Vince, Rebekah (2018) Negotiating Unsettling Memories: Contemporary Franco-Maghrebi Literature on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis focuses on contemporary Francophone North African writers who deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their literary work. These authors include Valérie Zenatti, Slimane Benaïssa, André Chouraqui, Hubert Haddad, and Yasmina Khadra. The disciplinary framework combines (Francophone) postcolonial studies, Jewish studies, and memory studies in considering the traumatic legacies of genocide and colonialism which together form an historical backdrop to the Arab-Israeli conflict as depicted in the primary texts. By focusing on the 1990s to the present day, the thesis looks at fictional responses to the breakdown of the so-called peace process, revealing tentative spaces for dialogue and re-evaluation within the texts which allow for unsettling memories to be negotiated. In relation to the authors’ own trajectories as well as their works of fiction, the thesis explores alternative identities to the Arab versus Jew and Israeli versus Palestinian antagonisms. Indeed, the thesis highlights the flimsiness of identity binaries between Arab, Jew, Palestinian, and Israeli identities, which are in tension with rather than in opposition to one another, steeped as they are in interrelated traumatic pasts. Moreover, the thesis draws on the concepts of filiation (roots) and affiliation (connections), demonstrating the dialogic potential of the primary texts, which resist utopian endings but dare to imagine an alternative future of peaceful coexistence.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	North African literature (French), Arab-Israeli conflict --1993-, Arab-Israeli conflict -- Literature and the conflict, Postcolonialism
Official Date:	September 2018
Dates:	Date Event September 2018 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Hand, Séan ; Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe
Sponsors:	Wolfson Foundation
Extent:	498 leaves
Language:	eng

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