Zahra Taheri
Abstract
Introduction: despite the popularity of realistic historical novel in the nineteenth century, especially in works by Sir Walter Scott, as the prime genre for the representation of bourgeois class and its value system, it is the postmodern version which has surpassed its ancestor and put this literary ...
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Introduction: despite the popularity of realistic historical novel in the nineteenth century, especially in works by Sir Walter Scott, as the prime genre for the representation of bourgeois class and its value system, it is the postmodern version which has surpassed its ancestor and put this literary genre once more back into popularity. However, this return is not as innocent as that of an offspring to his predecessors. It involves a harsh critique of the past and the disclosure of “history” as mere construct, despite its “totalizing” claim.Background of Study: Alongside Lyotard’s seminal work, The Condition of Postmodernism and Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism, as two major critical works deployed in this study, the article considers Sublime Desire by Elias as well. It also utilizes A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Guattari to elaborate on the notion of mosaic and assemblage. Furthermore, it has used Barton Thurber’s article, “Scott and the Sublime,” to discuss the relation between the historical novels and the notion of sublime.Methodology and Argument: through the perspective of left thinkers such as Hutcheon, Lyotard, and Deleuze, the writer tries to discuss how the American historical novel, which once established itself as a primary literary genre to undertake the mission of history making in the United States, has recently been used to unsettle the glamorous history by paying tribute to the voices gone silent through the white’s oppression and violence. Tuned into the liberal humanism, the historical novel, in fact, denies American nation its heterogenic nature to preserve the binary of “us” versus “them” intact while trying to keep its democratic face. However, with the arrival of postmodernism and the challenges posed to “grand narratives,” history proved the most problematic narratives whose critique redefined the way the world was once interpreted. Questioning the univocality, teleology, and linearity imposed on history, postmodernism revealed the heteroglossic, multilayered, circular nature of history which have been overshadowed by the liberal humanistic discourse. Such features put history in close relation with the concept of romance and fantastic and gave rise to a literary genre called historical romance. Set along with romance, the official history was, thus, reduced to a narrative among other ones and the hierarchical outlook was collapsed with the emergence of other narratives competing for the same attention and worth. The result was the replacement of the notion of history with “histories” and a rewriting of the past and what had been the established truth of a nation’s history. This act per se led to the emergence of meta-historical novels which focus on the discursive formation of the official history and the uncertainty surrounding the reality of the past which resemble the notion of sublime. Conclusion: The meta-historical romance or the postmodern version of the conventional historical novel is, in fact, a counter part to once realistic, linear, teleological, and mono-vocal works of the nineteenth century. In other words, this new version goes in tandem with the postmodern notions of fragmentation, mosaic, assemblage, non-linearity, and multi-perspectivism which deny an established, universal, and totalized version of reality and pave the way for the oppressed and stifled voices which were subject to the hierarchies of liberal humanism. In that way, these kinds of novels try to approach the history again and redefine the already-established, oppressive narratives. Since this redefinition turns the established history into a “construct,” one cannot grasp the reality of history any more, as one cannot comprehend the notion of sublime. It is out there, but out of touch. This fact welcomes heterogeneity and lets go of a hierarchical social structure for a horizontal one.
Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article focuses on the notions of panopticism and post-panopticism in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) through the perspective of left thinkers. Using Foucault’s and Lyon’s views, the writer tries to discuss how the exit of the migrants from the panoptic, disciplinary communities ...
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This article focuses on the notions of panopticism and post-panopticism in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) through the perspective of left thinkers. Using Foucault’s and Lyon’s views, the writer tries to discuss how the exit of the migrants from the panoptic, disciplinary communities of theirs to the so-called democratic West can prove a failure. Focusing on an unknown, Islamic country as well as the western cradles of civilization—Greece, Britain, and America—Hamid, in fact, tries to clarify how the disciplinary community of the orient has much in common with the post-global West. The only difference is a shift from a panoptican discourse to that of a post-panoptican one. To this end, the notions of “camp,” “sorting paradigm” and “bio-politics” are to be discussed. It is argued that despite the blurring of the borders through the post-global capitalism, the West seems to have restored the old imperialist ethos in the form of the anti-racist racism through the practice of “geofencing” and “geoslavery.” However, the hybridity that migration results in can pave the way for the emergence of a space of heterogeneity, herterotopeia, in the West which is in constant process of “becoming.” As a result a new sense of belonging and, thus, identity on the part of the ethnic other is formed and the notion of nativeness and the concept of the home are challenged so much so that the imigrant would be able to “make a home” wherever he is regardless of his roots
Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article focuses on the re-emergence of “camp” and rebirth of “homo sacers” in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) through the perspective of new-left thinkers. Deploying Giorgio Agamben’s views, the writer has tried to discuss how the biopolitical stands of the ...
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This article focuses on the re-emergence of “camp” and rebirth of “homo sacers” in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) through the perspective of new-left thinkers. Deploying Giorgio Agamben’s views, the writer has tried to discuss how the biopolitical stands of the neo-liberal humanism in the West has abused the notion of “state of exception” to trigger a new type of “master-slave discourse” in the postcolonial era. To this end, notions of “bio-politics,” “indistinct zones/non-places,” and “bare life” have been studied. It is argued that with the politicization of life, the deprivation of migrants from “bios” and “zoe,” the imposition of “bare life” on them, and their limitaion to the borders of “citizenship/ noncitizenship,” “life/ death,” “belonging- nonbelonging,” and “the self/ the other,” the West has once more repeated the old binary opposition of the “us/ them” in the recent decades. Such treatment on the part of the West has given birth to “homo sacer” figures as well as establishment of “camps” in the center of imperialism and, thus, justified the violation of migrants’ rights under the stigmatization of them as “national enemies.”
Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article, through a post-colonial feministic approach and the deployment of ideas by Whitlock, J. Butler and Emanuel Levinas tries to focus on the re-emergence of “Harem literature” through the new genre of Veiled Best-sellers. To this end, it focuses on the Sasson’s Mayada: The ...
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This article, through a post-colonial feministic approach and the deployment of ideas by Whitlock, J. Butler and Emanuel Levinas tries to focus on the re-emergence of “Harem literature” through the new genre of Veiled Best-sellers. To this end, it focuses on the Sasson’s Mayada: The Daughter of Iraq (2003) to discuss how such works have been abused to endorse neo-liberal policies and to justify the West’s attack on Afghanistan and Iraq; it, also, reveals how such works have been in line with the western policies of “war against terror.” It is argued that, despite the West’s attempt to attribute the popularity of such post- 9/11 works to the “white man’s burden” towards his “oriental sister” at that time, such “other-oriented” ethical discourse brings about no end to the liberal conception of subjectivity (as defined by modernist binary oppositions). On the other hand, it once more pushes the liberal humanism’s discourse of western racial supremacy and consequently justifies the neo-colonial wave in the West.