohamed Leftah, and certainly Omar Berrada and David Ruffel who introduced me to the work of this great author. My family has been constantly and relentlessly supporting my endeavors. I am much thankful to my children, Jerome Raphael, Christelle Raphael, and Marc Raphael, whose childhood memories consist of little outside their mother’s papers and exams. They have been my inspiration and my incentive to bring this project to completion. I thank them for their patience, understanding, and unflagging encouragement. My siblings, Omar Murad, Zeina Murad, and Hussam Murad, have always been the best cheerleaders a sister could wish for. My parents, Mtaweh Mrad and Mariam Mansour, have taught me to persevere and believe in my abilities. I owe much to the love and faith they have put in me throughout the years. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Ghada Mourad 2007 B.A. in English, magna Cum laude, California State University, Los Angeles 2010 M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine 2009-2014 Teaching Assistant, French Program, University of California, Irvine 2015-2017 Graduate Writing Consultant, Graduate Resource Center, University of California, Irvine 2017 PhD in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY The role of dissenting gendered bodies in the instigation of modernity in postcolonial Arabic and Francophone literature in the Middle East and North Africa DOCTORAL DISSERTATION “Unruly Bodies: Modernity, Dissensus, and the Political Subject in the Postcolonial Arab World” AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS 2016 Travel grant, University of Chicago 2010-2015 Outstanding 2008-Teaching Assistant, University of California, Irvine 2008-2015 Schaeffer Fellowship in Literary Translation, University of California, Irvine 2014 Humanities Collective Award, University of California, Irvine 2012 Travel Grant, Fondation des Sciences de l’homme à Paris 2012 Travel Grant, Centre National de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale, Oran, Algeria v 2012 Summer Language Study Fellowship, University of California, Irvine 2009-2012 Travel Grants, School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine 2016 Travel Grant, Associated Graduate Students, University of California, Irvine LANGUAGES Arabic and French (Bilingual native proficiency) Russian (Reading and writing proficiency) vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Unruly Bodies: Dissensus, Modernity, and the Political Subject in the Postcolonial Arab World By Ghada Mourad Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine, 2017 Professor Nasrin Rahimieh, Chair Associate Professor Dina Al-Kassim, Co-Chair This dissertation studies the articulation of modernity in its understanding as dissensus through the performativity of queer bodies in post-1960 Arabic and Francophone literature in the Middle East and North Africa. More specifically, I study Sonallah Ibrahim’s Tilka al-Rāʾiḥa, Mohamed Leftah’s Le Dernier combat du Captain Nimat, and Hoda Barakat’s Ahl el-Hawa and Ḥajar al-Ḍaḥik. I challenge the prevailing depiction of the modern Arab subject as ideological and/or submissive, an image that has been tainting this subject since the 1967 Defeat, and which has re-emerged in force following the recent political disappointments in the Arab world, by demonstrating that this subject is formed and expresses itself as a subject of desire, the engine of change. The introduction theorizes modernity as a dissenting attitude that is both atemporal and historically contextualized, framed by the intersection of various theories: Adonis’s theorization of Arab modernity as creative and innovative forces instigated by the marginals and seditious (al-khurūj); Michel Foucault’s understanding of modernity as an attitude, and his theorization of assujetissement; Jacques Rancière’s configuration of politics in the aesthetics of literature, as an vii intervention in the sensible; Judith Butler’s conceptualization of the subject through a psychoanalytic lens that adds the gender dimension to this subject that, as a biopolitical subject, dissents from the prism of sexuality; and Dina Al-Kassim’s elaboration on Judith Butler’s work by theorizing the abject expression of dissent by sexual minorities. My first chapter studies how the male narrator’s body registers dissent through the performativity of sexual, social, and literary non-conformity. The second chapter builds on Abdelkebir Khatibi’s understanding of decolonization to analyze dissent through the male narrator’s sexuality. I conclude that Mohamed Leftah envisages modernity as a process in the making, looking for an epistemology to articulate its ontology. The third chapter analyzes male queerness to assess the war’s role in society’s multifaceted regulation of its marginals and seditious. This chapter imagines modernity in the space opened by Barakat’s deconstruction of binaries. Centered around male queerness and abnormality, these texts register dissent while pointing at the need to recenter Arab feminist discourse on queerness away from women’s veil. viii INTRODUCTION In the fourth volume of Al-Thābit wa al-Mutaḥawwil (The Static and the Dynamic), Adonis writes that modernity or ḥadātha started in Arab culture as an attitude (mawqef) that takes the past as an example and interpret it by virtue of the present. This modernity consists mainly of forces of change (taghiīr) and creativity (ibdāʿ) in tension with the forces of conservation and imitation of ancestral traditions and texts (salafiyya and ittibāʿ). Adonis dates the inception of modernity to the Umayyad and Abbasid eras, where two currents of modernity existed: one intellectual-political, and another artistic. While the intellectual strand was expressed through Sufism and Ibn Rushd
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