Subscribe

Subscribe to our Newsletter and get informed about new publication regulary and special discounts for subscribers!

ILSHS > Volume 76 > Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā: Postmodernizing the Postcolony:...
<i>Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā</i>: Postmodernizing the Postcolony: <i>Nedjma</i> and beyond
< Back to Volume

Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā: Postmodernizing the Postcolony: Nedjma and beyond

Full Text PDF

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:
March 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

References:

[1] H. Sakkut, The Arabic novel bibliography and critical introduction 1865-1995. Vol 1, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo and New York, (2000).

[2] D. Cox, The novels of Tahar Wattar: command or critique?, Research in African Literatures. 28(3) (1997) 94-109.

[3] R. Salam, Le roman politique des écrivains Algériens de langue Arabe, Mots. 54(1) (1998) 96-110.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/mots.1998.2330

[4] A. Mbembe, On the postcolony, University of California Press, Berkeley, (2001).

[5] E. Soja, Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places, Blackwell, Cambridge, (1996).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/215881

[6] A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: transpolitics, race, and nation, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, (2004).

[7] R. Aissaoui, Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France, Tauris Academic Studies, London and New York, (2009).

[8] L. Hutcheon, A poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction, Routledge, New York, (1988).

[9] L.B.Y. Zayzafoon, Anne Frank goes east: the Algerian Civil War and the nausea of postcoloniality in Waciny Laredj's Balconies of the North Sea, College Literature. 37(1) (2010) 61-80.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.0.0091

[10] R. Trousdale, Nabokov, Rushdie, and the transnational imagination: novels of exile and alternate worlds, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, (2010).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106888_2

[11] M.J. Al-Musawi, The postcolonial Arabic novel: debating ambivalence, Brill, Leiden and Boston, (2003).

[12] Wāsīnī Al-Aʿradj [Waciny Laredj], Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā [Lolita's Fingers], Dar Al-Adab, Beirut, Lebanon, (2012).

[13] K. Yacine, Nedjma, Seuil, col. Points, Paris, (1956).

[14] G. Carpentier, Preface, 1996, in: Nedjma, pp. I-III.

[15] F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Trans. Constance Farrington), Grove Press, New York, (1963).

[16] G. Chevrolat, Intertextualité, subversion: Nedjma de Kateb Yacine, Revue des lettres et de traduction. 13 (2008) 448-468.

[17] B. Baron, Egypt as a woman: nationalism, gender and politics, University of California Press, Berkeley, (2005).

[18] A. Mustghanemi, Dhākirat al-Jasad [Memory in the Flesh], ‏ Dar Al-Adab, Beirut, Lebanon, (1993).

[19] E.M. Holt, In a Language that Was not his Own': on Ahlam Mustghanemi, s Dhakirat al-Jasad and its French Translation Mémoires de la Chair, in: Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship, M.J. al-Musawi (Eds. ), Brill, Leiden & Boston, (2009).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004176898.i-339.40

[20] M. Virolle, Ecrivains algériens: le troisième pays, in: Problématiques identitaires et discours de l'exil dans les littératures francophones, A. Talahite-Moodley (Eds. ), Presse de l'Université d'Ottawa, Ottawa, (2007).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/comparison.10381

[21] M. Amrani, Le 8 mai 1945 en Algérie: les discours français sur les massacres de Sétif, Kherrata et Guelma, L'Harmattan, Paris, (2010).

[22] M. Daoud, Le roman Algérien de langue Arabe: lectures critiques, CRASC, Oran, (2002).

[23] A. Mustghanemi, Fawḍā al-Ḥawās [Chaos of the Senses], Dar Al-Adab, Beirut Lebanon, (1997).

[24] V. Nabokov, Lolita (1955), Penguin, London, (2000).

[25] G.L. Ulmer, The object of postcriticism, in: The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, H. Forester (Eds. ), Bay Press, Washington, 1983, pp.83-110.

[26] C. Raguet-Bouvard, Lolita: un royaume au-delà des mers, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, (1996).

[27] E. Said, Reflections on exile and other essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, (2000).

[28] E. Said, Invention, memory, and place, in: Landscape and Power, W.J.T. Mitchell (Eds. ), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, (2002).

[29] S. Hafez, The novel, politics and Islam: Haydar Haydar's Banquet for Seaweed, New Left Review. 5 (2000) 117-141.

[30] J. Déjeux, Littérature Maghrébine de Langue Française, Naaman de Sherbrooke, Montréal, (1980).

[31] M. Foucault, What is an Author?, in: The Foucault Reader, M. Foucault, P. Rabinow (Eds. ), Pantheon Books, New York, 1984, pp.101-120.

Show More Hide