Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: creating new discourses from old
- 2 Women's voices and women's space in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia
- 3 Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
- 4 “At the Threshold of the Untranslatable”: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi
- 5 The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
- Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: creating new discourses from old
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: creating new discourses from old
- 2 Women's voices and women's space in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia
- 3 Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
- 4 “At the Threshold of the Untranslatable”: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi
- 5 The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
- Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A rediscovered country offers itself as what it is, without closure or totality.
abdelkebir khatibi, Amour bilingueYou have always had this scrupulous reverence for the dignity of the other, whoever he may be.
ABDELLATIF LAÂBI, who spent eight and a half years in a Moroccan prison for “crimes of opinion”This study examines postcolonial narratives of four major Muslim authors of fiction from diverse origins and backgrounds, who have elaborated counterdiscourses in European languages. It focuses on the problematics involved in developing such counterdiscourses while staying within the frame of the linguistic and cultural “systems” of the power structures within and under which these authors have written. While their narratives vary too greatly to suggest a single model of oppositional writing, the tendency and emphasis of their writings give evidence of a common aim – to refute totalizing, universalizing systems and reductive processes, in whatever society or form they may be found, which threaten to marginalize individual and minoritarian dissent, and to create a dominant cultural discourse that is univocal.
My personal experience leads me to emphasize narratives by French-speaking writers from the Maghreb (North Africa), more particularly from Morocco (Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi) and Algeria (Assia Djebar). I have also chosen to study the writing of Salman Rushdie, who, while brought up in the Islamic tradition in the Middle East and writing in English, shares with his French-speaking counterparts knowledge and experience of Muslim beliefs and practices, and offers another model of the postcolonial writing of authors versed equally in European culture and diverse cultures in countries where Islam is the primary system of faith.
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- Information
- Islam and Postcolonial Narrative , pp. 1 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998