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Informationen zum Autor Olivia C. Harrison is Assistant Professor of French and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. Klappentext Arguing that Palestine has come to signify the colonial, broadly conceived, in the decolonizing world, this book offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Palestine as Metaphor chapter abstract The Introduction situates the invocation of Palestine as rallying cry during the Arab Spring within a decades-long history of "transcolonial identification" with Palestine in the region: processes of identification that are rooted in a common colonial genealogy and a shared perception of (neo)colonial subjection. Elaborating on Mahmoud Darwish's image of "Palestine as metaphor" and Edward Said's reflections on the utopian dimensions of Palestine, the Introduction argues that Palestine has become the figure par excellence of the colonial, broadly conceived, in the purportedly postcolonial present, from the decolonizing Global South to minority communities in the Global North. After a brief discussion of the history of transcolonial identification with Palestine in the Maghreb, it concludes with an overview of the corpus and a summary of the six chapters and epilogue of the book. 1Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture chapter abstract Chapter One analyzes the representation of Palestine in the bilingual Moroccan Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas (1966-1971), the first text explicitly to connect cultural change in the Maghreb to an engagement for Palestine. It shows that Palestine was a central interlocutor not only in the journal's increasingly militant political positions against the Moroccan regime, but also in its efforts at "cultural decolonization," including the recovery of the Arabic language and the development of experimental literary forms independent from both French and Arabic canons. Abdellatif Laâbi's translations of Palestinian poetry in particular became the site of a reflection on the politics of culture, displacing the journal's founding mission-the elaboration of an autonomous Moroccan literature-onto the Palestinian context. If the poets who launched Souffles-Anfas could only write in the colonial tongue, Palestinian poetry in Arabic provided the model for cultural decolonization in an imperfectly decolonized Morocco. 2Transcolonial Hospitality: Kateb Yacine's Experiments in Popular Theater chapter abstract Chapter Two analyzes the figure of Palestine in Kateb Yacine's Algerian Arabic play, "Mohamed arfad valiztek" (Mohamed pack your bags) as the vehicle of a two-pronged critique of the postcolonial Algerian state and of French and Israeli colonial discourses. The play compares France-Algeria and Israel-Palestine to condemn both anti-immigrant racism in France and Israel's treatment of its Palestinian subjects. Aimed at a popular Algerian public, it also satirizes the Algerian state's instrumentalization of the Algerian and Palestinian revolutions to rally popular support. Kateb's popular theater begins to make evident the convergences and overlaps between two apparently antithetical discourses, which will be the focus of the final three chapters of Transcolonial Maghreb: the discourse of assimilation, characteristic of French colonial discourse (Algeria is France), and the principle of separation that undergirds Zionism and the Israeli state (Jews/Arabs). 3The Transcolonial Exotic: Allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Algerian Trilogy chapter abstract Chapter Three analyzes the best-selling author Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Algerian trilogy, which deploys the figure of the Palestinian guerrilla fighter and poet as a transnational allegory of revolution in the era of postcolon...
