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Diasporic Difference and Arab Ethnicity Re-Examined

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Diasporic Difference and Arab Ethnicity Re-Examined GEOGRAPHIES OF ESCAPE: DIASPORIC DIFFERENCE AND ARAB ETHNICITY RE-EXAMINED by Ramón J. Stern A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Ruth Tsoffar, Co-Chair Professor Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Co-Chair Associate Professor Santiago Colás Associate Professor Elliott Colla Associate Professor Christi Merrill Professor Anton Shammas ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Working on this dissertation has most certainly been challenging, and I have many people to thank for keeping me focused: Ruth Tsoffar, one of my closest mentors at the university and my co-chair; Cristina Moreiras, my second co-chair, who always had wonderful comments and reading suggestions; Anton Shammas, another close mentor who helped me a tremendous amount with Chapter 1 and Chapter 3; Santiago Colás, for pushing me to stay true to my reading approach throughout the whole process; Christi Merrill, for her wonderful advice on improving writing; and Elliott Colla, for his constant encouragement since my undergraduate years. Rackham Graduate School provided me with a Rackham Merit Fellowship to pursue my studies while at the university and the Comparative Literature Department supported me with teaching and summer tuition to complete my project. I also owe immense gratitude to the office staff in Comparative Literature –Paula Frank, Nancy Harris and Judy Gray—for their assistance with all questions and paperwork large and small. I am very thankful to my friends from the department, especially Amr Kamal, and to my parents, Steve Stern and Florencia Mallon, for the intellectual conversations that generated inspiration and the moments of relaxation to decompress after long days of writing and work. I owe a special thank-you to Albert Swissa, one of the authors from the dissertation, for agreeing to come to the University of Michigan and give a speech at a colloquium on his novel. I also could not go without mentioning and gratefully acknowledging the continuous emotional support of my dear friends Elizabeth Rodriguez and Abhishek Rai. ii Finally, special thank-yous go to two extraordinary people in my life: Dr. Armando Matiz and Wiston Garzón. They have done so much to make the final months of work more manageable for me by their generous help and caring friendship. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION Geographies of Escape 1 CHAPTER 1 The Dramatic Meta-Text of Ethnicity in Raduan Nassar’s ‘Lavoura arcaica’ 33 CHAPTER 2 The Aesthetic of Impurity and Transnational Akedah in Albert Swissa’s ‘Akud’ 85 CHAPTER 3 Judeo-Iraqi Dialect and Folklore in Two Samir Naqqash Short Stories 144 CONCLUSION Identity Crisis 188 BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 iv ABSTRACT By means of a selective choosing of authors of Arab diaspora, this dissertation seeks to explore what it means to “write against the grain” in the context of differing national and ethnic affiliations. Literary works by migrant communities Christian and Jewish who settled in Brazil and Israel, and trace their origins to Lebanon, Morocco and Iraq, are covered in the chapters: Raduan Nassar’s Portuguese-language novel Lavoura arcaica (1975) published in Brazil; Albert Swissa’s Hebrew novel Bound (1990); and Samir Naqqash’s “Iraqi,” Arabic-language short stories Tantal (1978) and The Day the World Was Conceived and Miscarried (1980). These pieces of literature perform radical disruptions of dominant literary culture in Portuguese, Hebrew and Arabic respectively, opening rich linguistic possibilities in the body of Brazilian, Israeli and broader Arabic-language literatures. Detailed literary analysis of each work reveals the complex intersection of identities –ethnicity, race, religion, class, gender—and the diverse ways in which literature thematizes and aestheticizes those identities through language. Most importantly, through a close reading of the literary language and aesthetics in these works, this research project brings identity politics and aesthetics into a fruitful conversation, considering diasporic ethnicities as identities created anew in each instance of narrative framing. This theoretical gesture proposes a method to read social identities such as ethnicity from a literary text rather than into it, advancing a vision of social identity that is fluid and malleable in the context of literary creation and imagination. In the specific texts under consideration, the authors pose “geographies of escape” that dodge the seeming finality of cultural and geographical displacement by imagining and cultivating taboo attachments to place and memory. These attachments, in turn, descend into an appearance of pathology and madness due to their resistance against the harsh pressures of assimilation or transculturation in the new homeland. KEY TERMS: Diaspora; ethnicity; narrative; intersectionality; aesthetics; thematics; nation; Brazil; Israel; Lebanon; Morocco; Iraq; Portuguese; Hebrew; Arabic. v Introduction: Geographies of Escape Aesthetics and Identity Politics The overarching debate that lies behind my research returns constantly to the relationship between aesthetics and identity politics. Aesthetics, in the context of discussions surrounding identity politics and art produced by “minority communities,” may often be seen as retrograde and Eurocentric.1 Indeed, the traditional reading of the concept has focused on Europe and has often advanced an elitist and retrograde brand of social politics. Nevertheless, aesthetics does not solely imply “literary taste” and the separation of art and literature into “high” and “low” varieties. Aesthetics, at least for the literary analysis of this dissertation, involves the deployment of linguistic strategies in literature that can defy and disturb separations between vernacular and avant-garde language, high and low branches of society and other facile binaries. Implicit in “aesthetic taste” is value judgment. The vision of aesthetics this dissertation poses, however, radically opposes the value judgment of “taste” in favor of a meticulous examination of the peculiar functions of language as it appears in a few pieces of literature of Arab diaspora. The three authors I analyze in this dissertation are Raduan Nassar, Albert Swissa and Samir Naqqash: a second-generation Lebanese immigrant in Brazil innovating modern Portuguese; a Moroccan-born Israeli Jew re-inventing Hebrew; and an Iraqi Jew continuing to write in an Arabic full of multiple registers and levels of experimentation. On the surface, they appear to have little in common. They write in different languages and employ distinct linguistic 1 strategies in relationship to their social identities. Why, therefore, am I looking at these authors together? Two words epitomize my grouping of this cluster of authors: language and aesthetics. Each author stands out as a kind of outlier in the literary traditions to which they loosely belong: Brazilian literature, modern Israeli literature and modern Arabic literature. One of the key reasons for the difficulty to place them is, quite simply, that they revolutionize the literary languages in which they write: Raduan Nassar uses archaic language and “secret” Levantine Arab themes to obscure the specific immigrant struggles expressed in his novel Lavoura arcaica (1975); Albert Swissa relentlessly transgresses and pollutes the narratives of purity in Judaism and Zionism alike in Bound (1990); and Samir Naqqash uses communal markers such as Judeo- Iraqi dialect and folklore as experimental tools to enact mental instability and textual rupture in his short stories and novels. What sets the discussion of Nassar, Swissa and Naqqash apart from many discussions of aesthetics is their cultural difference and salient, heavily marked social identities. As Arabs doubly marginal in the discussion of Arab ethnicity –due to migration to Latin America and to Jewish religion--, their aesthetic experiments have particular social implications and appear even more inaccessible given the lack of knowledge of the cultures they evoke in Brazil, Israel and the larger Arab world. The choice of these three authors, therefore, comes down to two crucial points: the aesthetic and thematic innovation of their works, on the one hand; and the radical cultural difference that their writing poses at the same time. These two factors force aesthetics and identity politics into a fruitful conversation, which considers the intersection of literature and politics in the context of cultural difference. 2 The question of the political implications of literature is heavily contested. The famous concept of “art for art’s sake” has become the target of pointed critique with the emergence of post-colonial theory, critical race theory, cultural studies and a number of area studies models concerned with nation, cultural difference, history, ideology and other seemingly “non-literary” disciplines and issues. In agreement with the critiques, I will argue that literature is inseparable from politics and social context. Nevertheless, the discussion far from ends with this affirmation. The larger question is not whether literature is political, but how it is political: more precisely, what kind of politics does and/or can literary fiction advance? Jacques Rancière famously argues that literature and its aesthetics have a politics distinct from that of political organizing and that elude more socially oriented models of politics (2006). Literature involves battles over representation,
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