This paper sets out to analyze the interstitial, hybrid and liminal aspects of Daneshvar’s novels Savushun (1969), Jazirah-i Sargardani (1993) and Sarban Sargardan (2001). A discursive analysis of these works shows that Daneshvar, instead of simply creating pre-Islamic-Islamic or Iranian-Western dichotomy, exploits these binaries to create what Homi Bhabha calls liminal and hybrid spaces and identities. If read in the context of political situations in which these works were produced, Daneshvar’s liminal and hybrid characters also emerge as subversive to the official narratives of Iran’s national identity. The novel Savushun unmistakably derives several motifs from the pre-Islamic legend of Siyavash. However, a close reading also demonstrates Islamic motifs in the novel. For example, the protagonist Yusof, who resembles Siyavash as pointed out by many scholars, shares several characteristics with Imam Husayn and theQur’anic Yusof. Such a transcendental portrayal of the protagonist endows him with a liminal and hybrid identity and defies the pre-Islamic-Islamic dichotomy. It also subverts the Pahlavi state’s ‘pedagogic’ narrative of Iranian identity rooted in ancient Iran. Daneshvar’s post-Islamic Revolution works Jazirah-i Sargardani and Sarban Sargardan successfully challenge the new ruler’s presentation of Iran as a Shi’i nation. These works reclaim Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage and place it on an equal footing with Islam. This is achieved through, among other things, creation of a liminal character in Hasti, who prefers atheist Morad over religious Salim, gives equal importance to Zoroastrian and Shi’i icons, and insinuates longings for pre-Islamic Iran. Daneshvar’s literary works also seek to transcend the Iranian -Western dichotomy. Although critical of Western imperialism, her works cannot be categorized as anti-Western. For example, Yusof, Zari, Hasti, Morad and most of the other positive characters are receptive to Western modernity. Indeed, their intellectual growth is shaped by their contact with theWest. Nonetheless, they self-consciously preserve their Iranian ‘self’. Daneshvar also creates many positive western characters, such as McMohan in Savushun and Mani’s Polish wife in Jazirah-i Sargardani. Mani’s wife is even fully accepted as an Iranian citizen, suggesting that one can become part of the nation not only through ‘filiation’ but also through ‘affiliation’. Such representations imply interstitiality between the East and the West. As in her personal life, Daneshvar refuses to privilege any one ideological, religious, or national group over others in her literary works. She achieves this by creating interstitial, hybrid and liminal characters and spaces in her works.

In the context of the American occupation of Iraq and the war on terror space was managed and invested in order to consolidate basic distinctions such as inside/outside; order/disorder; the realm of law/the state of nature. In this geographical and political ordering the centrality of the camp as a concept, an organizing principle and a practice was strongly reaffirmed as “the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized” (G. Agamben) Iraqi authors who wrote about the occupation focused their attention on space ordering and the geography of occupation reflecting in their novels the two opposite paradigmatic spaces and their corresponding practices: the city and the camp standing in opposition to one another. The Green Zone as the walled, entrenched space elected for law and culture opposes Bucca camp in the Iraqi desert where “evil” is contained and granted a visible localization and where lawlessness and barbarism reign. Two novels by Iraqi author Shakir Noori bearing as titles the two different spaces In the Green Zone (2009) and The Prisoners of Camp Bucca (2011) unveil the spatial rationale of the tortured geography of the occupation and the politics of security enforced by the Americans and its dehumanizing practices. Despite their differences, the two spaces converge in the way they are both the sites of moral and legal transgression: terror as the exception to order on the one side, and torture on the other as the transgression to law leading to its suspension. In both spaces the biological lives of the occupants are exposed, can be targeted and reduced to “bare life”. Within Giorgio Agamben’s frame work about the camp and the concept of bare life, this paper will examine the geography of occupation as it is portrayed in fiction with its two realms: the city and the camp and the bare life that reside in there.

" 'The Poetics of Proximity' in Mahmud Darwish's Athar Al-Farashah" This study is intended to explore Mahmud Darwish's Athar Al-Farashah (The Butterfly Effect) as an embodiment of relational proximity to the other. Such proximity functions as an anti-dote to Darwish's anxiety about absence/death and it represents the fruition of his poetic vision. Focusing initially on the significance of the title, the study will investigate the nuances of the word "athar" in Arabic (both as effect and trace) as modes of proximity. It will unravel the semiotics of the "butterfly" as representative of poetic sensibility. To achieve this task, the study relies mainly on the philosophical views of Emmanuel Levinas which sound congenial to those of Darwish. According to Levinas, poetry is "the proximity of things." In this sense, poetry is a "caress" which functions as a mode of transcendence in the here-and-now. Levinas's other-oriented thought emphasizes the search for what things are "in themselves, in their radical otherness," and as "traces of the infinite" (Collected Papers 118-19). Such perspective enables us to conceive the aesthetical as an approximation of the ethical in this work. Darwish's concept of alterity encompasses mainly another human being--a neighbor, a lovely woman, the "enemy," or the reader. However, it often seeks abstract terms for alterity in the natural world--the sky, the sea, a river, a tree, or a stone. Such proximity to things bestows a sense of "dwelling" on earth that belies the impending threat of absence. The poet's endeavor to leave behind him a "trace" is perceived as an ethical responsibility to the other. Through such agency, the limitations imposed on the poetic voice by absence are transcended by the permanent presence of the trace/effect of proximity to the other. This conclusion is in harmony with the fact that Darwish's late work emphasizes the humanizing, yet fragile, role of the poetic self that disseminates itself in the process of seeking correspondence to the whole world. For me, the implicit significance of this study perhaps lies in bringing together a Palestinian poet and a Jewish philosopher who shared a common ethical/aesthetical vision.

Resistance literature has been principally defined with regard to its historical context. However, to arrive at a detailed understanding of its characteristics and strategies, we may need to examine its literary tropes and themes. How does such a genre work as literature? I am proposing to look at resistance literature through the lens of the historical novel. Indeed, through my reading of Radwa Ashour's Granada Trilogy, this paper will examine the role of allegory in historical narrative, as well as explore the theme of loss. Loss of the homeland is a recurring theme in historical narratives from the Arab world; el-Ghitani's and Maalouf's historical fictions also come to mind. It may be an incarnation of collective trauma, which becomes constitutive of national identity. Thus, as a literary motif, it can help us understand the role of national allegory in literature. This paper will also draw on Ashour's critical writings, as well as her fictionalized autobiography, Specters, to examine such questions. It will propose reading strategies which give allegory due attention, without subsuming the work of fiction within it. By unraveling questions around historical narratives, the theme of loss and the significance of allegory, I will attempt to lay the ground for a theoretical definition of resistance literature.