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The DeformNation Theory: The Fragmentation of the Nation in the Narratives of Postcolonial Nation-States
Abstract
A monster stitched of victims’ joints is endowed with life; he roams the streets of Baghdad City seeking revenge and claiming justice. As these pieces blister and reject the hosted body, his urge to kill more to replace the decomposed lax joints escalates. The ‘Whatsitsname’ with his vindictive nature fed by grudge, is a metaphor for any national project predicated upon coercive cohesion. My argument in this paper is that, like this monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018), the nation itself is stumbling, struggling to gain its balance and existence as a united country that comprises all religions, ethnicities, minorities..etc. The failure of the character in the novel represents the failure of the nation outside the narrative border to be united and reconciled. As such, this novel, exemplifying a sprouting array of narratives in the region, refutes the ‘imagined political community’ of Arab nationalism and displays an awakening to the internal fragmentation in the region. If fiction is tied in this way with a symbiotic relation to reality, its subtlety goes beyond criticising reality to suggesting the pressing need for adaptation and change. Since the deformed monster is seen to stand for the failure of the nation, a key aspect of this paper is to invite rethinking the limitation of the nation both as a concept and as terminology that can enunciate ethnoreligious and cultural diversity. Accordingly, this paper invites relying on literature to provide the field of literary studies, if not also other fields of humanities, with a concept that is more commensurate with the literature of fragmented nations. Drawing on this background, I have coined a term to describe such a torn-up nation: DeformNation, and subsequently, such literature of national disparity: DeformNational literature. The purpose of this term is to create an integrative structure with a function, specific characteristics, and methodology. I will start with underscoring scholarly critiques on the original concept of nation and nationalism in European and non-European scholarship (Smith [1971 &1998]; Gellner [1983]; Anderson [2006]; Kedourie [2012]; Tagore [1917]) that is constituent of Arab nationalism (Mufti [1996]; Tibi [1997]; Makiya [1998]) before delineating the new term, its trajectory in postcolonial studies (Bhabha [1990]; Hall [2017]; Gagiano [2019]), the kind of literature it subsumes and an empirical concise analysis of Sadaawi’s novel. The term would enhance rethinking the multilayered complexities of postcolonial nation-states, and by extension, rethinking postcolonial literary studies.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Nationalism