The Arabic language has a rich history of literary criticism and theory, starting from the 8th century ce up to the 21st century. This literary criticism and theory engages with a poetic tradition that dates back to pre-Islamic times. The inquiry into literary quality was motivated by an interest in evaluating poetry, a general concern with eloquent speech, whether in verse or prose, and by the desire to articulate the beauty of the Quran. The transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics into Arabic also spurred interest in the poetic, particularly in Arabic philosophy. The study of eloquence crystallized into a standardized science by the 13th century ce, with branches focusing on (1) the role of syntax in literary beauty (the science of meanings); (2) simile, metaphor, and metonymy (the science of elucidation); and (3) rhetorical figures (the science of rhetorical figures).
The aesthetic developed in the early criticism of the 9th and 10th centuries was concerned with articulating the merits of an idealized classical style of pre-Islamic poetry, from which the “modern” poets of the early Abbasid period diverged. This classically oriented aesthetic was dominated by a concern with the truthfulness and naturalness of poetry, typical of the style of the “ancients,” on the one hand, and the limits of unrealistic imagery and affected artificiality, which characterized the more ornate modern Abbasid style, on the other. This binary outlook shifted after the 10th century, however, to an aesthetic of wonder. A theory of aesthetic experience began to develop, therefore, which was based on the ability of poetic language to evoke wonder in the recipient. As a result, wonder-enhancing characteristics such as strangeness, the unexpected, and the rare became essential components of aesthetic judgment. Moreover, the ability of language to make meaning manifest in ways that allow for an experience of discovery and hence wonder, became the foundation of aesthetic inquiry in post-10th century Arabic literary theory.
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Arabic Literary Theory
Lara Harb
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Arab Wests: Maghrib, Europe and the Americas in the Modern Literary Imagination
Ahmed Idrissi Alami
“Arab Wests” is defined by long and complex processes of mobility, cultural exchanges, and imperial encounters in the Western Mediterranean and across the Atlantic in the early modern period. Two novels, Granada: A Trilogy (1994) by Radwa Ashour and The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami (2014), reimagine Arab culture in early modern literary imagination across multiple geographies in the Western Mediterranean and the New World. The two narratives reflect significant aspects of the importance of the late 15th to early 16th centuries to the development of Arab culture in the early modern world—a historically unique time that coincides with advancing global capitalism and its constitutive relations and derivative effects such as slavery, dispossession, conquest, and territorial expansion in North Africa and the Spanish conquest of the New World. This period saw major transformations in trade routes, shifting the center of exchange to the transatlantic sphere and making Iberia an important hub for launching early modern global capitalism. All these new shifts in politics and material economies indicate that the center of action, previously located farther east, would soon be displaced to the Ibero-Maghreb and the Atlantic. Within this purview, the analytical trope of “Arab Wests” offers a site to reimagine the Western Mediterranean cultures and polities as interactive gravitational coordinates in the rapidly changing power balance in the early modern age.
The Arab communities and cultures of the regions of al-Maghrib and al-Andalus have been configured and represented in these two novels in relation to each other as well as through their connections to the New World in the early modern period. Given that the history of Spain is intricately connected to and dependent on that of the Arab Muslims in Iberia, the so-called Moors, these narratives highlight the continuities and iterations of the colonial politics of conquest, exile, and dispossession between the three geographical locations of al-Maghrib, al-Andalus, and the New World. They also challenge the narrow view and understanding of early modern Atlantic world history and its Eurocentric models of analysis and interpretation. The interconnected model of early modern history demonstrates how Arab Muslim cultural history in the Western Mediterranean is not only relevant to understanding the major socio-cultural and political transformations in North Africa and Iberia at that time but is also an integral and significant player in imagining and rewriting the “frontier” and the account of the emerging global Atlantic history in which Africa, Europe, and the Americas are linked through diverse forms of exchanges as well as conflicts. Ashour’s and Lalami’s texts, which draw on a rich and diverse repertoire of Arabic conventions of writing and storytelling, put “Arab West” historical fiction within a transatlantic network of narratives through their rhetorical content and textual dynamics, which also resonate with 21st-century issues such as racial identity politics, global Arab diasporic identity, and transnational forms of belonging. Despite the historical remoteness of the context of these fictions, the narratives are animated by an immediacy that corresponds and speaks to our modern sensibilities, especially the global realities that emerged post-9/11, the increasing awareness of systemic racism, and the call for more engaging and rigorous revisionist readings of imperial histories as well as more ethical representations of our interconnected past legacies.
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History, Memory, and Affect in Postcolonial Arabic Literature and Film
Nouri Gana
While modern Arab history has been marked largely by the experience of colonialism, postcolonial Arab history has been marked particularly by the Palestinian experience of settler colonialism. From the occupation of Palestine in 1948 to the occupation of Iraq in 2003, colonial entrenchments and encroachments have cast a long shadow on the decolonial achievements of several Arab countries, especially during the successful Egyptian and Algerian revolutions in the 1950s. Arabs have come to realize that Arab culture, literature, and film constitute a repository for these experiences, especially in the wake of the 1967 Naksa, the cataclysmic defeat of three Arab armies by Israel. Despite the turn to affect in early 21st-century scholarship, and a much earlier explosion of works on mourning and melancholia in post-World War II modernist and postcolonial studies, there is little theoretical and critical work done at the intersection between Arabic literature and affect theory—a puzzling lacuna, given the centrality of affect in everyday Arab culture and the aforementioned historical convulsions experienced by Arab countries in colonial and postcolonial times. Nothing can be gained by giving short shrift to the affective toll of the serial colonial and postcolonial defeats suffered by Arab regimes.
Affect is inextricably related to subjective experience and individual agency but it is increasingly enmeshed in politics and political mobilization. Grief, for instance, has always taken forms of response that range from declarations of love to declarations of war. Note, for instance, the outpouring of love that followed Lady Diana’s tragic passing or Michael Jackson’s similar fate. By contrast, note the serial declarations of war that followed the tragic events of 9/11 or October 7. The bombings of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, more recently, Libya and Syria, not to mention the catastrophic bombings of Gaza by Israel, all took place because or in spite of grief, and in order to fulfill or foreclose mourning. Colonial powers prescribe offensive and retaliatory violence to settle grief yet proscribe the same measures to the populations in whose dispossession and terrorization they are implicated. The stakes of grief seem so high that they decide who has the monopoly on violence and who wants to subvert that monopoly and claim their rightful share of the use of violence to inflict or overcome grief. Arab culture, literature, and film are bloated with ungrieved and ungrievable corpses, staking, as it were, a claim from beyond the grave to memory and justice.
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Postcolonial Avant-Garde Fiction
Adam Spanos
Postcolonial novelists face a difficult double bind. On one hand, they are expected to produce fiction that accurately represents the political and social circumstances of the nations to which they belong. Yet realism came to them as an inheritance of imperial rule, and as such it served as a tool for organizing colonial understandings of time, social relations, and interior experience. On the other hand, experiments in novelistic form that would break with the tenets of realism are often understood as frivolous capitulations to Western fashions or as bitter attacks on cherished traditional aesthetics. For if literary experiments are conducted with the intention of transforming popular tastes, they may very well be taken as analogues of the imperial civilizing mission, which claims to be justified in forcing cultural transformations on colonized populations by virtue of their purported indolence and backwardness. Evidently there is no position that a postcolonial writer can adopt that does not involve some kind of complicity with imperial interests or mimicry of its aesthetic forms. Yet the postcolonial avant-garde can be defined by its refusal of the binary choice between colonial-national and metropolitan-imperial imperatives. Its aesthetic innovations are defined by the intention of challenging not simply the realities created by empires but the very social imaginary, often uncritically adopted by colonial or postcolonial populations, on which the imperial project rests. Writers working in this tendency develop non-, pseudo-, or para-mimetic narratives to force readers to entertain the possibility of realities existing outside the terms of the real as this has been prescribed by dominant agencies, including imperial ones; alternatively, they turn their prose to ends other than representation in order to demonstrate the embeddedness of ordinary language in imperial discourses and to indicate other possible usages of a shared tongue. Magical realism, most influentially and spectacularly, began as a challenge to the disenchanted and positivist nature of the Western gaze: writers like Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ben Okri reveal the everyday power of forces not recognized by modern secular reason. Other writers, like Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, disclose the relation between realist literary representation and the very order of rationality that consigns heterogeneous or dissident elements to the status of madness. Postcolonial avant-garde fiction is thus distinguished intellectually from realist writing by its assault on the presuppositions or unconscious preconditions of imperial domination as these have been taken up among colonized populations. Insofar as imperialism, in its liberal varieties at least, works through an epistemological register to transform the ways in which colonized populations think, avant-garde artists must direct their polemical energies against both foreign and domestic audiences simultaneously. The obscurity and difficulty of postcolonial avant-garde fiction is thus the result not only of the novel narrative and descriptive strategies it employs but also of the tenuous and often untenable situation of the avant-garde writer in the postcolony, a gadfly to all implied readers. The formal innovations developed by postcolonial avant-garde writers are vast, but all serve the project of offering new modes of perception that cannot be contained by either imperial or nationalist worldviews. In this sense the avant-garde is a democratizing agency, opposing consensual fictions and opening up multiple possible avenues for experiencing and responding to the problems and potentials of postcolonial existence.
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Transcolonial Studies
Olivia C. Harrison
Since the beginning of the 21st century, scholars of race and empire have been invested in exploring the horizontal vectors that stretch across and between imperial formations, displacing the vertical axis of North-South relations taken to be characteristic of early postcolonial theory. An analytical framework that seeks to capture the relationality of empire and the transversal modes of resistance against it, transcolonial studies offers a methodology for apprehending the coloniality of the present. The term transcolonial was coined in the 1990s, but the horizontal relationalities it describes are as old as empire itself. Europe’s colonial ventures were relational from the start, driven by competition for hegemony over seas and land and modeled on the likeness of empires past and present. Likewise, resistance to colonial conquest and governance took shape in relation to liberation struggles elsewhere and drew inspiration from previous and ongoing revolts in Haiti, Algeria, Vietnam, and Palestine. The movements for racial justice and decolonization that have followed in the wake of empire are similarly rooted in practices of solidarity that span subject positions without conflating them, from Standing Rock to Gaza and Black Lives Matter. Such unexpected solidarities among heterogeneously racialized and colonized subjects and their majoritarian allies work to undo the reified identities produced in colonial and racial discourse, undermining the competitive identitarian model inaugurated by the divide-and-conquer methods of high colonialism. To describe these alliances as transcolonial is also to acknowledge that Euro-colonial modernity continues to shape the purportedly postcolonial present. The prefix trans is temporal as much as it is geographic and political.
