THE UNMAKING OF THE ARAB INTELLECTUAL: PROPHECY, EXILE, AND THE NATION

[...]exile is stripped of its poetic and nostalgic weight, most often associated with Edward Said, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Mahmoud Darwish, to be portrayed by Anglophone Lebanese author Hage as a much less emblematic figure, such as a professor who might have the attention of all the patrons at a l...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Arab studies journal 2018, Vol.26 (2), p.170-174
Main Author: Firat, Alexa
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Anxiety
Collective memory
Cultural heritage
Darwish, Mahmoud (1941-2008)
Ideology
Immigrants
Intellectuals
Intertextuality
Motion pictures
Novels
Paradigms
Police
Refugees
Social criticism & satire
Studies
Writers
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:[...]exile is stripped of its poetic and nostalgic weight, most often associated with Edward Said, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Mahmoud Darwish, to be portrayed by Anglophone Lebanese author Hage as a much less emblematic figure, such as a professor who might have the attention of all the patrons at a local café, but who also stands in line with other refugees and immigrants for public assistance; or Palestinian filmmaker Suleiman's invisible intellectual whose presence and labor is overlooked by Israeli police searching for him in "Chronicle." According to Halabi, the novel transcends Jaber's literary precursors' attempts to explain away the present by uncovering secrets and reasons. Jaber's anxiety is engulfed in a heritage of prophecy from Abu Tammam to his contemporaries, and his intertextual parody of an investigation into the suicide of an intellectual rejects the sublimity imposed on Rizqallah's death to refigure it as an ordinary post-war story in which the body, like the dissected and disintegrated body of the nahdawi intellectual Faris al-Hashim in Daif's novel, is individual, finite, and mundane, rather than a construct of the historical record in our collective memory. Scholars of Arab cultural studies will find that Halabi adeptly demonstrates that the shifts and transformations in literary studies that are often discussed in terms of generations (Sixties, Nineties) and defeats, are actually to do with "[authors'] engulfing anxiety about the demise of ideological paradigms, that terra firma or Mount Nebo on which the intellectual once stood overlooking the impending future" (155-6).
ISSN:1083-4753
2328-9627