Could Erich Auerbach have written Mimesis without Homer, Shakespeare, or Virginia Woolf? Could Roland Barthes have envisaged S/Z without Balzac's "Sarrassine"? To what extent,then,are these theories, informed by their own historical circumstances and literary traditions, applicable to the rich tradition of Arabic? More importantly, and especially so in the era of post-coloniality, where-in the vast sand of literary criticism- could a line be drawn between Eurocentrist and nativist theories? These two questions trigger a few others: what available mechanisms does Arabic literary theory have to contain chronic drifts of theory towards Europe? While Western theory on balance seeks to be universal and might even be compassionate towards the Other, how do we assess the concerns for immunizing Arabic Studies against surrendering once again to the good old gravitational pull of Eurocentrism? If the persistence of Eurocentrism in Arabic Studies is at all curable, what are the scientific or identitarian means needed to provide such remedy? How can the enormously varied cultures of the Arab world not only speak in, but provide organic critique for, their own distinctive voices? As its title indicates, Decolonizing Arabic Studies is a call for liberating the global community of Arabists from a fashionable yet potentially repressive servility to Eurocentrist theory. While many of the analyses of Arabic literary and cultural texts sound like they offer a revolutionary approach to Arab Studies, only a handful of these studies have solid educational value and contextual grounding that the field can benefit from or build upon. By considering the historical geneses of Western literary theories and their educational implications, the presenters in this panel will provide arguments, pose questions and interrogate answers about the increasingly abstract and historically irrelevant employment of Eurocentrist theories they encounter in their assessment and teaching of Arabic texts in today's universities. Yet, instead of dismissing the reliance on Western theory as ostentatious and nonrepresentational, the goal of this panel is to examine their main hypotheses in relationship to the empirical and historical specificities of Arabic literary and cultural productions. For this reason, the panel does not just present a critique of the employment of Western theory in approaching Arabic literary and cultural heritage in texts ranging from classical, medieval, nahda, to modern and contemporary eras,but it also provides illumination for an emancipatory path in order to enlarge and enrich our inquiry in this current situation of Arabic Studies.
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Dr. Ahmed Idrissi Alami
Most critical assessments and theorizing on modern Arabic literature prioritize the Nahda as a foundational cultural event in both periodizing the genesis of modern Arabic cultural production and theorizing its ‘modern’ character. While this historical framing has a lot of merit and appeal for the adherents and advocates of the import-inflected Nahda paradigm, some critics have seen it as extending the ‘colonial’ ethos of filial provenance from the west with its Eurocentric implications for questions of Arab identity formation and Arabic literary cannon. In particular, some protest and contend the Western perception of Arabic literature that is inherent in this privileging of the Nahda that perpetuates, both directly and implicitly, the forfeiture of the Arabic literary and cultural heritage that flourished in the previous age, in particular before the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt.
In my paper, I argue that the engagement with European culture before the Nahda as evidenced in travel writing from the Western Mediterranean/Maghrib reveals a rich and dynamic field of writing that provides a basis for rewriting the debates on modern Arabic literature. Not only did these writers contest Eurocentric cultural perceptions of Arab and Muslim identity and culture but they also engaged in the continental debates that prevailed in the post-Reformation period through reported religious disputations as exemplified by writings by Andalusian intellectuals after the expulsion of the Muslims from Iberia. The argument of my paper will also focus on the need to elaborate a network theory that could accommodate and reflect pre-modern Arabic cultural production. Such theorizing prioritizes cultural theory that centers on questions of translation and transfer of ideas by early modern Arab intellectuals who were cognizant of and responsive to the emergent and transformative geopolitics in the trans-Mediterranean cultures at the time. Such rethinking would also enable us to ground early modern Arabic literature in the pre-Nahda times and provide an alternative to the dominant European Renaissance intellectual model by emphasizing Arab cosmopolitan literary outlooks and the writers’ engagement with global cultural events.
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Dr. Hani Bawardi
The question of who and what is an Arab has been circumscribed by western theories on the origin of peoplehood. Overall, skewed analysis emphasizing British and French colonialist projects ignored long standing historical and cultural interconnectedness in the Levant and beyond since the late nineteenth century. Their aims centered on squaring the interwar mandate system with the “white man’s burden.” Seminal works by Arab scholar since the mid-nineteenth century were echoed by immigrant responses to colonialism, thus articulating pluralist conception of peoplehood and reformed societies with national aspirations. These articulations, were intended as responses to colonialism in the U.S. as they did in the Levant. This rich body of works defies easy translations because it draws on a collective memory immersed in deeper histories from the Arab and Islamic past. Regarding the Levant, Arab Nahdah and feelings of peoplehood and national aspirations were dismissively attributed to Europeans’ colonial institutions and physical structures. The baggage peoples of the Levant took with them on their emigrations amid these momentous events, yielded a breakpoint with strictly classical Arabic-language style in favor of Journalism Arabic. The emergent accessible language, this paper argues, animated formal conception of nation within the U.S. immigrant communities. However, Arab American studies failed to utilize these foundational basis rendering illusive a coherent Arab American narrative. Other reasons, this paper explores are lack historiographies, absence of native Arabic language fluency among the scholars themselves, or any translations of early Arabic text in the U.S., in addition to historically prohibitive immigration restrictions from 1917 to 1965. As a result, ideological alignments within narrow interpretations of Arabism, nation, and peoplehood further distanced Arab American studies from its core foundations. At present, the distinguished literary heritage over the first six decades of Arab American immigration is not part of any cohesive vision of Arab American communities. As a result, neo-Orientalist and essentially ideological alignments within Arab American studies set in where neoliberal intellectualism strayed hopelessly far from nuanced Arab content. The alternative is increasingly malleable representations of Arab Americanness based on narrowly conceived monologues and postmodern psychoanalysis, not historical or literary inquiry into events and rich texts.
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Dr. Emily Sibley
The study of adab on its own terms opens the door to a new sense of what modern adab-as-literature means while simultaneously exposing the entanglement of Arabic literature with Western critical theory. The starting point of my inquiry, the question of what adab “is,” is indebted to philology—a prime example of an interrogative framework favored not only by theorists associated with the West (e.g. Nietzsche; Nallini; Edward Said), but also as a substantive mode of textual hermeneutics within the Arab rhetorical and literary traditions. One only has to look to Lis?n al-‘arab or consider al-Shidyaq’s Al-saq ‘ala al-saq to see how the careful study of words has provided a major for critical thought taking place inside and alongside literature.
The central thrust of my argument is that adab contains within itself its own impetus towards excess, towards that which disrupts the parameters of adab as refined, mannerly, educated, and sociable poeticity and literariness. An unorderly adab, if you will; an uncivil adab at odds with adab’s pivotal drive towards a framework and language for civility.
However, this attempt to analyze adab on its own terms calls to the vocabulary of Derrida, adab as play or supplement, returning to the ambit of Western theory. Meanwhile, forays into describing and theorizing this inclination, attitude, or excess via contemporary Arab criticism lead to Adonis’ concept of modernity as innovation and resistance to convention. The problem with Adonis, however, is how easily his theoretical trajectory comes to reflect a teleological argument concerning the liberating force of secularism, echoing one of the main narratives of the nah?a: modernity as liberation from the stifling bonds of tradition.
How, then, do we liberate adab in theory? If adab contains within itself this liberatory impulse, how can we theorize this force or map its poetics without that liberation turning to an indebtedness to Western epistemology?
Instead of seeing these theoretical byways as indicative of adab’s colonization by theory, I hold that adab necessarily disrupts attempts to domesticate it. I engage Derrida’s terminology insofar as it speaks to the self-liberating dynamics accessed through a close engagement with the poetics of adab. My talk examines philology as a resource against the Eurocentric thrust of theory, insisting on returning to Arabic literature’s historical and rhetorical traditions. These returns provide a critical vocabulary for theory and poetics that allows us to engage Western critical frameworks from a position of comparison.
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Dr. Boutheina Khaldi
Literary feuds, which amounted to fifty, were central to al-Nahda Egypt. They were built on differences between al-Madhab al-Qadim” (The Old School) and al-Madhab al-Jadid (The New School). They involved many prominent intellectuals. The most famous of which were that between the conservative Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi‘i on one hand, and the modernists: Taha Husayn, ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, and Salama Musa, on the other hand. While al-Rafi‘i adhered to tradition and advocated Islamic Revival and a return to Islamic roots, Husayn, al-‘Aqqad, and Musa accepted the supremacy of the European model by seeking to assimilate the achievements of European civilization. This paper sets out to argue that these feuds and polemics were also among modernists who can be divided into two schools: The Latinate School whose education was primarily French, like Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Husayn, and the Anglo-Saxon School like al-Aqqad, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, and Musa, and others. While traditionalists castigated modernists for their slavish imitation, and irrelevant employment, of Western ideas, modernists denounced each other for misunderstanding Western ideas/theories.
