Suchergebnisse

"Qur'anic Invocations: Narrative Temporalities in Twentieth Century Maghrebi Literature" investigates the dialogic relationship between literary and theological discourse in modern Arabophone and Francophone literature of the Maghreb. The novels of al-Tahir Wattar, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraibi and Mahmud al-Mas'adi critically explore the complex colonial histories and conflicted articulations of national identity, language and literature in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. While the 130-year French imperial presence in the region left an indelible cultural and linguistic imprint on the Maghreb, nationalist attempts at homogenizing these countries under a shared Arab and Islamic heritage were equally divisive. This dissertation examines the intersecting discourses of nationalism, modernity and postcolonialism in fiction of the late colonial and post-independence period between 1945 and 1985. I posit that these novels engage with Islamic Thought in order to complicate, nuance or challenge the temporality of these grand historical narratives. In the process, however, they trouble the boundary between 'religious' and 'secular' discourses. In large part, this confluence reflects the very notion of 'Adab' that underwrites both religious and literary discourse in the Arab literary tradition. A concept that historically denoted the moral dimensions of individual and social conduct in the Islamic sciences, 'Adab' also signifies the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and, more currently, the corpus of belle lettres. For while they employ Qur'anic symbology, imagery and motifs, these texts also intervene into debates on the apostolic tradition of hadith, Islamic exegesis, history and jurisprudence. Further, they reimagine the novel in dialogue with and opposition to Arabic and French literary as well as historical discourses. These elements are reflected in the heteroglossic and polyphonic structure of these texts, which undermines historical teleologies and myths of origins.My first chapter, "Revolutionary Eschatology: Islam and the End of Time in Wattar's al-Zilzal" [The Earthquake, 1974], analyzes Wattar's mobilization of eschatological imagery to question the ideological underpinnings of Algerian nationalist discourse. I explore al-Zilzal's critical engagement with the rhetoric of Arabism and Islamism in post-revolutionary state politics. In my second chapter, "Heterodoxies of History: Algerian National Identity in Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia" [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985], I investigate the interweaving of the French colonial occupation and settlement of Algeria with the Arabo-Islamic conquest of the region in the seventh century. I posit that the novel's polyphonic structure and resistance to a single authoritative voice challenges religious, ethnic and linguistic narratives of origins, as well as the politics of transmission and interpretation in Islam. The third chapter, "The Thin Line of Imperialism: Parsing the Qur'an in Chraibi's Le passé simple" [The Simple Past, 1954], examines the controversial representation of French imperialism and Islamic patriarchy as mutually imbricated ideologies. I argue that Chraibi offers an alternative mode of historical and literary temporality in the motifs of the passé simple and la ligne mince. My final chapter, "The Poetic Landscape of Islamic Thought: Creation and Existence in al-Mas'adi's Mawlid al-Nisyan" [The Genesis of Forgetfulness, 1945], explores the novel's fusion of Sufism, Existentialism, Islamic Thought and Arabic literary discourse. Al-Mas'adi's ethical literary project, I suggest, reads artistic representation as a mode of creation.

Elle Flanders's 2005 documentary film Zero Degrees of Separation subtly weaves together two seemingly distinct narratives: the settlement of Palestine in the 1950s by a hopeful generation of pioneering Jewish immigrants and the challenges of gay Israeli-Palestinian relationships in contemporary Israel/Palestine. By innovatively interlacing archival footage shot by Flanders's own grandparents as early as the 1920s with interviews conducted with Israeli and Palestinian queers in 2002, Flanders demonstrates the mutual implication of these narratives. This essay examines how through the unique temporal collision of these two historical moments, prominent tensions of the current conflict are made visible in the haunting utopian images of the early Zionist movement. By filtering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of sexuality, Flanders's film deconstructs certain constitutive myths of the modern nation-state, offering an intimately personal glimpse into questions seminal to both the political genealogy of the current conflict and the quotidian lives of Israelis and Palestinians: human rights violations, violence, the policing of bodies, the geopolitics of Israeli expansion, the politics of mobility, and the mapping of Western colonial ideologies onto racialized conflicts—both between Israelis and Palestinian and within the Israeli community itself between Jews of Arab (Mizrahim) and European (Ashkenazim) descent.

An Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA, Gil Hochberg received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the intersections of trauma studies, psychoanalysis, race theory, and postcolonial theory, particularly in the context of contemporary Israel and Palestine as well as North Africa. Professor Hochberg has published essays on a wide range of issues including Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, gender and nationalism, and cultural memory and immigration, as well as exile and literary production. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers "Arab" and "Jew" in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. She recently talked with Hoda El Shakry, a doctoral student in Department of the Comparative Literature at UCLA, about her current projects, including a special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.