Abstract
This chapter reads contemporary Anglo-Arab writings through the critical-theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conception of minor literature. It argues that Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory of minor literature from an analysis of western writings. Applying the same theory uncritically in the context of Anglo-Arab literature would be limiting and restrictive. Reading the notion of Minor Literature parallelly with Post-Arab Spring Literature, this chapter reformulates the notion of Minor literature and provides a new definition for it.
Creation takes place in choked passages … Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric.
—Deleuze, 133
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in Libya, Muammar Al-Qaddafi set up literary festivals and invited all young writers around the country to attend. He then arrested them and threw them in a prison where a whole generation of intellectuals spent a decade (“Hisham Matar on the Power of Libyan fiction” npr.org, Apr, 2011).
- 2.
For details about nationalism, see the “Introduction” to Badawi’s Modern Arabic Literature.
- 3.
By naïve realism, I mean that Anglo-Arab authors do not take mimesis, as an imitation of life, in literature in the naïve sense. Instead, their writings are innovative and experimental.
- 4.
World literature seems to consist of only a few European and western literatures. This practice has recently been challenged from the perspective of other non-European or non-western major literature; however, the question of the minor literature or minor authors is still far from settled.
- 5.
The writings of Anglo-Arab authors are normally refracted through the prism of Orientalism. According to Wail S. Hassan, contemporary Anglo-Arab texts resist orientalist discourse by enacting cultural translation. These writers accept represent the burden of being a representative of their own people by deliberately deterritorializing English. This can take the form of the infusion of the English language with Arabic or linguistic and stylistic deterritorialization in favor of experimentation with the English language.
- 6.
Using different film techniques in narrative to tell the story. For example, attention is paid to light, sound and music, and so on.
- 7.
It is through this capacity of their writings that these authors gamble on the performative potential of creative fiction.
- 8.
The examples throughout in this book are not simply instances of experimentation with form. I also illustrate how the inculcation of slogans, the mixing of Arabic and English and glossing create the environment of the Arab revolution.
- 9.
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Younas, A. (2023). Introduction. In: Post-Arab Spring Narratives. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_1
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