The Postcolonial Arabic Novel Debating Ambivalence by Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003. 432 pages.)

Abstract

Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi’s book offers a fresh contribution not only to
studies in Arabic literature but also to postcolonial critique, cultural criticism,
comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies. Its interest lies in
the fact that it introduces a relatively less explored territory in postcolonial
thought and cultural criticism: namely, Arabic literature. The
attention of many western and non-western scholars in the field has long been directed toward Anglophone literature from South Asia, Japan,
Africa, and Canada, and then to Francophone literature from North Africa
and the Antilles.
In the context of the Arab world, the author also situates the importance
of his study in how The Thousand and One Nights, a work whose
fate and reception he sees as emblematic of the fate of fiction writing in
the Arab world, was received. Just like the novel genre in general, this
work only received scholarly interest rather recently, after centuries of
neglect and disdain by conservatist Arab scholars and elite culture.
Central to postcolonial critique, whose sources and precedents can be
traced to the practices and discourses of those writers associated with various
intellectual traditions (e.g., poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism,
feminism, cultural studies) and which has affinities with the literary movement
known as postmodernism, is the experience of colonization as a
moment of cultural self-consciousness and self-dividedness. This moment
generates contradictory and ambivalent identity patterns and subject positions
resulting from the encounter with the Other (culture), and emphasizes
the constructedness of identity. Al-Musawi transposes these key postcolonial
motifs and insights to the realm of Arabic literature in order to reveal
important dimensions of the contemporary Arabic novel.
Scholarly research on Arabic literature (both within and outside the
Arab world) often privileged poetry as an object of study, given its historically
prominent place in elite culture and the Arab world’s literary canon.
The subject choice of the book is of particular interest, because it targets
the Arabic novel as an emerging literary genre, and, by the same token,
because of its use of postcolonial analytical concepts to account for this
relatively new literary genre’s place in contemporary Arab culture and
society ...