The Postcolonial Arabic Novel

Abstract

Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi’s book offers a fresh contribution not only tostudies in Arabic literature but also to postcolonial critique, cultural criticism,comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies. Its interest lies inthe fact that it introduces a relatively less explored territory in postcolonialthought and cultural criticism: namely, Arabic literature. Theattention of many western and non-western scholars in the field has long been directed toward Anglophone literature from South Asia, Japan,Africa, and Canada, and then to Francophone literature from North Africaand the Antilles.In the context of the Arab world, the author also situates the importanceof his study in how The Thousand and One Nights, a work whosefate and reception he sees as emblematic of the fate of fiction writing inthe Arab world, was received. Just like the novel genre in general, thiswork only received scholarly interest rather recently, after centuries ofneglect and disdain by conservatist Arab scholars and elite culture.Central to postcolonial critique, whose sources and precedents can betraced to the practices and discourses of those writers associated with variousintellectual traditions (e.g., poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism,feminism, cultural studies) and which has affinities with the literary movementknown as postmodernism, is the experience of colonization as amoment of cultural self-consciousness and self-dividedness. This momentgenerates contradictory and ambivalent identity patterns and subject positionsresulting from the encounter with the Other (culture), and emphasizesthe constructedness of identity. Al-Musawi transposes these key postcolonialmotifs and insights to the realm of Arabic literature in order to revealimportant dimensions of the contemporary Arabic novel.Scholarly research on Arabic literature (both within and outside theArab world) often privileged poetry as an object of study, given its historicallyprominent place in elite culture and the Arab world’s literary canon.The subject choice of the book is of particular interest, because it targetsthe Arabic novel as an emerging literary genre, and, by the same token,because of its use of postcolonial analytical concepts to account for thisrelatively new literary genre’s place in contemporary Arab culture andsociety ...