The postexotic Arab: Orientalist dystopias in contemporary postcolonial fiction

This dissertation draws on modern theories of the exotic in order to critique racialized, consumer-oriented representations of Arabs. Such representations often betray an exoticist and neo-colonial discursive pattern in which things Arab figure essentially as an index for a threateningly attractive otherness. Reading the texts of Leila Sebbar's Sherazade (1982), Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996), Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1996), and Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (2003) and The Language of Baklava (2005), I argue that contemporary postcolonial fiction displays a patently self-conscious, self-parodic engagement with the constitutive paradoxes of the discourse of exoticism, especially when this discourse takes the Arab figure as its subject. I avail myself of "postexotic Arabness" as a tropological descriptor for such an engagement. Postexotic Arabness thus designates the creation of narrative dystopias that not only ironically recycle Orientalist configurations of things Arab but also implicate both authors and readers in an ultimately self-parodic re-assessment of the Arab exotic. The strategic exoticization of Arab otherness in these works, I argue, is also coterminous with a historically conscious critique of global consumer culture and unequal social relations of power.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Ottawa (Canada)

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Laouyene, Atef

• Literature, Modern.
• Literature, Asian.
• Literature, African.
• Literature, Canadian (English).
• Literature, American.

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-04, Section: A, page: 1274.
http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-19812

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/29576