Arwa Salih’s al-Mubtasarun (Stillborns, 1996) is an insightful reflection upon her Seventies Generation, the 1971-72 Student Movement that she led, and the fate of the Left in post-infitah neoliberal Egypt. Her book, published several years after most of it was written, is difficult to categorize. It is theoretical, analytical, deeply personal, and political. Salih introduces al-Mubtasarun with a preface written just before its publication, i.e., several years after she wrote the heart of the book. In her preface, she notes that her language and historical worldview were nationalist, despite her communism. Nationalism was forefront in the Student Movement’s calls for war with Israel and survived – even fueled – Egypt’s 1973 infitah and decades of neoliberal consolidation. In recounting this political and intellectual history, Salih points to the split in her “contradictory consciousness” – simultaneously nationalist and Marxist – that was once a coherent anti-colonial political project of socialist national liberation. I turn to al-Mubtasarun and Salih’s posthumously published collection of poetry and literary criticism Saratan al-Ruh (Cancer of the Soul, 1997) to situate the post-infitah unravelling the Marxist and nationalist strands of Arab Nationalism. In particular, I am interested in the way Salih’s Marxism sustains her analysis of literature, culture, and politics whereas nationalism for her is increasingly a violent right-wing political force. By grounding my paper in Salih’s critical vocabulary of “stillborns,” “militant kitsch,” “contradictory consciousness,” and “post-nationalist nihilism,” I argue that her writing acts as a necessary bridge for theorizing Egyptian politics, culture, and literature in the neoliberal era. The theoretical bridge she offers is especially important in linking the collapse of Nasser’s socialism and Sadat’s infitah to the post-2011 consolidation of military rule and right-wing neoliberal economic policy. Salih’s critical engagement with nationalism and Marxism in this historicized manner speaks to politics and literature beyond Egypt. Given the near ubiquity of the neoliberal order, she is an important voice grappling with the global state of anti-colonial and Marxist politics and culture in an era dominated by capitalism and right-wing nationalisms.

The Egyptian author Miral al-Tahawy includes a short epigraph in her 2010 novel Bruklin Hayits (Brooklyn Heights) from the Iranian poet Furugh Farrukhzad’s posthumously published poem “Iman biyavarim bih aghaz-i fasl-i sard” (“Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season”; 1974 [first drafted in 1965]). The novel’s epigraph provides a comparative starting point to explore a reciprocal haunting between the two texts. While Farrukhzad’s Persian poem remains haunted by premodern Arabic poetic form in the shape of the 'arud (prosody), her lines also haunt and thereby shape our understanding of al-Tahawy’s protagonist, an Egyptian immigrant to New York City named Hend, as a flaneuse, a female urban walker. In both poem and novel, the flaneuse figure operates in the background of urban space like a ghost and as a witness to a particular moment in history. Starting from al-Tahawy’s citation of Farrukhzad’s melancholic poem, this paper approaches the flaneuse in Brooklyn Heights in terms of Derrida’s concept of hauntology from his lecture Specters of Marx (1993). The argument builds by analyzing how Hend, as a flaneuse, crosses the boundary between the public and private spheres as well as how Hend’s walks through Brooklyn open up New York’s Arab past to her. I situate Hend’s experience of exile in relation to the history of the Arab world during the twentieth century and explore how memories about early Arab immigrants to the United States and the loss of Palestine, along with the contemporary immigrant experience in America as presented in al-Tahawy’s novel, lend themselves to hauntological study. Guided by Derrida’s comments on the persistence of Marxism even after Fukuyama’s “end of history,” the paper shows how the ghosts of impossible futures persist in Hend’s world as she explores the past, both that of her own family and of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries more broadly. Overall, the paper reads al-Tahawy’s novel in terms of hauntology to offer a way out of the contemporary Western neoliberal consensus through the flaneuse figure’s recognition of ghosts and these ghosts’ continued insistence that history has not yet ended.

Set in the aftermath of the 1492 Castilian reconquest of Andalusia, Radwa Ashour’s Granada Trilogy follows the working-class al-Warraq family as they struggle to survive the increasingly draconian papal state’s measures to dispossess them of their cultural heritage. The forced conversion of all Muslims to Catholic Christianity and the banning of Arabic, among other policies, inaugurates a veritable crisis of interpretation which prompts the Trilogy’s protagonists to question the guidance of their illicit faith as they fail to make sense of the signs of life. This coercive symbolic disorder is expressed throughout the Trilogy as a dissonance between the visceral unfolding of profane events and some immanent but imperceptible divine design. Following Fredric Jameson’s writing on allegory, it should come as no surprise that this sudden unraveling of metanarratorial power coincides with the Castilian occupation and the discovery of the so-called “New World.” Ashour’s Trilogy associates the reassertion of White-Christian hegemony in Europe with the colonization of the Americas and the genesis of the capitalist world system in such a way that Andalusia appears as a kind of laboratory of settler colonialism across the Atlantic. At the center of this symbolic upheaval, linking these theaters and timelines of dispossessive violence, stands the figure of the orphan. The trope of rahil—of setting out, departure, exodus, or even death—is central to Ashour’s bid to construct new world-framing narratives capable of placing the expulsion of Europe’s Arab-Muslim population in dialogue with the settler colonization of the Americas and the undeterred violence of contemporary American empire. I will argue that Ashour casts the orphan as a itinerant figure whose very psycho-spatial unmooring positions him or her well to perform acts of allegorical recovery akin to what Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” i.e., “some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [global capitalism], in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle...” In the process, Ashour elaborates a vision of South-South solidarity and historical translatability oriented toward the continual renarration of histories of civilizational violence as past instances of dispossession find allegorical fulfillment in yet more setbacks. In this context, I will argue that Ashour’s Trilogy should be read as a novel form of late capitalist allegory in a post-Cold-War age where the contours of the Third World have bled out into what is today known as the global South.

In Palestinian poet Fadwā Ṭuqān’s two poems, Lan abkī (“I Will Not Cry”) and Waḥsha: mustawḥā min qānūn a-jādhibiyya (“Longing: Inspired by the Law of Gravity”), she utilizes the poetic features of Arabic’s pre-Islamic literary tradition to both pay homage to the Arabic qaṣīda, and address losses particular to Palestinian history. In her lyric poems, Ṭuqān incorporates the naṣīb, the elegiac prelude, and the aṭlāl, the lament of the abandoned encampment — to reflect upon the grief that Palestinians have endured in the wake of the naksa (set back) of the 1967 War — and which they continued to experience during the Second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 2002. By citing allusions to, and utilizing conventions from pre-Islamic jāhilī poetry, Ṭuqān invokes the long existing tradition that relates Arabic poetry to loss. She personifies the Palestinians’ vulnerability through the mobilization of language and references to different demarcations of time. Ṭuqān spotlights the precarity of Palestinians’ lives which are devoid of sovereignty and state protection, revealing the ways in which Palestinian experience is punctuated by violent ruptures and continued mourning. Even though the two works explore expressions of bereavement and dispossession, they distinctively incorporate attributes of classical Arabic poetry to remark on variant forms of loss in Palestine. Specifically, while in Lan abkī the poet halts in the late 1960s to weep at the traces of the material ḥuṭām (ruins) of the Palestinians’ homes in Yaffa, in Waḥsha: mustawḥā min qānūn a-jādhibiyya, Ṭuqān ruminates on losses that are both more intimate and metaphysical. In the 2002 poem, it is al-waqt, or “time” itself that is being commemorated. Notably, in her opening verse, Ṭuqān proclaims, rakaḍa al-waqt (“time ran away”) — illuminating how time is elusive and cannot be fully inhabited or possessed — and additionally, how mourning persists in the present and has become a routine aspect of everyday life. While one can read Ṭuqān’s later work as a means of individual reflection in the final years of her life, this paper will analyze the ways in which her meditations on time also delineate how national and communal belonging coincide with personal expressions of lament in Palestine. As highlighted through the imagery in these two works — and through resonances of jāhilī poetry — Ṭuqān deploys her verses to underscore how for Palestinians, there maintains an ineluctable link between ordinary life and elegy.

This paper considers Algerian author Assia Djebar’s “Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement” as a depiction of a gendered, communal experience of melancholia relative to women’s relationship to the nation and the nation-building project. The story also proposes a solution to that melancholia: to “unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among ourselves, in all the women’s quarters” [“…tout débloquer: parler, parler sans cesse d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, parler entre nous, dans tous les gynécées”]. Departing from Sigmund Freud’s foundational essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” this paper will consider the theorization of a collective, national melancholia by scholars like Anne Anlin Cheng, and David Eng and Shinhee Han, as well as Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic chora as a receptacle or space of the drives which orients the child to the body of the (lost) mother. This paper will provide a reading of the core of the nouvelle—the scene set in the hammam, and the sections entitled “Pour un divan de la porteuse d’eau” and “Pour un diwan des porteuses de feu”—as a space for (re)orientation to the lost object, the national community. The poetics present in these sections, particularly in “Pour un divan de la porteuse d’eau,” showcase the transformative power of the chora as a space of the subject’s becoming, enabling new relationships to community and affirming the power of language.