Strategies of unworlding in Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte (1985)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bonaparte’s famous pronouncement regarding forty centuries of history looking down on his soldiers from the top of the Pyramids, is emblematic of his imperialist aspirations in Egypt. It also implies the production of a ‘worlding’ (Spivak, 1985), by its inscription of imperial discourse upon colonized space, or more specifically in this case, a relatively short military occupation with lasting consequences. At the time of its release in 1985, the film Adieu Bonaparte directed by Youssef Chahine, displeased critics in the two countries that co-produced it. In France, it was seen as ‘chaotic’ and ‘anti-French’; in Egypt, rather than a film that properly showed the Egyptian resistance to the French invasion, it was deemed as a film ‘about love’. Arguably, these critiqued aspects of the film could be seen as part of Chahine’s strategy to counter the violence of Bonaparte’s worlding of Egypt, and to affirm a national self-determination that is responsible and responsive to the other. Working with Spivak’s term, I contend that Chahine resists and undoes Bonaparte’s hegemonic structure through a series of formal strategies that I call strategies of unworlding, among which the depiction and references to the Pyramids of Giza are notable examples.