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Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā: Postmodernizing the Postcolony: Nedjma and beyond

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Abstract:

This essay tackles the way the postcolony is refigured in Waciny Laredj’s Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā (2012). It makes use of a number of theoretical insights to uncover the interplay between the representation of the colony during the colonial period through a brief examination of the fly metaphor in Nedjma, first published in 1956, and that of the postcolony. Relying on intertextuality, the essay attempts to highlight how the metaphor of the femme fatale, a key trope in Nedjma, is relocated in the interstices between national and transnational ways of constructing Arab identity that continues to be both here and there. The intertextual nature of Aṣābiʿ complicates the postcolony as it rewrites it. This rewriting seems to highlight the tragic position of Arab characters that continue to vacillate between a traditional past and a postmodern present. Thus, Waciny Laredj subverts the femme fatale trope by making it literal and ends up shaking the very basis of the postcolonial state.

Info:

Periodical:
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (Volume 76)
Pages:
1-14
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.76.1
Citation:
K. El Aref "Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā: Postmodernizing the Postcolony: Nedjma and beyond", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 76, pp. 1-14, 2017
Online since:
Mar 2017
Authors:
Khalid El Aref
Keywords:
Algeria, Arabic Novel, Identity, Intertextuality, Laredj, Postcolony, Yacine
Export:
RIS, BibTeX, Text
Distribution:
Open Access

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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