Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804794219 ISBN 13: 9780804794213

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Transcolonial Maghreb offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years. Arguing that Palestine has become the figure par excellence of the colonial in the purportedly postcolonial present, the book reframes the field of Maghrebi studies to account for transversal political and aesthetic exchanges across North Africa and the Middle East. Olivia C. Harrison examines and contextualizes writings by the likes of Abdellatif Laâbi, Kateb Yacine, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Albert Memmi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida, and Edmond El Maleh, covering a wide range of materials that are, for the most part, unavailable in English translation: popular theater, literary magazines, television series, feminist texts, novels, essays, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and pamphlets written in the three main languages of the Maghreb-Arabic, French, and Berber. The result has wide implications for the study of transcolonial relations across the Global South.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Olivia C. Harrison is Assistant Professor of French and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California.

Olivia C. Harrison is Assistant Professor of French and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California.

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Transcolonial Maghreb

Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization

By Olivia C. Harrison

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9421-3

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Palestine as Metaphor, 
PART I. DECOLONIZING THE MAGHREB, 
1. Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture, 
2. Transcolonial Hospitality: Kateb Yacine's Experiments in Popular Theater, 
3. The Transcolonial Exotic: Allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Algerian Trilogy, 
PART II. JEWS, ARABS, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF SEPARATION, 
4. Portrait of an Arab Jew: Albert Memmi and the Politics of Indigeneity, 
5. Abrahamic Tongues: Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida, 
6. Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other, 
Epilogue: Palestine and the Syrian Intifada, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Souffles-Anfas

Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture

The first text explicitly to link Maghrebi culture and politics to the Palestinian question, the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas captures and exemplifies what I am calling transcolonial identification with Palestine: transnational forms of solidarity that are based on the understanding that Palestine and the Maghreb are part of an overlapping and unfinished colonial history. More explicitly than any other text in my corpus, Souffles-Anfas compares the plight of the Palestinians to the Maghrebi (post) colonial condition, including not only the experience of French colonization and acculturation but also continued French cultural and economic hegemony and the repressive tactics of the autocratic state. I argue that Palestine was a central interlocutor in the journal's founding mission, "cultural decolonization": the elaboration of cultural forms (literature, theater, orature, the visual arts), political models, and intellectual traditions that would break with both colonial (French) and pre-colonial ("traditional") canons and norms. After June 1967, Palestine became the principal source of inspiration for Souffles-Anfas' sustained reflection on language and culture, culminating in the launching of an Arabic-language journal, Anfas, and the dissemination of Palestinian poetry in French translation.

I begin, in medias res, with a poem that dramatically stages the kinds of political imaginaries I will be calling transcolonial in this book, an impassioned plea for solidarity with Palestine written in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967:

my memory is long ... Scars and grafts ... weigh down my step but no longer stop my expansion

for a long time I dreamed They were nightmares Slow motion races of repetitive executions Whirling eyes Opium-burned demonstrations ... Branded faces Cataclysmic winds The Atlas erupting in a deluge of collective memory

memory ... You dictated to me the itinerary of violence

..............................................................

I am the Arab man in History set in motion built anew by the vanguard of Palestinian guerrilla fighters Arab Arabs Arab a name to be remembered great voices of my seismic deserts a people marches on through 8,000 kilometers raises tents command bases how many are we yes how many gentlemen statisticians of pain advance a number and the prophetic masses retort with infallible equations today WE ARE ALL PALESTINIAN REFUGEES tomorrow we will create TWO ... THREE ... FIFTEEN PALESTINES

Abdellatif Laâbi's "Nous sommes tous des réfugiés palestiniens" (We are all Palestinian refugees) intertextually inscribes Morocco and Palestine in a transnational history of popular protest and anticolonial struggle, culminating in a call to pan-Arab revolution. In this sense it constitutes a textbook example of the anticolonial fervor that swept across the Arab world after June 1967. It also perfectly captures the transnational character of what has come to be known as May '68, and the centrality of anticolonial and Third Worldist thought to this event. The poem's titular metaphor, reprised in the cascading layout and capital letters of the poem's conclusion, appropriates "we are all German Jews," the famous French slogan of May '68, for Palestine, while the final tribute to Ernesto Che Guevara's call to "create two, three ... many Vietnams" places Palestine at the vanguard of world struggles for social and political justice. But what fascinates me in this otherwise typical if not cliché pro-Palestinian poem is the "itinerary of violence" it sketches from French colonialism and Israeli expansionism to what Laâbi elsewhere calls "internal colonialism": the postcolonial state's subjection of its citizens. Although the medical and bodily metaphors that punctuate the first stanzas of the poem ("grafts," "scars," "burns," "branded faces") are clear references to the physical and psychological violence of colonization, any Moroccan of Laâbi's generation would have recognized that they also evoke an event that marked the beginning of the "years of lead," as the repressive regime of Hassan II (1962–1999) came to be known: the violent repression of a student demonstration in Casablanca on March 23, 1965. The "cataclysmic winds" that usher in postcolonial violence project the poet into the arms of "the prophetic masses" marching to Palestine, metaphorically collapsing Palestine and the rest of the Arab world in a common front against colonialism, writ large to include past and present, foreign and domestic forms of oppressive rule.

Laâbi's ode to Palestine was published in the fifteenth issue of Souffles (the plural of souffle, meaning breath or inspiration in French), a journal he founded with several poets and artists in 1966, ten years after Moroccan independence and exactly one year after the protests of March 1965. Initially a venue for experimental French-language poetry, from the second issue onward Souffles began publishing articles on popular theater, film, and art, and quickly became a platform for debates ranging from national culture and language to the continued effects of what its founders called "colonial science" on artistic and scholarly endeavors in postcolonial Morocco. In an editorial published after al-Naksa, Laâbi coined an expression that captures the journal's broader cultural and political aim: "cultural decolonization," the elaboration of literary and artistic forms that would break with French canons without seeking a return to tradition, which Laâbi, like Frantz Fanon before him, identified as a colonial construct. Souffles undertook this task on many fronts — scholarly production, the visual and performative arts, and cinema — but none more forcefully than poetry, its main focus from the outset. The texts published in the journal remain some of the most exciting examples of "linguistic guerrilla" from the era, to use Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's felicitous turn of phrase: the irreverent, iconoclastic use of the colonial tongue, French, to decolonize Moroccan culture.

Souffles-Anfas played a seminal role in the fields of Moroccan and Maghrebi literature, shaping debates about genre, form, language, and popular culture that continue to be central to the field today. From the first issue onward, it published iconoclastic and formally inventive texts, for the most part experimental poetry written in French, and later in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804794219
• ISBN 13: 9780804794213
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Herausgeber: Harrison Olivia C.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande