Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political
Tarek El-Ariss
Abstract
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. Trials of Arab Modernity traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth-century to the present. Tarek El-Ariss thus reframes Arab modernity [ḥadātha] as a somatic c ... More
Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. Trials of Arab Modernity traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth-century to the present. Tarek El-Ariss thus reframes Arab modernity [ḥadātha] as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events [aḥdāth] emerging in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse. This study challenges the prevalent conceptualizations of modernity, both those that treat it as a Western ideological project imposed by colonialism, and others that understand it as a universal narrative of progress and innovation. Instead, El-Ariss offers a close reading of the simultaneous performances and contestations—or trials—of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, this book reveals the unfolding of these trials as a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity, decentering yet also redefining and producing it. El-Ariss's theoretical and comparative approach offers a new configuration of Arab modernity at the intersection of historical, cultural, and aesthetic frameworks.
Keywords:
Arabic Literature,
Nahda,
Arab Spring,
Affect Theory,
Travel Literature,
Rifa'a al-Tahtawi,
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq,
Tayeb Salih,
Hanan al-Shaykh,
Ahmed Alaidy
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780823251711 |
Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2014 |
DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823251711.001.0001 |