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Abstract
My dissertation, Fantastic Cohabitation. Magical Realism in Hebrew and Arabic and the Politics of Aesthetics is a comparative study of magical realism, a narrative mode that migrated to Israel and the Arab countries from Latin America, coalescing in the mid-1980s. I argue that magical realism in Arabic and Hebrew negotiates the expression of minor identities within the nation by dialoguing with certain tropes of World Literature, while at the same time activating the poetics of faith and of the aesthetics of the untranslatable. 'While conventional readings of magical realism recognize it as a rupture with colonial logic and a symptom of national enunciation, magical realist texts in Hebrew and Arabic break with the myth of the nation, a political entity that excludes ethnic, religious, gender, and language minorities.
The first exploration of the mutual dependence of genre and minor identity in the Arab countries and Israel, the project illuminates the development of post-national consciousness, foregrounding the paradoxical necessity of looking beyond the nation in order to partake in it. In my first chapter, I trace this development of post-national sensibilities to the collapse of the Second World. I identify magical realism as a growing alternate to realism, a mode that constructs the nation as a rational, secular, and modern establishment. My second chapter examines the role of religion in magical realist works. It expounds on what I call the "poetics of faith," a miraculous bridge between the rational and the supernatural. Magical realist texts in Hebrew and Arabic draw upon paradigms of the miraculous as a starting point for their decentering of realist narratives. By activating a supernatural poetics of faith, these texts erect alternate chronotopes of social organization and communal belonging, without separating from the nation entirely. Reading the historiography of Hebrew and Arabic literature through the aperture of magical realism fills its gaps and absences, ellipses of alternate belonging overlooked by traditional tropes of canonical literature.
In each of my dissertation's two remaining chapters, I examine one of the ways that magical realist techniques deconstruct conventional literary tropes and their corresponding modes of representation, and create an alternate discursive space for minoritarian enunciation. My third chapter consists of two parts, both pertaining to different facets of what I call the "asthetics of becoming" in magical realist texts. The first part of the chapter establishes language as a revolutionary device in works of minor literature and cinema. These texts insert minor languages into the narrative, syntactic, rhetoric and logical structures of major languages (Hebrew and Arabic), creating significational fissures that are analogous to the supernatural perforation of realist texts. Both magic and minor languages are untranslatable symptoms of irreducible alterity that safeguard minor subjectivity from anthropological objectification. I activate Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of minor literature, and especially their poetics of "becoming minor," arguing that metamorphosis in magical realist texts is an astute expression of minority and of becoming.
The second part of the chapter breaks with the realist paradigm of the house as a synechdoche of identity. It focuses on the poetics of inhabiting an architectural structure as a synecdoche of identity. By inserting a supernatural element into the canonically stable, rational, geographic space, magical realist texts subvert the realist chronotope that upholds the clear distinction between the Self and the Other. The human self magically transforms into the spectral, bestial, or extraterrestrial, thereby enabling a minority community to inhabit a plot of land, but at the expense of its loss of humanity. This portion of the chapter explores a more performative facet of becoming in which human characters "become-animal," "become-imperceptible," and "become-alien."
The fourth and final chapter deconstructs canonical tropes of territorial sovereignty that run throughout the course of Modern Hebrew and Arabic literature, conflating the control of land with the restraint and violation of the female body. I show how Marco Carmel's film My Lovely Sister (2011) and Mansurah Izziddin's novel Maryam's Maze (2005) build autonomous female subjectivites through the magical realist device of haunting. Neither embodied, nor alive, the ghosts in these novels preclude territorial control of the female body through rape and murder. I employ Derrida's "hauntology" in order to offer an alternate method of imagining space in situations of conflict.
Building on its contribution to the understanding of minor literature, the project develops a new conception of literary dialogue, where literatures communicate with one another through global networks, even as they tether projects to national political systems much at odds with those of their interlocutors. This inquiry also intervenes in debates about World Literature, alternative postcolonialities, and literary theory. Finally, rereading literary historiographies and national mythologies through the eyes of minorities proves invaluable at a time when their existence in the Middle East is greatly threatened.
