“We were our only intellectual and artistic works,” wrote Waddah Charara (1942-) in July 1980 in The Comrades, a retrospective exploration of his decade of militancy (1965-70) after his very early exit from Marxism, both as organized political practice and an intellectual tradition, at the outset of the Lebanese civil and regional wars (1975). Before becoming a prolific writer, a university professor and a public intellectual, Charara the militant was the theoretical tenor of the Lebanese New Left. In that capacity he was instrumental in the founding of Socialist Lebanon (1964-70), which would later merge with the radicalized Lebanese faction of the Arab Nationalist Movement establishing The Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (1970-). The Comrades is the closest Charara has come to an autobiographical narrative. It is however much more than that. The narrative which is mostly cast in the first person plural draws on, and is weaved from, multiple discursive threads. It brings together a sociological sketch of the milieux from which the comrades came, an ethnographic account of the practices and rituals of the political organizations’ life, an analysis of the local, regional and international political conjuncture defining the era, a veiled auto-critique, as well as a depiction of the theoretical and aesthetic practices of militant self-fashioning. In unraveling these different discursive threads, my paper, which also draws on Socialist Lebanon’s writings and interviews I conducted with the organizations’ members, examines the transformation of Marxism from the ground from which political and economic criticism was voiced to the object of criticism, which is explained through sociological categories such as religious sectarian affiliation. I also show how Charara’s recourse to the sociological and ethnographic registers of analysis as well as his drawing on the language of passions and aesthetics in The Comrades, is both a polemical critique of the primacy of the political, reason and science during the years of militancy as well as symptomatic of his wider theoretical intervention at the time which highlighted the primacy of the social fabric – sectarian, regional, and familial solidarities – in understanding the unfolding events of the war. I end by considering how the complex form of the text which navigates the biographical and the sociological; the theoretical and aesthetics well as beliefs and rituals is helpful to think with to capture the layered experiences of post-colonial critics who shuttle back forth between worlds, languages, conceptual traditions and attachments.

The paper investigates Yasin al-Hafiz’s autobiographies in the context of the disappointment of the post-1967 era and the concomitant transformation in the political horizon, registers of critique and political subjectivities of a generation of modernist Arab intellectuals. al-Hafiz’s autobiographical writings set the stage for the quest of a new self, amidst the turbulent transformations of this era, one that is captured, following Scott, by the notion of tragedy. The tragic character emerges out of the impossibility of a reconciliation between the two intertwined narratives of his biography: the narrative of gradual emancipation from his society on one hand, and the repetition of thwarted political beginnings on the other. The conclusion of this twin trajectory is a disengagement from the history of Arab thought and from politics, setting the basis for the emergence of the figure of the critical or ‘detached’ intellectual.

Orientalist narratives of Arab literary history often frame the modern Arabic novel as a borrowing, assimilation or translation of 'European literary modernity,' without addressing the dialogic interplay between local modes of cultural production and hegemonic structures of colonial or global power. Despite the diverse ethno-linguistic constitution of the Maghreb, the region’s cultural, and particularly literary history have long been read through the totalizing lens of French imperialism and it's attendant timeline of pre, post and neo-colonialism. Across the Maghreb, however, the literary avant-garde of the mid-late twentieth century was interested in generating a new vision of cultural production and innovation that called many of these categories into question. Between the 1930s and 1960s, a flurry of interdisciplinary journals began appearing throughout the Maghreb: 'al-'Alim al-Adabi' and 'al-Mabahith’ in Tunisia, 'Confluent,' 'Souffles/Anfas' and 'Atlantes' in Morocco, as well as 'Novembre' in Algeria. These journals were run and contributed to by an intelligentsia that sought to redefine the interface between form and critique. Through their critical writings, experimental fiction and pivotal translations, this generation of thinkers – which included Zayn al-'Abdin al-Sanusi, Mahmud al-Mas'adi, Mohammed Berrada, Malek Haddad, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Abdellatif Laâbi and Kateb Yacine – was instrumental in bringing regional issues of decolonization, linguistic pluralism and Islamic modernism into dialogue with broader debates on humanism, Marxism and globalization. Building upon this intellectual history, my paper argues that these narrative interventions reveal the shared ethical and aesthetic stakes underlying the concept of 'Adab' – as both a demarcation of genre and the moral dimensions of personal and social conduct. I posit that in both their literary and critical writings, these thinkers continued to reimagine post-Nahda intellectual debates surrounding the question of 'iltizam' or literary commitment. Their works thus blurred the line between novelistic and other discursive forms – both theological and 'secular.'