This book looks at eight post Arab Spring novels in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature. Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Karim Alrawi, Youssef Rakha, Yasmine El Rashidi, Omar Rober Hamilton, Saleem Haddad, and Nada Awar Jarrar all focus on the Arab world in their work; on the lives of ordinary and minority peoples; and on the revolutions of their respective nations. This volume shows how these contemporary Anglo-Arab novelists exhibit linguistic experimentation akin to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of ‘deterritorialization’, but in a way that is unique to Anglo-Arab writing. The selected novelists repudiate the use of metamorphosis, which is usually an essential part of the deterritorialization of a major language. Instead, their writings enact the minor practice of linguistic deterritorialization by using metaphor and by incorporating contemporary modes of protest like popular slogans, tweets, and chants. These authors challenge the conventions of minor literature and, by adopting this mode of deterritorialization, foreground the experiences of officially silenced voices.
Author(s): Abida Younas
Series: Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 193
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Post-Arab Spring Literature
Minoritarian Strategies in Post-Arab Spring Literature
Minor Literature
Post-Arab Spring Narratives as Minor Literature
Chapter Overview
Chapter 2: Writing the Present to Commemorate: Personal Narratives of the Arab Revolution in Ahdaf Soueif’s Memoirs of a City Transformed and Hisham Matar’s The Return
Arab Spring Memoirs: Keeping the Discourse of the Revolution Alive in Minor Literature
The Reconfiguration of the Revolution
Transcribing the Egyptian Revolution in Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed
Chronicling the Libyan Uprisings in The Return
Chapter 3: Magical Realism in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Metafiction in Youssef Rakha’s The Crocodiles: Rethinking Minor Literature
The Real and the Magic in Alrawi’s Book of Sands
Metafiction in The Crocodiles
Chapter 4: Post-Arab Spring Cairo in Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicles of a Last Summer and Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins: Urban Narratives as Minor Literature
Neoliberal Cairo in Chronicles of a Last Summer
Revolutionary Cairo in The City Always Wins
Arab Spring and the Right to the City
Toward Making Minor Space
Chapter 5: The Humanitarian Narrative of the Arab Spring in Saleem Haddad’s Guapa and Nada Awar Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven: Further Toward Minor Literature
Humanitarian Narratives and Minor Literature
Traumatic Lives of Gay People in Guapa
Mourning in the Lives of Refugees in An Unsafe Haven
Melancholic Lives of Exiled Individuals
Chapter 6: Post-partum
Coda: Post-Arab Spring Narratives
Bibliography
Index
