Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Transliterated Names
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Writing Arab Selfhood – From Taha Husayn to Blogging
- 1 Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
- 2 Writing Selves on Bodies
- 3 Mapping Autobiographical Subjectivity in the Age of Multiculturalism
- 4 Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
- 5 What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
- Conclusion: Arab Autobiography in the Twenty-first Century
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Transliterated Names
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Writing Arab Selfhood – From Taha Husayn to Blogging
- 1 Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
- 2 Writing Selves on Bodies
- 3 Mapping Autobiographical Subjectivity in the Age of Multiculturalism
- 4 Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
- 5 What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
- Conclusion: Arab Autobiography in the Twenty-first Century
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Nationalizing the Autobiographical Subject
In 1993 – almost a decade before the events of September 11, 2001 triggered a global crisis of Arab identity, and two decades before the Arab Spring – Martin Kramer wrote in his article “Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity”:
Three lines of poetry plot the trajectory of Arab national consciousness. “Awake, O Arabs, and arise!” begins the famous ode of Ibrahim al-Yaziji, penned in 1868 in Lebanon … “Write down, I am an Arab!” begins the poem of resistance by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, written in 1963 … In the century that separated these two lines millions of people gradually awakened and arose, insisting before the world and one another that they should be written down as Arabs. (Kramer 1993: 171)
Indeed, the question of Arab national identification remains at the core of Arab cultural life. Tracing the formation of modern Arab subjectivity back to the early days of the Arab Renaissance or al-Nah∂ah al-‘Arabīyah (Sheehi 2004: 3) and looking into the development of Arab national narratives during the last 150 years, one cannot underestimate the complexity of modern Arab nationalism, both as an ideological construct and as a social movement. In 1993, Halim Barakat identified three main “nationalist orientations” circulating in the Arab world:
one is pan-Arabism, which dismisses existing sovereign states as artificial creations and calls for Arab unity. Another is the local nationalist orientation, which insists on preserving the independence and sovereignty of existing states. In between these two is a regional nationalist orientation that seeks to establish some regional unity, such as a greater Syria or a greater Maghrib, either permanently or as a step toward a larger Arab unity. (Barakat 1993: 38)
However, the recent politico-ideological crises throughout the Middle East and North Africa (particularly in Egypt) have brought to the fore a new confrontational dynamic between pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, and local nationalisms, where the latter strives to become a ruling entity in a given nation-state, rather than endeavoring to initiate an Arab and/or an Islamic unity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture , pp. 37 - 74Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014