World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

Notes

1^ Although a full Bakhtinian reading will not be attempted in this study, particularly because of Bakhtin’s enmeshment in the linguistic-oriented readings of the 1970s-80s, (an approach not adopted in the study), Bakhtin’s idea of the novel as a polyphonic genre accommodating often conflicting discourses usefully complements the Postcolonial/World Literature reading used here. Bakhtin’s concept of language and culture as a two-sided or dialogic act posits that language is already imprinted with the effects of previous users, and our use of it is directed towards receiving a future answer. The novel form in its inherent polyphony and heteroglossia has a carnivalesque function of subversion and resistance of authoritarian ideologies. The preoccupation with individual formation in the novels discussed here, and their perceptible autobiographical inspirations also makes Bakhtinian analysis pertinent because of the connections Bakhtin posits between the novelist, the narrator, and the protagonists, the first located at a “novelistic centre”, while all three exist in dialogic relation to each other. A consideration of some of Bakhtin’s work would also support the multi-vocal musical analogies offered by Said and Gilroy. The implicit variety of voices in Said’s poetic-political metaphor of ‘contrapuntal reading’, for example, even Said’s recurrent use of the word ‘polyphonic’, has been picked up by Homi Bhabha: “[In addition to the] sheer plurality and virtuosity of voices, polyphony provides us with a figurative vision of the possibilities of fairness and freedom in the midst of complex transitional structures…There is something resembling a democratic practice that runs through the fugal form and establishes the convention that several voices must, at different times, claim the character of a main part; that the contrapuntal process should express the feelings and aspirations of several peoples; and that the combination of subjects and structures ensures that each voice is answerable to the other” (“Adagio” 16). Meanwhile, Gilroy makes it clear, as I explain here, that the sheer variety of ‘calls’ and ‘responses’ from different sources, in different times and places, makes it impossible to specify the initial call or its definitive answer.

2^ As mentioned by Salah D Hassan, “hypercanonization describes the consensus in academic judgment that locates a text at the apex of its field” (Hassan 298). Taking up the word from Jonathan Arac, Hassan uses it to express his concern of what citing certain works in Postcolonial studies may suggest of “some kind of compensation for past exclusion [that]…in fact overburdens a text with a singular representative function” (Hassan 298). See Salah D Hassan, “Canons After ‘Postcolonial Studies’”.

3^ In its implicit material linkage, this seems to be much the same relation as (the image, resources and peoples of) the ‘Orient’ had stood to the image of the Occident in Said’s Orientalism. The relation also resembles the way Raymond Williams approached the English ‘country’ and English ‘city’ in his now classic The Country and the City. See statements, for example, such as the following: “There is then no simple contrast between wicked town and innocent country, for what happens in the town is generated by the needs of the dominant rural class….For indeed, if you stop to listen to it, the bright conversation of the town never really strays far from its quite inward concern with property and income” (53). Or “It was no moral case of ‘God made the country and man made the town’. The English country, year by year, had been made and remade by men, and the English town was at once its image and its agent (honest or dishonest, as advantage served). If what was seen in the town could not be approved, because it made evident and repellent the decisive relations in which men actually lived, the remedy was never a visitor’s morality of plain living and high thinking, or a babble of green fields. It was a change of social relationships and of essential morality. And it was precisely at this point that the ‘town and country’ fiction served: to promote superficial comparisons and to prevent real ones” (54). In many ways, however, the idea of contrapuntal reading in Culture and Imperialism as a ‘follow up’ to Orientalism (and for that matter to The Country and the City) passes over, although of course does not ignore, its predecessors’ materialist metaphors.

4^ See, for example, on India: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.

5^ Damrosch also refers, for example, to concepts of World Literature in Brazil (What Is World Literature? 27).

6^ For a succinct overview of colonial and postcolonial approaches across fields such as anthropology and literary studies, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, esp. ch. 2, pp. 33-55.

7^ Counter-arguments inspired by music include Françoise Lionnet’s “Counterpoint and Double Critique”. Lionnet picks up on the musical motif of Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal reading’ and compares it with Abdelkebir Khatibi’s concept of ‘double critique’. Lionnet argues that Said ignores the contributions from the post-1960s Francophone world or the possibilities of Francophonie and therefore submits to the British and French colonial divisions of the cultures of North Africa.

8^ In response to Lionnet’s suggestion of a ‘transcolonial’ solidarity and affiliation to counter hegemonic (first-world) perspectives, see Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic on what he perceives as the shortcomings of concepts like black nationalism, creolisation and hybridisation which either dwindle into or are pre-conceived as sets of purist binaries.

9^ See Puchner “Teaching Worldly Literature” on teaching texts as World Literature when they were not considered literature in the modern sense.

10^ For a longer examination of colony-colony relations and similar networks of resistance, see Elleke Boehmer’s Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial.

11^ See also ‘clusters’ of responses to and debates on critical approaches to World Literature: Prendergast to Casanova on The World Republic of Letters in “Negotiating World Literature”; Prendergast to Moretti on Graphs, Maps, Trees in “Evolution and Literary History”, and the latter’s reply: “The End of the Beginning”. See also Spivak’s critique of anthologies of World Literature in Death of a Discipline, responded to by Damrosch in “World Literature/Comparative Literature” and Puchner in “Teaching World Literature”. Finally, see Moretti’s response to various critiques of his “Conjectures on World Literature” in his follow-up essay “More Conjectures”.

12^ See also Said’s “Yeats and Decolonization” which divides resistance into two ‘phases’: the first, the period of nationalist anti-imperialism in which the objective was to gain independence, the other, the liberationist anti-imperialist resistance that followed World War II. It is with the second that the idea of ‘liberation’ is conceived of for itself.

13^ See, for example, Rob Nixon’s comparison of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and South Africa, and a discussion of the violence entailed by a popular acceptance of ‘ethnic nationalism’ or of the definition of ethnicity as a founding characteristic of the state. Rob Nixon, “Of Balkans and Bantustans: Ethnic Cleansing and the Crisis in National Legitimation”.

14^ See the organisation of Simonsen et al’s, World Literature, World Culture which seems to tap into the polemics (and tensions) of World Literature as mode of criticism, pedagogy, market network, and a list of cultural representatives, particularly apparent in the editors’ choice to organise the various essays into sections entitled ‘histories’, ‘translations’, ‘migrations’ and ‘institutions’.

15^ Damrosch suggests that one strategy by which writers rework local material with a global audience in mind is by going ‘glocal’. “Glocalism takes two primary forms: writers can treat local matters for a global audience –working outward from their particular location– or they can emphasize a movement from the outside world in, presenting their locality as a microcosm of global exchange” (How to Read World Literature 109).

16^ The hornet’s-nest debate on the precise nature of the relations between the Bildungsroman, Bildung, the nation-state and the novel is further complicated because it takes on different local concerns and is approached through different interdisciplinary perspectives around the world. There is no intention of unravelling the layers of precisely this centuries-old debate, if indeed it is possible to do so. For some of the latest discussions on the matter that tap into the way these relations (between Bildungsroman, Bildung, the nation-state and the novel) have changed in different times and places, see Thomas Pfau’s “Of Ends and Endings: Teleological and Variational Models of Romantic Narrative” on what different kinds of narrative closure in European Bildungsromane may imply of the changing understanding of Bildung in various political circumstances. For a discussion of how tenuous the relations between the Bildungsroman, Bildung, the nation-state and the novel may actually be, as well as an overview of some of the literature of the past decades on the topic, see Pieter Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef’s “Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century”. For a succinct overview of what the concept of Bildung may mean, see Josef Bleicher’s “Bildung”. For a rare article in English that gives some insight as to how Bildung, with all its accumulated meanings of the past, may be used today outside Literary Studies, specifically in educational theory, see Klaus Prange’s “Bildung: A Paradigm Regained”.

17^ The idea is that because the Czech nation is a “small” one it is fated or doomed to struggle continuously to defend its existence from the threat of large nations. See Kundera’s now famous speech at the equally famous Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. See a reiteration of this argument in Testaments Betrayed, “The Unloved Child of the Family”, pp. 190-95. The plight of being a small nation surrounded by hostile ones has been a recurrent theme in Czech national discourse, not least during the precarious international situation of the 1960s-70s. See, for example, Vladimir V Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring; Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia; David W Paul, Czechoslovakia.

18^ I use the word here in what may be an old-fashioned general sense of multicultural co-existence and a privileged, perhaps distanced, intellectualism, which is how Ram might have used it. The notion has come in for renewed interest in the past few decades. See, for example, Pheng Cheah’s “Cosmopolitanism” which traces the changing concept of cosmopolitanism from the eighteenth century to the globalised present, from an intellectual ethos to an institutionally-embedded political consciousness. Cheah argues that cosmopolitanism without a mass base remains a concept by and for a select elite. He compares the common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea of a cosmopolitan person as someone who belongs to the elite citizenry of the world to its more recent referent to someone who, supported by a popular and political infrastructure, is a citizen of an international community. For a discussion that relates Bildung, cosmopolitanism and the nation-state, see Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality which reformulates the classic ideals of free Bildung (in a liberal state) to an imagined one in postcolonial states. See also Bruce Robbins’s work on cosmopolitanism which uses the concept to refer to a political awareness and engagement, particularly through the international community. See Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics; also Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War. In a similar vein, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism focuses on the way cosmopolitanism if considered an ethical choice can achieve more efficient dialogue in a globalised world. For a study that combines some of these discussions of cosmopolitanism with a focus on Ghali’s work, see Deborah Starr’s unpublished thesis on images of the Jewish community in Levantine literature, “Ambivalent Levantines/Levantine Ambivalences”, and her published article “Drinking, Gambling, and Making Merry: Waguih Ghali’s Search for Cosmopolitan Agency”.

19^ There is a playful linguistic connection too between ‘Bohemian’ and ‘Egyptian’, both having been used in English to describe ‘gypsies’: dark and exotic people with no country. See Amitav Ghosh’s Antique Land (30-34) discussed in Chapter 3. See also Derek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia (5-8) who points out how the words ‘Bohemian’, ‘Egyptian’ and ‘gypsy’ could be used interchangeably by various people from Shakespeare to Neville Chamberlain.

20^ See, for example, Robert Young’s Postcolonialism for the connections between what he calls the ‘tricontinental’ decolonisation movements around the world; see also Elleke Boehmer’s Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial for interactive (anti-imperial and anti-colonial) connections in the British empire, that is, margin-margin interactions rather than colonial-periphery interactions, and specifically from 1890-1920. For a shorter discussion see Laura Doyle’s “Inter-imperiality” which argues that what she calls the ‘inter-imperial’ relations between colonial and postcolonial cultures should include an understanding of globalisation as happening over a longer duration, and of colonisation as happening over a longer period of time and a larger geographical expanse.

21^ The protests for national liberation in the colonies of course themselves had often appropriated and reworked previous protest moments in Europe, the French Revolution and its writings always being the most notable, but also the peasant revolts and workers’ strikes in Russia and China. For suggestions, however, of the more subtle and often surprising relations between resistance movements in places seemingly unconnected, see Amitav Ghosh’s essay “Mutinies” on the Indian and Irish soldiers working for the British Empire and sent to suppress resistance movements around the world, but who would, at the end of their service, also become some of empire’s staunchest critics. See also Kundera’s note on a conversation he had with Carlos Fuentes, and in which the former discovers that Czech soldiers were sent to fight in Mexico, and so had left a fond memory for Czechs among locals at the time (“Czech Destiny” 3). On such troops in ‘unexpected’ places, it is worth mentioning that as is well known, Nasser sent Egyptian soldiers to fight in national struggles around the Arabic-speaking world but what is less known is that he also sent a contingent as far as Mexico.

22^ Thus the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 could directly affect the economic situation in Czechoslovakia, a situation which in turn directly aggravated general dissatisfaction with the Communist Party. See Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath.

23^ Thus, for example, the spread of Indian film in Egypt during the late 1950s and early 60s of non-alignment (See Ghosh “Confessions of a Xenophile”), or the increase in Poland of translations of Arabic novels into Polish at the same time (See Lasota-Barańska “Arabic Literature, Polish Readers”).

24^ Besides the more well-known examples of the Universities of Chicago and Columbia, see, for example, “1968 Revisited”, a recently hosted webpage archiving some of the New York University student protests of 1965-71.

25^ See Betty S. Anderson’s “The Student Movement in 1968” for a brief comparison of the student movement in Cairo and Beirut in 1968 and the January 25^th protests in Cairo in 2011.

26^ In their introduction to Dangerous Liaisons, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat allude to the influence of Marxist politics, thought and practice on the rise and spread of third-world nationalism (Mufti and Shohat 5-6). For a longer analysis, see Robert Young’s Postcolonialism.

27^ In the first half of the twentieth century, for example, the same issue of an Arabic periodical or magazine could debate the problems of British or French occupation in the same pages as it discussed local irrigation problems, Tagore’s universal culture and Gandhi’s politics in India (the former would eventually visit Egypt in 1926, the latter in 1931). Interestingly such issues could all be discussed under the same banner of emancipation. World War I, for example, figured as a bone of contention for writers on issues of ‘occupation-general’, whether it was perceived as a European civil war or as a war on the Ottoman Caliphate (itself a long-resented presence in Egypt), or whether it was considered a war that was fought on non-European land by non-European soldiers, or simply for what the War entailed of demands for supplies and soldiers, and economic change. Framed in Egypt by two national milestone events –the Urabi Revolt (1879-82) and the 1919 Egyptian Revolution– World War I also helped complicate local debates. Egyptian politics could then be contested using the same discourses of World War I, with local groups adopting pro-axis or pro-allied positions based on their priori allegiances to, or hostility towards, the British, French or Ottoman powers. In the Middle/Near East the conflicts of World War I would continue for a much longer time, leaving indelible ideological imprints, such as the memory of promises for national liberation that were then reneged on after the War (A. Hourani 1991; G. Antonius), and political divisions, some of which have not been resolved until today. What would also remain until at least World War II, woven and rewoven through these newspapers, were signs of the “interactions in resistance” (Boehmer 2005; Young 2001) that would by mid-century become clinched. Even until the late 1930s Arabic newspapers could dissect the corpse of the Great War in the same pages as they analysed situations in India, Ireland and Africa, the African American Civil Rights movement, and the socialist victories in Eastern Europe and Russia. Armistice did not signal the end of a time of atrocity, but for many, it triggered a new solidarity, a new ‘internationalism’.

28^ Ken Seigneurie touches upon these intersections in his article on the Arab Revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria, focusing specifically on the cultural discourses of human rights, progressive commitment and “elegiac humanism”. See Ken Seigneurie, “Discourses of the 2011 Arab Revolutions”.

29^ Very recently the connection seems to have resurfaced as indicated by the theme of the University of Edinburgh conference entitled ‘Comparing revolt and transition from Europe 1989 to the Arab World 2014’ (8-9 Jan. 2014).

30^ Although the details are far from known, Ghali got into political trouble in Egypt for alleged communist activities, a common accusation under the Nasserite regime. Ghali’s Egyptian passport was also revoked when he was abroad. He lived as a political exile from about 1956 until his death in 1969.

31^ See Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage which will be discussed in the next chapter. Ahmed asserts that the Jews did not, as is sometimes made out, live as some ghettoized persecuted minority in early twentieth century Egypt, and indeed, there were state-endorsed and active Zionist associations in Egypt from about the 1920s, (which is not obviously to deny that the Jewish community was persecuted). On the Jewish community in Cairo and Alexandria see, for example, Hassoun; and Ilbert. See also an example of the French-language newspaper Israël. Published in Cairo with a peak circulation of 2,000 to the effect of informing readers of, and at times inflaming them towards, international Zionist affairs, Israël was run by Dr. Albert Mosseri, a prominent Egyptian Jew, from 1922-39. Some of the issues have been digitised and are available online.

32^ This is evident in much of the works written by the Egyptian Jewish community which has begun to form a small corpus of its own, such as Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt; and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. See also Mongrels or Marvels (eds. Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh) which publishes some of the work of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, a Jewish Alexandrian who eventually settled in Israel. Despite the differences in the backgrounds of the Jewish families and the travelling papers or foreign nationalities they may have happened to have, in these writings, the Jewish speakers insist that they had no primary inclinations to leave Egypt even after the state of Israel had been established; their exile was forced, their departure was drawn out, and the whole process whereby they suddenly found themselves in a situation held on a par with the refugees from European shores came as a shock. See Deborah A. Starr’s unpublished dissertation for an exposition of the literature produced by and about the Jewish Egyptian community.

33^ Such organisations could be both non-religious, such as pro-axis supporter groups during World War II, and religious, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

34^ Will Hanley has rightly criticised the common use of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Middle Eastern studies which fails to engage with the latest developments of the critical term in Euro-American fields and therefore suffers from being formulaic, elitist and charged with a kind of grieving nostalgia. He advocates a deeper examination of historical documentation and an engagement with the new international understandings of cosmopolitanism that excludes (the implication is bypasses) meanings of ‘ethnic co-habitation’ and the like. See Will Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies”. While I strongly agree with Hanley on his critique of what often appears to be a rather fetishist nostalgic idea of cosmopolitanism rather than a strict and much-needed historical excavation of the records of communal pluralism, I take his outright dismissal of the usefulness of analysing this understanding of cosmopolitanism to account. I think it would be productive to examine critically the parameters of what may be a common Middle Eastern understanding of cosmopolitanism as it stands –neither only by perceiving it as some hard-to-dislodge remnant of ‘European elitism’ as Hanley seems to do, nor as a would-be aspirant to a current Anglo-American universal, but for its own objectives in its local political-cultural contexts. It would be significant in this manner to examine why writings on cosmopolitanism in the Middle East at present seem to be so nostalgic, how modern political/social/cultural traumas, such as decolonisation and in many cases a complete restructuring of a political-economic way of life in the nations of the Middle East may have influenced or engendered such nostalgia in common discourse (comparable, for example, to writings on post-World War II and post-Soviet Europe), the status and function of nostalgia itself as an emotion or trope which is perceived less negatively in Arabic culture, and above all, what this nostalgia may suggest of a shared scepticism towards political futures in the various communities in the region. While Hanley calls for a reinvestigation of historical documentation and factual evidence of the ‘lost cosmopolitanism’ of the Middle East, which, indeed, is vital and of priority if the discussion of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism is to be more productive than it has been so far, a different investigation of the polemics of cosmopolitanism as it stands may prove productive in the same manner as Shahid Amin puts it on the changing images of majority and minority Hindu/Muslim ethnicities in India: “Rather than simply confront pasts, ingenious or disingenuous with definitive historical records, history writing, I argue, must have a place for the ways pasts are remembered and retailed, and for the relationship of such pasts to the sense of belonging. As a practicing historian, one must then pose afresh the relationship between memory and history, the oral and the written, the transmitted and the inscribed, stereotypicality and lived history. A ‘true history of communalism’, to use a slightly tendentious phrase, would be one that sets out to unravel not just what happened …[in India’s diverse communities] but also how these communities remember, understand, explain and recount pasts and presents to themselves” (2). See Shahid Amin, “Representing the Musalman”.

35^ David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (Eng. trans. 2010) touches upon an implicit generational difference in understanding the situation in Palestine/Israel: specifically, the differences between first and second-generation Israeli settlers’ attitudes to the ‘other’ inhabitants of the land, the general weariness of territorial conflict, and the stress on the losses suffered and inherited by all the population. Grossman’s novel too uses the romance and particularly family trope for national affiliation, and starts with the 1973 Egyptian-Israeli (Yom Kippur) war as an Israeli national crisis/trauma.

36^ Ghali’s biographer Diana Athill has announced that she has lost the diaries. Recently, however, photocopies of them turned up in the hands of another scholar, who had them digitised and made available on the Cornell University website. See Ghali, Diaries. A print version of them is forthcoming. See Hawas, ed. The Diaries of Waguih Ghali.

37^ A tendency Jane Kramer remarks on even as she uses it herself in a 1984 interview with Kundera: “[Kundera] is 54 now, tall, lean as a cowboy, with pale eyes and straw hair faded into gray. On the streets of Montparnasse he even looks a little like an old cowboy, in the pair of jeans and the black shirt, buttoned to the neck, that have become a well-known Kundera costume. He is something of a celebrity here…His new novel, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ is on the best-seller lists. Libération calls him ‘cruel,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘virile,’ as if he were next winter’s collection from Claude Montana or Thierry Mugler” (n.pag). See Jane Kramer, “When There is no Word for ‘Home’”.

38^ The novel is also (less commonly) approached through the philosophies/philosophers it highlights. See, for example, Erik Parens, “Kundera, Nietzsche, and Politics”; Michael W. Payne, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”; or, with an emphasis on theology, Stephen Schloesser, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

39^ See Robert Thomas, “Milan Kundera and the Struggle of the Individual” for a very brief summary of the importance of individual political choice in four of Milan Kundera’s novels.

40^ Partha Chatterjee points out that in the heyday of the struggle for independence in third world countries, the ‘women’s question’ becomes urgent. Once direct foreign rule ends, the issue fades in the background of public debate in the now-independent states, and simply fails to arouse the same degree of public passion that it had a few decades before (Chatterjee The Nation and its Fragments 116).

41^ See, for example, Doris Summers on the romance narrative in foundational nation-building novels in Latin America; or Alison Sainsbury on the British romances or domestic fictions in India during the 1880s-1930s. The love experience is almost a cliché for the East-West encounter in the modern Arabic novel.

42^ On Kundera’s pan-European vision and what it excludes, see a short discussion in Charles Moleworth, “Kundera and The Book”.

43^ This is beyond obviously the theological differences on this matter and the fact that entire regional cultures continue to reinstate mutual antagonism built up over centuries precisely around what these differences are, or rather should be. I refer here to the same narratives/stories in the three Holy books.

44^ Compare Vaclav Havel’s position on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan which he presents in the “Anatomy of Reticence” (1985) while drawing on a similar ‘small nations-large nations’ argument. While Kundera uses a small nation-large nation discourse to outline the precariousness of small nations’ existence within the European bloc, and so creates a vision of ‘Central Europe’, Havel links the specific historical experience of Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan in 1980 to the Soviet tanks rolling into Prague in 1968: “Havel draws on national and regional history, but he emphasises the common experiences of small, vulnerable nations around the world rather than laying claim to a unique destiny (whether Czech or Central European)” [Brackets in original] (Sabatos 1837).

45^ For a concise survey of key critical texts and figures that espoused the evolutionary vision of European/Western literature whether as epochal historical process of works or individual process of artistic creation absorbing and extending cultural history, see Wellek’s Concepts of Criticism. Wellek discusses the different concepts of literature as ‘growth’, from Aristotle’s Poetics (in his analogy between the history of tragedy and the life-cycle of a living organism), taken up in Renaissance and neoclassical criticism, through Herder and Schlegel’s organicism, through Moulton and Eliot, and so on until 1960. See René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, esp. 37-53.

46^ In much the same way as Edward Said suggests ‘contrapuntal reading’ as a critical approach to the interweaving of world literatures and literary cultures, Kundera, an avid musician, uses the same image to speak of the literatures of the small European nations which form ‘another Europe’ and “whose evolution runs in counterpoint with that of the large nations” (Testaments Betrayed 190).

47^ Kundera’s world scope seems to change in his most recent critical work. In The Curtain (French edition 2005; English edition 2006), which contains a chapter devoted to ‘Die Weltliteratur’, Kundera stresses his admiration for the ‘contributions’ of magical realism, and acknowledges the importance of adopting a comparative approach to the novel as a genre that includes important writers such as Carpentier. Although there appears a notable widening to non-Europe, Kundera’s view remains firmly ensconced in the march of what he regards as strictly European literary culture, emanating from a European centre, originating in European (Judeo-Christian) civilisation. “Broch inaugurated a new path for the novel form. Is it the same path for Carpentier’s work? It certainly is. No great novelists can exit from the history of the novel. But behind the sameness in form hide different purposes. In juxtaposing diverse historical eras, Carpentier is not looking to solve the mystery of a Great Death Throe: he is not a European; on his clock (the clock of the Antilles and of all Latin America) the hands are still far from midnight” (The Curtain 161). The Antilles and Latin America are still the ‘inheritors’ of a European past whose European peoples have betrayed their own testaments. The presence of non-European cultures can only be acknowledged after European civilisation ‘dies’; it is a vision for a potential World Literature of the future, but one that remains firmly rooted in its ‘mono’-cultural past. On this particular point, then, I disagree with Michelle B. Slater’s reading (who also uses the term ‘supranational’ but differently from the way I use it here) of Milan Kundera’s widening ‘global’ vision of literature. See Michelle B. Slater, “Shifting Literary Tectonic Plates”. Kundera’s concept of ‘world’ literature is worldly as long as the world is actually Europe and an occasional cluster of distant lands. On this, see Alison Rice who likens Kundera’s vision to Pascale Casanova’s in a wider discussion of various immigrant Francophone writers. See Alison Rice, “Francophone Postcolonialism From Eastern Europe”.

48^ A conference on World Literature organised at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 2012, for example, took as its theme “New Worlds, New Critiques’. One of the topics suggested was the ‘globalized Bildungsroman’ as a form that started in Europe and moved to Africa, Asia and the Americas.

49^ To expound on the two perspectives of the national-imaginary, it may be fruitful to compare Suhayl Idris’s The Latin Quarter (al-Hayy al-latīnī 1954) with these two works. The Latin Quarter tells a story common to Arabic novels during the1950s-70s: an Arab student (in this case Lebanese) travels to Europe (in this novel, France) to pursue postgraduate studies. He has one or more love experiences with European women, some more educational than others, returns to his native country’s embrace and ends up marrying a ‘suitable’ girl from his home country. The Latin Quarter’s strident call for Arab countries to stand united against European colonialism is presented against the bloody background of Algerian independence and is worked in the mode of ‘committed literature’ popular among Arab novelists at the time. Idris’s supra-national vision of ‘Arab identity’ with the binary Western/Arab is comparable to Kundera’s pan-Europeanism and stands in contrast to Ghali’s cross-nation.

50^ It is significant to note that the German concept of Bildung is similar to some extent in Arabic as a concept of organicist individual formation that is tied up to the individual’s experience in the wider world, but also one which is embedded within the (national) education system. The origin of the study of literature in Arabic, for example, is rooted in a kind of polite behaviour and conduct, ‘adab’, which is often translated as belles-lettres, paideia and Bildung. The Arabic title for the Ministry of Education in Egypt today which regulates formal schooling from the primary stage until university is called wizārat al-tarbia wa-l ta‘līm, loosely translated as ‘The Ministry of Upbringing and Education’, marking the link between acculturation, self-development and national education.

51^ Perhaps the quintessential example of the use of this common allegory in Arabic literature in the mid-twentieth century is Yahya Haqqi’s novella “The Saint’s Lamp” (1944).

52^ Speaking specifically of the loss of the father figure in Beer in the Snooker Club, Hamouda states that “loss of guidance and authority becomes metaphoric of the absence of a nation...[which is] unable to meet the demands of its citizens” (Hamouda 11). See, in a comparable perspective, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006), also a formation narrative that uses the romance/family trope, this time located in Gaddafi’s Libya in the 1970s. A little boy tells of growing up as his father forms part of a resistance group towards Gaddafi’s regime and gets captured and tortured. In the same way that Kundera repeatedly asserted that Tereza is the real protagonist of The Unbearable Lightness of Being but Tomas dominates the action, Matar’s title implies that this is the country ‘of men’, but it is the mother’s childhood, her attempt to survive an arranged marriage and save her family of men in a dictatorial regime who is the real heroine of the novel.

53^ See Frantz Fanon, “On Violence”, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 1-52; and “The Man of Color and the White Woman”, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 63-82.

54^ Sex scenes are also part of the ever-present philosophical and aesthetic dimension in Kundera’s novels. See Igor Webb, “Milan Kundera and the Limits of Scepticism”.

55^ It is important here to note that ‘colour’ politics in Northern Africa are different from those in sub-Saharan Africa, but see Fanon “The Man of Color and the White Woman” in Black Skin White Masks, pp. 63-82.

56^ Considering that the novel was written at the peak of Nasser’s anti-American rhetoric this shows great foresighted resentment on Ghali’s part. Over the next fifty years during the Sadat and Mubarak eras, American presence in Egypt would increase tenfold, quite often in the shape of civil workers like Jack.

57^ This is not meant as a narratological reading, and the designated narrators: ‘first-person’, ‘omniscient’ and ‘author’ are not meant to directly engage with terms such as ‘I-narrator’, ‘third-person omniscient narrator’, ‘implied author’ (Wayne Booth 1961), author/subject (Gérard Genette 1989;1993) or ‘focalizer’(Mieke Bal 1989), etc. The narratorial voices I refer to are defined or self-introduced in Kundera’s novel, which, as I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, is divided into sections, with each section narrated by a clearly designated speaker. The analysis of issues of author, reader and their respective authorities, while certainly pertinent to discussing Kundera’s work in general, is not intended here. For a short piece that does address these issues, see David Lodge’s essay “Milan Kundera”. Lodge gives a reading of Kundera’s The Joke (1967; auth. Eng. tr. 1983) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978; Eng. tr. 1980) that touches upon the problems of the reception of Kundera’s work which either holds him accountable for the political opinions expressed in his novels, or ignores the political content completely. Drawing on his own experience as writer and academic, Lodge alludes to Kundera’s double engagement with the practice of writing and with modern critical theory. This double engagement seems to result in a potentially discordant combination in Kundera’s novels of a preoccupation with highly artificial or conscious narrative techniques and linguistic play on one hand, (ostensibly a privilege of ‘Western’/Western European writing) and, on another hand, the inescapable societal and political preoccupations (or national allegories) of non-Western writing (in this case, Central or Eastern European). Although Lodge only alludes to these problems, sometimes implicitly, his brief reading does a good job of highlighting the textual strategies of Kundera’s writing while still acknowledging its political significance, market circulation and reception.

58^ One view of Czech political history interprets it as happening in a series of ‘eternal returns’, with a series of conquerors, often with Czech consent, re-writing historical archives to suit the political purposes of the day, so even as successive governments declare ‘progression’, their actions parallel previous governments, all the while recreating new ideas of ‘Czech nationalism’ that seem to push it further away from Europe’s mainstream narratives. See Derek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia, esp. chapters 6-7, pp. 221-321, pointedly-titled “Eternal Returns” and “Future Perfect”, respectively. While Kundera depicts this vision of Czech history in The Unbearable Lightness of Being by drawing on what he describes as Nietzsche’s philosophy of ‘eternal return’, he seems to have an otherwise linear view of novelistic (and Western European) history, in contrast with which the Czech nation’s elliptical pattern of historical destiny seems distinctive and even aberrant.

59^ In an interview Kundera refers to the return to Prague specifically in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as a reflection of the “glorification of roots”, the “adoration” of “the house, of the household, of das Heim”, or the “idea that life beyond one’s roots is not life anymore” which appears as a “national enigma” in Czech literature and all over Central Europe including Austria, Hungary and Germany (Kramer n.pag). Meanwhile, Ghali specifically chooses to construct Cairo, the capital, in his literary work with some loving nostalgia, although he was actually Alexandrian.

60^ Compare this presentation with that of the Cairo presented in other writings such as Edward Said’s “Cairo Recalled”, “Egyptian Rites”, and his memoir Out of Place. See also Leila Ahmed’s memoir in the next chapter. Such memoirs have increased in the past few decades, as migration from Egypt has increased (noticeably from 1970s onwards) and the market for ‘world writing in English’ has expanded.

61^ The choice of the Vltava is intentional. It is not only the longest river in the Czech Republic, but it is also a national symbol, being a backdrop for Prague and featuring in much of the national music composed in the country in the nineteenth century.

62^ The movement to document folk tales and ballads of course often paralleled the rise of nationalism in many areas of Europe.

63^ Elsewhere Ghali, a strident socialist, would himself use the same romanticised epic. See his article written a few months before his suicide in 1968 for the first issue of Shimon Tzabar’s Israel Imperial News.

64^ According to Williams: “By 1967, around 60 per cent of the working population was aged between fifteen and thirty-seven, had been shaped almost exclusively by wartime and the communist era, and had at most only a fuzzy memory of the pre-war republic. The intelligentsia that was starting to challenge the existing order was, by and large, a new one, consisting largely of people of working-class origin who had moved up in the world thanks to class war, education, and the patronage of party god-fathers. Many of the writers, scholars, and journalists who in the mid-1960s began aggressively denouncing the crimes of political terror and the constraints of censorship had, fifteen years earlier, written odes to Stalin, hounded thousands of ‘bourgeois’ professors and students out of universities, and dutifully tamed the media” (5).

65^ “This was the time when plays were staged and books by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Eugene Ionesco and others were read, and when new interest was shown in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Husserl” (Kusin 53-54). Kusin discusses how such philosophical debates were the site for engaged political dialogue and calls for political reform in intellectual circles. See Vladimir V Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring, esp. ch. 4, “Philosophy of Man”, pp. 36-52. Kieran Williams mentions the liberalisation philosophies concurrent in the sixties during which Czech thinkers drew on the work of Eastern European revisionists such as Georg Lukacs and Leszek Kolakowski to challenge the functional determinism of Marxism which portrayed human beings as victims of history to enhance man’s projective consciousness. “Through praxis, especially art and philosophy, people were to transcend the false reality of the surface world and probe the reality beneath, which, upon discovery, they would try to change, thereby overcoming alienation, a concept derived as much from the rediscovered Franz Kafka as from Marx” (Williams 9). Although such a discussion lies outside the scope of the present work, Kundera’s novel shows a direct debt to these diverse writers and philosophers.

66^ As Kundera himself puts it: “I have always, deeply, violently, detested those [critics] who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality” [italics in original] (Testaments Betrayed 89). See also in the same book Kundera’s critique of any literature that aims to be political in the first place (155-57).

67^ For Kundera’s idea of the main dilemma of the novel form, that is, its relation to history, its objective in asking the question ‘what is an individual?’, etc., see parts 1 and 2 of Testaments Betrayed, pp. 2-51.

68^ As a Palestinian speaking of his first visit to his homeland after years of exile Barghouti’s statement takes on added significance and refers to the impossibility, for a Palestinian, that anything might be a-political.

69^ See how the role of writer/political activist as both aesthetically and politically-engaged through distance appears in a recent example of second-generational postcolonial/resistance writing ‘in globalised times’, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Telling the growing pains of a second-generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Oscar in the United States, Diaz’s novel excavates the traumatic era of Trujillo in footnotes to engage with the dilemma of the poverty of immigration and the inherited historical postcolonial background. The formal ‘distance’ of the footnote as supposedly supplementary material located beyond the main narrative is belied by the rather nosy and belligerent narrator who addresses the reader directly in macho Spanglish, frequently commenting on Oscar’s story (if his family and postcolonial background were not bad enough, Oscar also has to deal with the tragedy of being an unattractive Dominican man). A case can be made for the work to be a reformulation of the Bildungsroman, at least of a kind, even as it contextually dialogues with a different body of postcolonial literature focused on the Trujillo era such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000) (referred to in one of Diaz’s footnotes).

70^ See Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”, Open Letters, 125-214.

71^ Groppi’s was a famous bar/salon de thé in Cairo, (although its first branches were in Alexandria). Originally opened in 1925 by the Swiss Giacomo Groppi in a building designed by the Italian architect Guissepe Mazza and featuring a non-stop concert and a pricey high tea, it enjoyed a good thirty years of fame until nationalisation, when it lost its original owners, clientele and glory. Located in downtown Cairo, the building still stands today, decrepit and downtrodden, open to the occasional misguided visitor, and a monument to Nasser’s rent-control policies.

72^ See a similar analogy used in a foreword to an English translation of Etiemble’s The Crisis of Comparative Literature: “Comparative literature serves criticism by functioning both as a telescope and as a microscope. Used as a telescope, it widens the range of relevance and enlarges the frame of reference in which the individual work is placed….Used as a microscope, it narrows and sharpens the frame of reference and thus differentiates the individual, unique qualities of particular works of literature from others in their own genre, form, style, and period” (Weisinger and Joyaux XIX). For a similar connecting movement, see Claudio Guillén’s discussion of the ‘local and universal’ where he posits but without going into strong detail how the comparatist needs to be aware of the tensions between local and universal, particular and general, national and international. See Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, esp. pp. 5-12. See also David Damrosch’s “Frames for World Literature” who also applies the analogy to the texts’ mode of circulation: “[W]orld literature operates in a multi-dimensional space, in relationship to four frames of reference: the global, the regional, the national, and the individual. These frames of reference, moreover, continually shift over time, and so the temporal dimension serves as a fifth frame within which world literature is continually formed and reformed” (496).

73^ Boehmer’s article is expanded in ch. 2 of her book Stories of Women. The chapter adds to the article a consideration of the dissemination of the ‘postcolonial’ novel in particular. The chapter complicates the seemingly analogous definitions or approaches of ‘postcolonial’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ (existing implicitly via cultural networks all leading to the metropolis) by suggesting that such terms are often used within the borders of ‘national’ paradigms, and, so ‘postcolonial writing’, rather than bypass the nation in order to transcend it, valorises the local and the national as a space from which to navigate or engage with the transnational. See Elleke Boehmer, “Beside the West: Postcolonial Women Writers in a Transnational Frame”, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, pp. 187-206.

74^ Focusing on women in the third world, Chandra Mohanty uses the idea of the imagined community (specifically identifying with a socialist perspective) to suggest that one way of discussing a ‘feminism without borders’ is to pose an ‘imagined community’ of third-world women, linked via potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries in oppositional struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism and monopoly capital. Mohanty goes on to argue that rather than biological or cultural bases for alliance (race, class, etc.), using political frameworks and links (that is, the way we think about race, class and gender) gives stronger ground for solidarity because then potentially all women of all colours can align themselves with and participate within these imagined communities. Her approach to third-world women and the politics of feminism is to conceive of imagined communities of women “with divergent histories and social locations, woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also systemic” (47). See Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders. For an earlier use of the term by the same author, see Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle”.

75^ Damrosch suggests that one strategy by which writers rework local material with a global audience in mind is by going ‘glocal’. “Glocalism takes two primary forms: writers can treat local matters for a global audience –working outward from their particular location– or they can emphasize a movement from the outside world in, presenting their locality as a microcosm of global exchange” (How to Read World Literature 109).

76^ As the epigraph from Glissant suggests, history can be read on the underside of landscape. For an example of the relation between landscape and the construction of history, see an excerpt from one of Glissant’s essays which poetically links the landscape of Martinique and the historical formation of the community: the dense green mountains of the north are where Indian slaves and labourers found refuge during times of strikes or revolts; the prickly flat cane fields of the centre are dotted with ruins of factories above ground and slave prisons underground; and the south beaches mark the plains where so many resistance fighters died ‘extending their arms in salute over the seas to Louverture’ (Glissant 10-11).

77^ Françoise Lionnet’s Postcolonial Representations offers a ‘feminist comparative’ approach that attempts to find a space for dialogue between what could become dichotomous categories, epistemologies or groups of women which undermine the promise of women’s solidarity and feminist critical theory. Lionnet argues that métissage, a dynamic process of multidirectional cultural patterns of influence, is ‘universal’ even if, in each specific context, power relations produce widely diverse configurations, hierarchies, dissymmetries, and contradictions. Examining postcolonial women’s writing from different parts of the world including Botswana, Franco-Algeria, Jamaica, and the US, Lionnet highlights the interconnectedness of literary traditions, and discusses the approaches and insights of women writers and their perceptions into the complex formation of identities and the flux of cultures. In an earlier book Lionnet uses métissage to examine a series of women’s autobiographical writing in juxtaposition with St. Augustine and Nietzsche. She defines métissage in this work, however, in particularly structuralist terms. See Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices.

78^ Although there is no room to delve into it with any kind of depth in this study, the interdisciplinary and increasingly popular approaches to reading offered by ecocriticism, and particularly the relations that ecocriticism draws between nature and culture and its concern with the natural world in general, would have further developed the analysis of these two works. Both Ahmed and Dangarembga’s works allude in passing to key developmental projects that have garnered major ecological debate within Egypt and Zimbabwe for decades: the High Dam in the former, the urban planning and development of the reserves and colonial settlements in the latter, and various concerns of agricultural development in both. The importance given in Dangarembga’s and Ahmed’s texts to sustaining and preserving the nature that is part of one’s birthright, conditioning, and source of sustenance, and the implicit call for an ethical, intellectual involvement and ‘green’ activism runs in parallel with ecocriticism’s primary tenets. Since my study as a whole draws more on Postcolonial, gender and World Literature theory, however, ecocriticism has been left for another day.

79^ For an analysis of geographical space as an indicator of larger, socio-economic flows whether on global scales of multinational capital or in national-particular issues of class, gender and regional development, see some of Doreen Massey’s now classic work in Space, Place, and Gender. See esp. chapters 8-9, pp. 185-211, for an examination of how space and place and our perceptions of them are gendered. For the intertwining of gender and nation, see, for example, Elleke Boehmer’s Stories of Women and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather. For a discussion of gendered images of landscape in literature, see, for example, Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her on the American Frontier in narratives, letters and diaries. For a short and informative summary of approaches to how the national landscape is ‘gendered’ in political debates during times of nation-building, see Shachar Pinsker’s “Imagining the Beloved”. Focusing on the gender dimensions of the Zionist state reflected in several modern Hebrew texts, Pinsker points to the work of various scholars on the imaging of the nation as wife, mother and lover, and the description of territory, land and language as a woman to be cherished, protected or fertilised. In her introduction to critical writing on the matter she mentions among others Benedict Anderson, Anne Kolodny, Margaret Homans, George Mosse, Nira Yuval-Davis and Flora Anthias.

80^ On the primacy of geographical landscape and territory also see Said’s “Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature” where he mentions the topographical or agricultural change wrought by colonial settlers in South America, Australia and India (76-79).

81^ See on this topic Christopher Okonkwo’s “Space Matters” for a thematic analysis of the use of geographical and bodily space in Dangarembga’s work.

82^ Jalal al-Din Mohamed Al-Rumi (1207-73) was a theologian, jurist and teacher. Rumi was born in the Turko-Muslim part of what was then Persia, now Afghanistan and Tajikistan. As a child he moved with his family across Baghdad, Hijaz, Mecca, Damascus and around Turkey. The family settled in Karaman (Turkey) for some time before finally relocating to Konya, where Rumi lived most of his life and where his shrine today has become a place of pilgrimage. Originally written in Persian but widely translated and greatly circulated, Rumi’s work had a strong influence on Iranian, Turkish and Central Asian Muslim cultures and those of the Indian subcontinent. Where Sufism travelled across the huge geographical expanse of Islamic culture from Iran to Ethiopia and from Yemen to Morocco, Rumi’s influence travelled with it, and, with spiritualism’s mobility, transferred beyond its initial geographical borders.

83^ Sufi and unhu humanism are also comparable as ways of achieving societal well-being through the individual acquiring good conduct, character and acculturation. They have both been considered subversive counter-cultures to political discourses: in mainstream Islamic narratives in the former case, and within decolonisation movements in Zimbabwe and in South Africa in the case of the latter.

84^ Black studies theory has drawn on the history of the Nile Valley civilisations and ancient Egypt in particular as proof of a pre-slavery ‘classical heritage’. See, for example, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. Also referred to in Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (59-60; 187-91; 208-11). This vision famously appears in all its global connectedness in Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Dreams of Rivers”. Although the Nile connects North Africa with sub-Saharan Africa, the contemporary African cultures through which it flows mostly do not stress this link.

85^ It has also, for example, been considered as an early image of the cross, or the Coptic cross.

86^ As discussed in the previous chapter Milan Kundera starts off The Unbearable Lightness of Being by referring to one of those stories of the Nile: the Old Testament story of baby Moses.

87^ On the idea of the ‘road’ as a connector (or more specifically, being ‘on the road’, that is, ‘on the move’) in African literatures and how ‘roads’ may show the conjunction of African literature with and into World Literature, see Nirvana Tanoukhi’s “African Literature and World Literature”. Of the works referred to here, Tanoukhi includes in her discussion Dangarembga, Achebe and Salih.

88^ For what the peasants working the land might say of Nasser, see Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land discussed in the following chapter.

89^ These include: “the outright alienation of African land, the heavy subsidization of European farming endeavours, the provision of extension services exclusively to European farmers, and the legislation of marketing arrangements that favoured European over African producers” (Schmidt 3). For an overview of the economy and change in infrastructure where Schmidt’s account stops, specifically from UDI to independence (1965-80) see Stoneman and Davies, “The Economy: An Overview”.

90^ For Turner’s theories on ‘liminality’ and ‘structure’ see The Forest of Symbols and The Ritual Process. For Edward Said’s brief use of Victor Turner’s terms (in relation to Kipling’s Kim), see Culture and Imperialism, p.170.

91^ The image of cultivated gardens, private and public, physical or figurative, and the territorial politicised act of owning or working fertile land is stressed and expanded in The Book of Not.

92^ A large number of Arabic feminist writers, for example, have appropriated the figure of Scheherazade as a symbol of the power of women’s oral knowledge in their titles or fiction, from Fatima Mernissi to Nawal Al Saadawi. One of the books, for example, published by The Women and Memory Forum NGO in Cairo within a project to rewrite local tales from a gender-sensitive point of view is significantly entitled ‘What Scheherazade didn’t say’ (See Kamal).

93^ Examples are legion. An earlier ‘generation’ of women autobiographies either self-narrated or edited and published posthumously include those by leading figures of the Arabic feminist movement in the early twentieth century: Egyptian Nabawia Musa’s tarīkhi bi-qalami [My History], Lebanese Anbara Salam Al-Khalidi’s jawla fi-l dhikrayāt bayna lubnān wa filastīn [A Journey in Memory Between Lebanon and Palestine], and Turco-Egyptian Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years. There has also been a noticeable move to republish, translate and suitably index similar works in the past few decades. See, for example, Radwa Ashour, Ferial J. Ghazoul and Hasna Reda-Mekdashi’s bibliographic Arab Women Writers.

94^ Ahmed’s also comes from a now large and growing body of nostalgia-infused memoirs of Cairo and Alexandria. See, for example, on Alexandria: Harry Tzalas’s collection of short stories Farewell to Alexandria and autobiographical Seven Days at the Cecil; Robert Solé’s novel The Alexandria Semaphore; Jacqueline Cooper’s anecdotal short stories Cocktails and Camels. For Cairo, see Pierre and Anna Cachia’s autobiography Landlocked Lives; Colette Rossant’s memoir/recipe book Apricots on the Nile and Samia Serageldin’s memoir The Cairo House.

95^ As Selma Leydesdorff remarks in her introduction to Gender and Memory: “In the 1980s, much of the groundbreaking work in oral history was done in migrant communities where the particulars of women’s roles were studied….These women remember their cultures of origin in different ways….[T]he borders between autobiography and work on memory are often fluid –a factor that… continue[s] to influence the field of oral history” (x).

96^ It is significant that feminist criticism in the 1970s would be partly responsible in changing the literary discussion of autobiography as a genre, which was until the early 1980s almost exclusively discussed as the life stories of great men. It was leading feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Juliet Mitchell who examined the lives of major women novelists to discuss how they resisted patriarchal constraints with their fiction. See Chamberlain and Thompson, esp. pp. 4-5. Writing on (black) narratives in the Black Atlantic Gilroy refers to the role of black women’s autobiography in resisting the idea that the intellectual power of the abolitionist movement was exclusively generated by white commentators. Narratives written by black men and women on their own experiences “express in the most powerful way a tradition of writing in which autobiography becomes an act or process of simultaneous self-creation and self-emancipation….[A] new discursive economy emerges with the refusal to subordinate the particularity of the slave experience to the totalising power of universal reason held exclusively by white hands, pens, or publishing houses. Authority and autonomy emerge directly from the deliberately personal tone of this history….[T]hese narratives …[show] that in the hands of slaves the particular can wear the mantle of truth and reason as readily as the universal” (69).

97^ For a discussion of the intersections of religion and ethnicity (or ‘tribalism’) in Africa’s modern states, and the role of Islam, Christianity and indigenous African religions as fragmentary or unifying, subnational or transnational, see Ali Mazrui’s interesting article “Transnational Ethnicity and Subnational Religion in Africa”.

98^ See E. Kim Stone on the bedroom as a location for the formation of single women’s performative space in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. For the idea of gender as performative, see Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (although the concept will not be used in this discussion). For a related discussion to both World Literature and women’s living spaces see an essay by Deborah Weagel which briefly sheds light on the life and achievements of Juana Inés de la Cruz in seventeenth-century Spain through appropriating a ‘room of her own’. Deborah Weagel, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One’s Own”.

99^ Elleke Boehmer discusses how Tambu and Nyasha’s ‘special female relationship’ may exemplify a kind of subtle encoding of queer relationships in literature. See “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga”. From a Bildungsroman point of view, this is also very similar to the ‘best friend’ relationship among men: random examples include Pip and Herbert in Great Expectations and Ram and Font in Beer in the Snooker Club, besides of course the friendships that in fact are gay such as those in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990).

100^ Schmidt alludes to the form of kutya within Shona society as the “utmost form of respect” or literally “fear”: “Just as it was the duty of children to respect and obey their fathers, and junior men their elders, it was the duty of wives to respect and obey their husbands” (19). Although the precise word kutya is not used in Nervous Conditions, the idea of Nyasha’s ‘respect’ or lack thereof seems similar.

101^ Thus, for example the ‘solution’ of a Christian marriage ceremony forced by Babamukuru on his brother Jeremiah in order to legalise and validate the latter’s relationship to the mother of his children (but also to prevent Jeremiah taking a second wife and bringing the social, although not at the time illegal, shame of polygamy to Babamukuru’s immediate family). Feeling that such a ceremony somehow invalidated her own existence and made a mockery of her life, Tambu refuses to attend as an adult bridesmaid in her parents’ ‘wedding’. Babamukuru may have good intentions but to the other people concerned they seem out of place. As a representative of ‘progressive Africans’, Babamukuru, like others of his time, “laboured to create a ‘progressive’ African family and one of the ways they did so was to reshape [the contractual forms of] gender relations” (Ranger Are We Not Also Men? 33).

102^ It would later be this affluent class of the black population arising from an urban labour and entrepreneurial force and missionary intervention that, as in the case of many other colonies, would form a significant part of the opposition to white rule. For an analysis of the economic distribution and social mobility in Zimbabwe (after UDI from the 1960s to the 1980s), see Coenraad Brand, “The Anatomy of an Unequal Society”.

103^ Fanon’s famous argument about the emasculation of the black man by colonisation was taken up by anti-racist movements around the world. According to Anthias and Yuval-Davis: “Activists in the Black Power movement in the US in the 1960s, and which in its turn, has affected the British Black (and many other) radical movements, were very affected by Fanon’s work and saw their task as reclaiming their manhood (in terms of the ‘humanhood’ of Blacks as well as with a touch of machismo)” (140).

104^ Grewal and Kaplan argue that transnational feminist practices require comparative work that seeks to “articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, ‘authentic’ forms of traditions, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels” (17). See their introduction to Scattered Hegemonies, pp. 1-33.

105^ See Nadia Gindi’s “Ducit amor patriae: Which Country?”

106^ On the European domestic patterns of womanhood that were incorporated within the colonial state through missionary education, see Schmidt, esp. ch. 5, pp. 122-54. Of course, as Michael West puts it: “The cult of domesticity was not…simply a missionary or government imposition on Africans. Both female and male members of the emerging middle class voluntarily subscribed to it” (qtd. in Ranger 59). In his biography of a black Methodist South Rhodesian couple, Ranger presents a counter-opinion to Schmidt’s argument. “Schmidt quotes –and certainly accurately– many examples of early missionary abuse of African women as backward and superstitious and as a dead-weight on the progress of Christian men. She does not bring out, however, that the Methodist Church, in common with all others, came to be increasingly a church of women. Women were the faithful members, men the backsliders” (Ranger 40). During the Depression of the 1930s, the great period of Shona independency, it was everywhere the women’s movements which held the day for mission Christianity. The women’s movements, too, were the most successful in converting chiefs and spirit mediums (Ranger 42). See Ranger, esp. ch. 2, “Making Class, Redefining Gender”, pp. 32-62.

107^ According to Pheng Cheah: “Since one cannot see the universe, or world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one of perceptual experience but of the imagination. World literature is…a type of world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world” (“What is a World?” 26). Or elsewhere: “Literature creates the world and cosmopolitan bonds not only because it enables us to imagine a world through its powers of figuration, but also, more importantly, because it arouses in us pleasure and a desire to share this pleasure through universal communication. Literature enhances our sense of (being a part of) humanity, indeed even brings humanity into being because it leads to sociability” (“What is a World?” 27).

108^ See on a related matter, Elleke Boehmer’s ‘worlding’ of patriotic verse in the British Empire. The ‘jingo poem’, she argues, “was, before the 1950s pop-song, probably one of the most culturally migrated or ‘worlded’ of literary genres” (22). See Elleke Boehmer, “The Worlding of the Jingo Poem”.

109^ Of course Leila has her own ‘wind in the willows’ motif running through the book. The book’s opening lines go: “There was, to begin with, always the sound –sometimes no more than a mere breath– of the wind in the trees, each variety of tree having its own music, its own way of conversing” (3). The image recurs frequently: “I remember it as a time, that era of my childhood, when existence itself seemed to have its own music –a lilt and music that made up the ordinary fabric of living. There was the breath of the wind always, and the perpetual murmur of trees” (47). Ahmed, however, directly links the music in the trees to the sound of the street reed player in Cairo.

110^ Phenomenally successful, like most of Dahl’s books, Matilda would travel around the world, in English and in translation. It remains one the best-selling children’s books world-wide today.

111^ These are the same ‘familiar red roofs’ of England that Ram dreams of visiting, mentioned in Chapter 1.

112^ This ‘dichotomised’ bicultural position might perhaps depict the typical, or stereotypical, postcolonial ‘condition’, but more accurately I think exemplifies a state of ‘worldliness’, of being, in Ahmed’s words, ‘plural’, and subsequently, caught between dichotomous political discourses of resistance and assimilation. As Rey Chow writes, referring to her work on femininity in modern Chinese literature: “Although the point that we must not be trapped within dichotomies is a familiar one, many of us, especially those who experience racial, class, or gendered dichotomies from the unprivileged side, are still within the power of dichotomization as an epistemological weapon. The above kind of interrogation [Why are you using Western/Western feminist theory on China?] slaps me in the face with the force of a nativist moralism, precisely through a hierarchical dichotomy between West and East that enables my interrogators to disapprove of my ‘complicity’ with the West. Such disapproval arises, of course, from a general context in which the criticism of the West has become mandatory. However, where does this general critical imperative leave those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already ‘Westernized’? For someone with my educational background, which is British colonial and American, the moralistic charge of my being ‘too Westernized’ is devastating; it signals an attempt on the part of those who are specialists in ‘my’ culture to demolish the only premises on which I can speak” (“Violence in the Other Country” 90-91). She continues: “This…brings to the fore the cultural predicament that faces all of those who have to negotiate their way into dominant channels of representation….‘[T]radition’ is huge and crippling; as it weighs us down it also gives shape to our movements and gestures….On the other hand, the Chinese [and non-Chinese] intellectual knows that she must fight her way into the world precisely because she is already, in one way or another, ‘Westernized’” (91) [italics in original].

113^ See also Yuval-Davis’s concept of ‘transversalism’ which she suggests as a way between universalism and relativism in feminist global culture. Transversalism, which she adopts from an Italian group working particularly with Palestinian and Israeli women, uses as keywords ‘rooting’ and ‘shifting’. The idea is that each participant in the dialogue brings with her the rooting in her own membership and identity, but at the same time tries to shift in order to put herself in a situation of exchange with women who have different membership and identity. They call this form of dialogue ‘transversalism’ –to differentiate it from ‘universalism’ which, by assuming a homogenous point of departure, ends up being exclusive instead of inclusive, and ‘relativism’ which assumes that, because of the differential points of departure, no common understanding and genuine dialogue are possible at all (Gender & Nation 129-30). See also Leydesdorff et al’s notes on the need to recognise “plurality as a basic feature of the human condition” in context of feminism since feminism has ceased to be “simply a social and political movement of middle-class women” (5-7).

114^ Renya Ramirez, for example, has stressed the importance of linking race, tribal nation and gender as non-hierarchal and linked categories of analysis to adequately explain and cover the oppression of “American Indian” women, and to ward off the threat of ‘nationalist’ struggle overwhelming the feminist one. See also Nagel who gives the example of the women military fighters during Algeria’s fight for independence, who, after independence in 1969 were expected to return to the kitchen, or the case (at the time of Nagel’s article) in Palestine, where some activists subsumed women’s rights under the priority of fighting for statehood. Yet women’s movements too, change their organisational methods according to context. On an anecdotal angle, a meeting was held in Cairo in 2012 by the Coalition of Egyptian Feminist Organizations (collaborating after the January 2011 Revolution) with the aim of producing a draft constitutional document concerning the protection of women’s rights, and which was to be delivered in tandem with the demands of other civil rights’ organisations at the time. One of the few men attendees, a lawyer for a civil rights organisation suggested (yet again) ‘linking’ the constitutional amendments related to women to a ‘wider’ and more general cause. This was, he argued, a practical suggestion, so that the demands could have more of a chance of being considered by the (interim, as it turned out), government. The suggestion was met with an almost collective blank refusal. “We tried that many times before and then we become marginalised”, one of the women attendees answered. “This time our cause shall not be subsumed or swallowed.” For more on this project, see “The Women and Constitution Working Groups Document” on The Women and Memory Forum website.

115^ See Hosn Aboud’s article published in both Arabic and English giving a short bibliography of key studies of Islamic feminism in the past few decades.

116^ In an interview Ghosh corrects his interviewer who suggests the two stories (historical and Ghosh’s experience) follow each other by saying: “Actually the narratives don’t follow on each other: they are joined together in a helical pattern” (Stankiewicz 536). Picking up on this movement Ato Quayson writes that Antique Land “calls for an evaluation of history as a process of mirroring in which the past is often reiterated but with an easy-to-miss difference” [my italics] (11).

117^ See Claire Chamber’s interview with Ghosh. “You know, it’s a strange thing about In an Antique Land, that so many people think it’s a novel. Homi Bhabha teaches it and he told me at great length just the other day why, philosophically, it’s a novel. But I know that it’s not a novel. I didn’t make up single word of it” (Chambers 28). Or in another interview, Ghosh takes care to stress: “When people describe Antique Land as a novel, or as ‘fiction’, I think they are actually referring to the book’s structure rather than its content. But this is misleading in my view because the book is…strictly nonfictional” (Stankiewicz 536).

118^ Something that Clifford enthusiastically seizes upon in his commentary in the London Review of Books where he describes Antique Land as “part travel memoir, part archival detective story, and part experiment in multi-locale ethnography” (26).

119^ As such, two reviewers could find the same book praiseworthy or lacking for precisely the same quality. One reviewer writes: “Ghosh’s excellent account of the Geniza’s discovery is marred by persistent intrusions of a sweeping anti-imperialist sentiment –reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism” [My italics] (Elukin 138). Standing on exactly the opposite plane, Egyptian-British writer Ahdaf Soueif applauded the book’s ‘worthy motivation’, ‘fairness of attitude’ and ‘generosity of spirit’ in recounting the theft of the Geniza documents, but refuted that it could be ‘representational’ of Egypt (“Intimately Egyptian” 15).

120^ This linear projection criticised by Postcolonial studies has not of course been limited to the ‘Orient’ of Africa, Asia and America but also to the ‘Orient’ of Europe, vividly apparent, for example, in the ‘deep freeze’ theory which was a popular explanation for the nationalist movements after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It was commonly thought that the Cold War had kept national or ethnic conflicts “frozen” but then “a thaw” had appeared and so old conflicts re-surfaced. This was referred to as “the return of history” (Goldmann et al 14). See also in the same volume Jerzy Tomaszewski, “From Internationalism to Nationalism? Poland 1944-96”.

121^ Perhaps this is why some of Ghosh’s most intuitive readers and working collaborators have been those using Postcolonial and Subaltern approaches. For brief discussions of or allusions to Ghosh’s works from these perspectives, see, for example, Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakravarty, Correspondence; Elleke Boehmer, “Global and Textual Webs”; and Elleke Boehmer and Anshuman A Mondal, “Networks and Traces”. For longer discussions see Tabish Khair ed., Amitav Ghosh; and Tabish Khair et al, eds., Other Routes.

122^ Braudel differentiates between a ‘world-economy’ (or ‘world-theatre’) and ‘world economy’, where the former concerns a fragment of the world, but is “an economically autonomous section of the planet able to provide for most of its own needs, a section to which its internal links and exchanges give a certain organic unity” (Civilization and Capitalism 3:22). Although much of Braudel’s magnanimous work has been on the post-1500 Mediterranean world, Braudel often states that there were always world-economies, just as there have been societies, civilisations, states and even empires, from ancient Phoenicia until the present. For the argument of whether or not the hyphen is required, see The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, eds. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, especially the contributions by Immanuel Wallerstein, “World System Versus World-Systems”, pp. 292-96, and Janet Abu Lughod, “Discontinuities and Persistence”, pp. 278-91.

123^ See also an article which refers briefly to ‘new approaches’ to the markets of the 13^th-15^th centuries, specifically in Granada, Italy and parts of the Northern African coast, and which examines these routes as being connected by ‘complementary commercial zones’, often sustained by the efforts of groups of local traders, rather than solely different regional economies controlled by the external agency of a metropolis. See Ádela Fábregas García, “Other Markets”.

124^ Such communal affinities can be seen in books of genealogies of the 10^th-13^th centuries in Arabic which often affiliated people and families to cities and towns, like Baghdad or Damascus or Khwarizm, despite the existence of larger political entities like Iraq and India. Some of the more famous include ‘al-Hamadhani’ of maqama fame (i.e, from Hamadhan), ‘al-Khawārizmi’ (anglicised as Algoritmi, from Khawarizm), and one of the writers discussed in this chapter, Yaqūt al-Hamawi al-Baghdādi (from Baghdad). Similar surnames remain today, although of course the genealogy is untraceable, and their owners may carry very different nationalities. Such names and the origins and travel routes they hint at are referred to directly by Ghosh when he writes in Antique Land of meeting people whose names “spoke of links with distant parts of the Arab world –cities in the Levant, the Sudan and the Maghreb….a legacy of transience [which] had not ended with their ancestors either” (173).

125^ Thus, critics could discuss the tragic burning of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and by the US and UK in 2003, elliptically, according to the critics’ respective approaches precisely because Baghdad had been constructed and reconstructed politically and culturally for centuries as a town-metropolis (whether flourishing or inglorious). Edward Said, for example, often condemned the common description of Baghdad as a place of insignificance during the war on Iraq and the destruction of the city by American and British armies in 2003, stressing that it had been the city in the twentieth century from where some of the finest modernist Arabic poets had emerged. He compares the destruction of Baghdad in 2003 to its destruction in 1215 by the Mongols, the latter event signalling the official end of the Abbasid age, and one which, because of its atrocity, had been tersely referred to in Arabic as simply ‘the burning of Baghdad’. (After the American-British invasion a date is now supplied to this phrase). From another perspective, Vilashini Cooppan explains one objective of teaching World Literature by giving an example of two disparate historical narratives of Baghdad, that of Haroun Al Rashid’s in 1001 Nights and that flashing fire and smoke on CNN in modern Iraq: “One culture’s Baghdad is not another’s. The observation of this fact stages both an ethical obligation…and a historical obligation” (39). Meanwhile Bruce Robbins criticises Wai Chee Dimock’s perspective of ‘deep time’ (Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time [2006]) which juxtaposes both incidents without due explanation of historical context. See Robbins, “Uses of the World Literature”. See also Djelal Kadir’s comparative discussion of the two (and interim and related) invasions in “The Siege of Baghdad”, Memos from the Besieged City, pp. 41-63.

126^ See Ira M Lapidus’s Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages which delves into the socio-political allegiances in cities such as Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo from 1250-1517, but with reference to other cities like Alexandria, Beirut and Tripoli. Lapidus asserts the importance of seeing the cities as a series of social structures, allegiances, and networks that changed continuously based on the changing patterns of class and family structures, economic sophistication, technological competence, and forms of business enterprise.

127^ In Antique Land Ghosh mentions, for example: al-Idrissi (b. Ceuta 1100-d. Sicily 1165), Ibn Jubayr (b. Valencia 1145-d. Cairo 1217), Ibn Battuta (b. Tangier 1304-d. Morocco 1377), and Abd al-Razzaq al-Samarqandi (b. Herat, Iran 1413-d. Herat? 1482). In his essay on Bomma in Subaltern Studies, Ghosh also cites Ibn Khoradadhbeh (b. Tabristan, Iran 820-d. Baghdad? 893), Ibn Hauqal (b. Nisibis, now Turkey-d. Baghdad ca. 977), al-Mas‘udi (b. Baghdad?- d. Cairo 957), and al-Sirafi’s akhbār al-Sīn w-al Hind (9^th -10^th c).

128^ Ger. trans.: St. Petersburg 1823; Russ. trans.: Moscow 1939; Eng. trans.: London 1949.

129^ Fr. trans: Paris 1861; Eng. trans.: London 1831.

130^ Partial Fr. trans: Sicily 1846; Fr. trans: Leiden 1852 and Paris 1949; Italian trans: Rome 1906; Eng. trans.: London 1952.

131^ Ar. ed: Rome 1592; Latin trans.: Paris 1619; Fr. trans.: Paris 1837-39 and Paris 1940.

132^ Fr. trans.: Paris 1881; Ar. trans.: Cairo 1943 ; Eng. trans. 2001.

133^ On the archaeological front, see a recent article reporting on a shipwreck of Indian or Arab origin filled with Chinese ware off the coast of Indonesia. See Michael Flecker, “A Ninth-Century AD Arab or Indian Shipwreck in Indonesia”.

134^ In the interests of a wider project it would be significant to compare the rihla-voyage (as an epistemological or formative concept) in writings which were not written in Arabic within the same or overlapping sub-systems, particularly during the spread of Arabic as a lingua franca. Obvious parallels would be Turkish, Persian and Hebrew as the most prolific, but it would be equally enlightening to examine the convergence between Arabic and various Indian vernaculars appearing in flourishing cities or entrepôts in the linked system. See on this last, for example, Muzzaffar Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan”.

135^ The word ‘traveller’ in Arabic (rahhāl or rahhāla) is both in the ‘exaggerated’ case to signify worthiness or value and the case denoting a profession (al-Muwāfi 24).

136^ Nassār argues that the rise in the literary standing of travel literature can be seen in the increase in the number of major writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who tried their hands at travel writing, a genre which had been until then usually practised by minor writers. Nassār justifies this to the rise of literary prestige of prose (that is, the European-models of the short story and the novel) which automatically gave travel accounts more literary value (126).

137^ For recent anthologies of Arabic travel texts across Afroeurasia from the ninth until the late nineteenth century, see, for example, Nabil Matar’s In the Lands of the Christians and “Two Journeys”; and Nassār’s Adab al-rihla [Travel Literature] for an appendix list of less-known travel texts starting the ninth century, with particular attention given to the shady period of 1600-1800. For anthologies of travel accounts originally written in different languages across the region, see Constable; Khair et al; Alam et al; and Wasti.

138^ Al-Hamawi refers here to the early move, popular with linguists, ‘philologists’ and religious men of letters but also poets and prose writers who travelled to the desert to collect the sayings and biography of Mohammed and the ‘pure’ Arabian/Arabic language from the Bedouins of Arabia and the steppes of Syria and Iraq, dialects deemed all the more ‘authentic’ for their distance from urban centres. The search for ‘purity’ and ‘correctness’ would gradually become outdated and strongly debated –giving rise to a wider scope of what adab (belles-lettres) as artistic writing and proper behaviour might mean.

139^ See also Kratchkovksy’s voluminous and now classic Tarīkh al-adab al-jughrāphi al-‘arabi [history of the literature of Arabic geography] (1957; Ar. trans. 1965), the ponderous title of which reveals something of the categorical blurriness of the travel texts.

140^ Although the argument can be made for many of his works, see Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1987) in particular, now a classic of partition literature in India, and also, pertinent to this context, a Bildungsroman.

141^ By all accounts a kind of corrupt archaeology that has continued to the present: see Meskell’s article on archaeological practices in Egypt.

142^ On a short discussion of how the rihla-voyage, by bringing individuals and groups towards one or another centre of Islamic teaching, united the wider community of the faithful (umma) while also developing a specific sense of local consciousness, see El Moudden’s “The Ambivalence of rihla”.

143^

ومن أعجب ما يُحدَّث به أن نيران الفتنة تشتعل بين الفئتين مسلمين ونصارى، وربّما يلتقي الجمعان ويقع المُصاف بينهم ورفاق المسلمين والنصارى تختلف بينهم دون اعتراض عليهم .شاهدنا في هذا الوقت...خروج صلاح الدين بجميع عسكر المسلمين لمنازلة حصن الكَرَك، وهو من أعظم حصون النصارى، وهو المعترض في طريق الحجاز والمانع لسبيل المسلمين على البر، بينه وبين القدس مسيرة يوم أو أشفّ قليلاً، وهو سراراة أرض فلسطين...فنازله هذا السلطان وضيّق عليه وطال حصاره.

واختلافُ القوافل من مصر إلى دمشق على بلاد الإفرنج غير منقطع. واختلاف المسلمين من دمشق إلى عَكَّة كذلك. وتُجّارُ التصارى أيضاً لا يُمنَع أحد منهم ولا يُعتَرَض. وللنصارى على المسلمين ضريبة يؤدّونها في بلادهم، وهي من الأمَنَة على غاية. وتجّار النصارى أيضاً يؤدّون في بلاد المسلمين على سِلّعهم، والاتفاق بينهم والاعتدال في جميع الأحوال. وأهل الحرب مشتغلون بحربهم، والناس في عافية، والدنيا لمن غلب (