Exilic Subjectivities in Arabic Literature: Belonging and Estrangement

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2023) | Viewed by 2186

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, Yale University, P.O. Box 201962, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
Interests: eurocentrism; problematics of literary translation; cultural history; the image of the Arab in U.S. literary narratives; postcolonial literature; modern Arabic fiction; Maghrebi studies; life and works of Mohamed Choukri

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This thematic issue aims to bring together scholars with an interest in examining exilic subjectivities. This issue focuses on how the concepts of belonging and estrangement have been explored in Arabic literary genres. Separation from one’s homeland, resulting from social, economic, ecological, political, and religious hardships has gained the attention of many Arab writers. Since the nineteenth century, in particular, the atrocities faced due to colonization, persecution, merciless regimes, fear of imprisonment and torture, political oppression, and continuous wars in the Middle East and North Africa have forced many into exile. Examples of these atrocities include the mahjari movement, in which writers fled oppression and injustice (and indeed, civil war) in Syro-Lebanon in the 1850s and 60s under the ruling of the Ottoman Empire, the Algerian struggle for Independence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Lebanese Civil War, the Gulf War, the American invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian Civil War, to name a few. These hardships have inspired many writers to explore various topics in their literary works, including alienation, displacement, traumatic experience, liminality, and constructed subjectivities, in an attempt to unveil the experiences exilic subjects go through and expand (and nuance) our understanding of exile.

For this Special Issue of Humanities, we encourage papers that directly engage with the concepts of belonging and estrangement in their discussion of exilic subjectivities, focusing on how exile affects one’s sense of identity and the ways in which exiles (re)construct themselves.  

Dr. Jonas Elbousty
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • arabic literature
  • alienation
  • exile
  • detachment
  • displacement
  • identity
  • liminality
  • subjectivities
  • trauma

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

11 pages, 235 KiB  
Article
Liminality, Madness, and Narration in Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” and “Why Don’t You Write a Novel Instead of Talking about All These Characters?”
by Rima Sadek
Humanities 2023, 12(3), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030050 - 16 Jun 2023
Viewed by 1829
Abstract
The fiction of Hassan Blasim addresses the horrors of contemporary Iraq and centers on the crisis of identity that is part of the immigrant’s experience. Blasim’s protagonists try to forget past traumas related to their homeland by developing new identities ingrained solely in [...] Read more.
The fiction of Hassan Blasim addresses the horrors of contemporary Iraq and centers on the crisis of identity that is part of the immigrant’s experience. Blasim’s protagonists try to forget past traumas related to their homeland by developing new identities ingrained solely in the present. Yet, the past resurfaces in the form of nightmarish dreams, madness, and fractured narratives where fiction and reality intersect and overlap. Inhabiting a constant state of liminality imprints itself on the body and psyche of the border crossers and leads to their physical or mental demise. Drawing on theories of madness, liminality, and narration advanced by Shoshana Felman and Michel Foucault, I analyze Blasim’s two short stories “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” and “Why Don’t You Write a Novel Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” I argue that the imaginative space of literary narration, an in-between, liminal space between reality and fiction, is the space where ethico-political paradoxes and the absurdity of real-life trauma, death, and chaos are transformed into a meaningful literary dialogue that can expand reality and offer new spheres of understanding of the trauma that shapes the lives of Blasim’s characters. Full article
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