Threading the racial capitalocene: on the poetics of affective porosity in Ibrahim al-Koni's Bleeding of the Stone (Nazīf al-ḥajar) and Yoel Hoffmann's Book of Joseph (Sefer Yosef)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Excavating traces of the Racial Capitalocene in Libyan-Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni's Arabic language Bleeding of the Stone (1990) and Israeli Jewish author Yoel Hoffmann's Hebrew-language Book of Joseph (1988), this article posits a novel critical framework for comparative readings of Middle Eastern literatures. In centering the advance of the racializing commodity frontier as primary node of literary interrogation across European capital city and African desert expanse, it argues that the two texts, despite their divergent positionings, craft remarkably parallel character dramas predicated upon affective porosity. Given their similarly sensitive, self-aware protagonists, their shared recourse to the “oikos”—a larger web of life beyond the self—and their overlapping thematizations of needle and thread, and Christological imageries of redemption articulated in minor tongues, the two texts ultimately curate affective porosity as a means for addressing and unsettling the conditions of racialized capitalist accumulation and its environmental and social effects.