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"Attachment to the soil and aspiration toward departure" : tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation & identity in Amin Maalouf
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Alhathlool, Khalid (2013) "Attachment to the soil and aspiration toward departure" : tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation & identity in Amin Maalouf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2724294~S1
Abstract
This thesis critically engages with Amin Maalouf’s (b. 1948) contribution to the
pressing socio-cultural debates of the contemporary world. By drawing implicitly on
Lucien Goldmann’s concept of worldview, it traces the development of a number of
ideas across Maalouf’s work, including revivalism, tradition, modernity,
cosmopolitanism, globalisation and identity. I argue that although Maalouf’s oeuvre is
an attempt to ‘reclaim’ history from the gaze of the ‘Other’, seeking self-representation
through a ‘native’ perspective and bridging the chasm between East and West, it fails to
transcend the discourses of ‘inferiority’ manifest in orientalist writings about the ‘Arab
World’ and the ‘Third World’ in general. Maalouf’s self-claimed role as a cultural
interpreter and mediator is put into question by reading his works against two contexts:
Arab cultural debates and postcolonial debates that are centred around the classical
‘self/other’ dichotomy. I place special emphasis on the historical context of those
debates and demonstrate how ideas of ‘failure,’ ‘backwardness,’ ‘cultural malaise’ and
‘the absence of democracy’ stand in contrast to Western notions of ‘progress,’
‘civilisation,’ ‘development’ and ‘modernity’. In doing so I underline how these
conceptions of civilisational difference did not originate with contemporary theorists
(for example, Samuel Huntington). Maalouf’s obsession with ‘failure’ is no coincidence
but rather the symptom of a theoretical preoccupation that can be traced back to the very
formation of modern Arab subjectivity during the Arab Renaissance or Al-nahdah Al-
Arabiyah.
Ultimately, I argue that Maalouf’s body of work fails to distinguish itself from the
widespread conceptions that understand the ‘European’ model of economic and political
development as representing the only path to modernity. I try to show that Maalouf
subscribes to a particular version of universalism involving what Samir Amin has
described as a twofold ‘cultural involution’: on one side of the ledger he places
European/ Western provincialism, thereby confirming Western exceptionalism; on the
‘other’, he places reactionary Third World fundamentalism, which in its corresponding
provincialism affirms a totalising cultural Otherness vis-à-vis the West.
The thesis is divided into two sections. In the first of these, I engage thematically with
six of Maalouf’s novels, discussing his representation of the contest over cultural
‘authenticity’ in ‘the Arab world’, his suggestion (advanced most centrally in The Rock
of Tanios) that the Arab peoples have failed to ‘enter’ or ‘realise’ modernity, and his
mobilisation of the idea of cosmopolitanism, notably cast in his work in terms of a
nostalgic figuration of a better world, now ‘lost’. The second part of the thesis engages
with Maalouf’s non-fiction. Its objective is to trace the development of Maalouf’s
understanding of identity in the ‘era of globalisation.’ My engagement with this body of
work draws upon a range of critical methods and conceptions – cultural studies as well
as Marxist, postcolonial and world-system theories – as I attempt to situate Maalouf
work in the context of wider Arab considerations of identity, modernity, secularism and
globalisation.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Maalouf, Amin -- Criticism and interpretation, Cosmopolitanism in literature, Literature and globalization -- Arab countries, Identity politics in literature | ||||
Official Date: | July 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Lazarus, Neil, 1953- | ||||
Sponsors: | Imam Muhammad ibn Saud University; Saudi Arabia Cultural Bureau | ||||
Extent: | 349 leaves. | ||||
Language: | eng |
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