MESA Banner
Negotiating Space, Making Place in Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History
Abstract
This paper will investigate the everyday social and spatial practices of an ordinary character, Jacob, the protagonist of The Angel of History, the latest novel by the Lebanese-American, Rabih Alameddine. Through this study, I attempt to understand how Jacob negotiates and experiences the spaces he inhabits in Cairo, Beirut, Stockholm, and San Francisco, all of which are portrayed as spaces of violence and exclusion. In these spaces, Jacob struggles to make himself invisible wherever he goes as his visibility is never to his advantage. In addition to having to deal with haunting memories of war, Jacob is othered for being gay, a refugee, and an Arab – in addition to having to deal with memories and experiences of war and civil conflict. As a result, Jacob, a poet, cannot write. In a final act of defiance, and after being refused entry to a psychiatric ward, Jacob starts writing on all the spaces that have excluded him, starting with him own body. This act of defiance and transgression is a reclamation of space denied, an agentive action towards claiming his right to the city, and against a violent space that only includes him in the social space he inhabits as the excluded. My paper will explore how Jacob’s everyday life as “othered” is experienced through his relationship to and position in the spaces around him. I will then investigate his socio-spatial transgressive practice to show the importance of studying spaces of conflict and violence which carry within them their very negation: the possibility of appropriation and social transformation, the potential of challenging the dominant established order through politicised action. I will be distinguishing between the terms space and place using Yi-Fu Tuan and Tim Cresswell. Michel Foucault will be employed to expound on the relationship between power and space, while the power of space will be investigated through the works of Giorgio Agamben and Henri Lefebvre.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Arab States
Sub Area
Arab Studies