Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political by Tarek El-Ariss (review)

Abstract

El-Ariss, Tarek. 2013. Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and New Political. New York: Fordham University Press. $20 sc. 248 pp.One might initially perceive Tarek El-Ariss's Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and New Political to be latest theoretical foray into current upturn in scholarly interest in literature of nineteenth-century Arab Renaissance (ahiahdah aharabiyah). After all, its opening chapters, arguably most original and scholarly contribution of book, offer complex reading of al-Shaykh Rifa'a Rafi' al- Tahtawi's Takhlis ahbriz (translated as An Imam in Paris), firsthand account of Shaykh's five-year sojourn in Paris starting in 1826, along with an unpacking of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's masterful and complex AlSaq'ala alSaq (Leg over Leg) and his understudied Kashf aPmukhabba' (Revealing Elidden), both themselves versions of Arab travel literature in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet Trials of Arab Modernity is not really about ahiahdah It is an epidemiology of in Arab world. More specifically, it is symptomatological study that reframes Arab (hadatha) as somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and (ahdath) emerging in and between Europe and Arab world, literary text and political discourse (3). El-Ariss's methodology, then, is not through periodization but through approaching Arabic text, mostly novelesque writing between nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as of and staging, where new meaning, anxieties, complicities, and contestations synchronically are performed.Complicating what Walter Benjamin described and what Adonis in 1980s termed sadmat aPhadathah (the shock of modernity), El-Ariss contributes to larger au courant intellectual project of provincializing Europe, by decentering the West from its central position in cultural and literary comparative axis (12-13). In al- Tahtawi's travel account Takhlis aPibriz-which only recently has attracted critical close readings despite its canonical stature-El-Ariss maps series of vertiginous events that exemplify instances of anxiety and which express themselves in somatic effects. The most noteworthy of these is al- Tahtawi's disorientation and virtual fainting in his first experience in French cafe. AhTahtawi, author states, stages through literary fantasy reworking and, I might add, mastery of threats and disorientations with which Shaykh is confronted during his journey and sojourn to Europe. With these moments of rupture and collapse, El-Ariss asserts that new relations of power unfold between Arab and European, East and West, tradition and (50).El-Ariss continues to chart how body of Arab traveler is staged as site of cultural conflict and epistemological rupture by arguing that al-Shidyaq stages his physical collapse due to bad food as symptom of civilizational, discursive, and, indeed, political battle between European and Arab cultures (55-56). El- Ariss cleverly casts al-Shidyaq's vomiting of English food not only as rejection but also as performative engagement with civilizational discourses that pose English culture as superior to Arab culture. Lest we consider vomiting scones and pork as only form of al-Shidyaq's cultural resistance, El- Ariss rightfully shows how now legendary figure, himself merciless self-critic of Arab society and culture, dismantles binaries that structure and exposes the coercive violence of civilization itself. In doing so, he creates possibility of trial and experimentation through literary production as a dynamic mawrid (source) of Arab modernity (73).Chapter 4 argues that somatic affects of and colonial trauma could only be staged and embodied in texts, poignantly and complexly narrated in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to North (90). …