Rethinking Mahjar Literature and the Arab Nahḍah: Jubrān’s Critical Intervention

Abstract

Abstract This paper foregrounds the ways in which Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān represents and addresses the project and concept of the Nahḍah. It demonstrates how the Arab renaissance is represented and engaged in Jubrān’s work as a polyvocal and contested space in which the particular and the universal dialectically and creatively intersect. Equally, it argues that a constant emphasis on individual and collective moral autonomy (al-istiqlāl al-maʿnawī) undergirds Jubrān’s Nahḍawī vision. Serving as the premise of creative aesthetic production, moral autonomy transforms the role of the poet from a crafter (ṣāniʿ) into a creator of a new mode of thinking/being in the world. It also functions as the sine qua non of original national and civilizational awakening, which is conceived of beyond traditionalism and westernization. This Nahḍawī engagement at once underlies and straddles poetics and politics, forcing us to re-evaluate Jubran’s role as a renaissance intellectual within and beyond the frameworks of literary Romanticism and postcolonialism.