The Mediation Position in ‘Arabic’: The Mimetic Mask

Abstract

The third chapter focuses on the period when literary criticism in Arabic for the Palestinian readership in Israel underwent academization. It argues that these processes recreated the mediatory position within “Arabic,” reshaping its internal dynamics and its relation to other state institutions. The historical carriers of these processes were the Palestinian academics educated in the Arabic education system and then in Israeli academia, some of whom were subsequently employed in permanent positions within it. A major figure in the academization of Arabic literary criticism during this period–starting in the late 1960s–is Mahmoud Ghanayem. The chapter examines his corpus of literary criticism that deals with Palestinian literature in Israel, designed to reach the Palestinian readership through publications in literary journals that were part of the material and institutional infrastructure of “Arabic.” Ghanayem studied in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Tel Aviv University, and completed his MA and doctoral theses under the supervision of Sasson Somekh. A comparison of the bodies of knowledge of these two scholars indicates that Ghanayem represents a colonized mirror image of the colonizer intellectual, particularly with regard to the modernization of literary Arabic.