Challenging the Oikos of Al-Andalus: Hybridity, Cyborgs, and Coloniality in Abderrahman El Fathi’s Danzadelaire

Abstract

In Abderrahman El Fathi’s Danzadelaire , there is a hybrid, non-binary poetics that questions originality and the idea that human subjects are subservient tools for exploitative neoliberal economics. As the central thesis, I argue that El Fathi pens a cyborg poetics in his Danzadelaire anthology by questioning a racist, paternalist, and Africanist vision of oikos , a home space that is no longer defined as the glorified Al-Andalus. Instead, the investigation argues that Al-Andalus is a destructive idealized home space because it conceals the colonial difference between Spain and Morocco. The close examination of El Fathi’s poetics entails a discussion of the meaning of tools and prosthetics and how human colonial subjects relate to them. At issue is whether the colonial subjects are in control of these tools or whether they become a prosthetics of empire, leading to theoretical and literary analyses of the similarities between cyborgs and colonized subjectivities as well as matters of agency in the context of the hegemonic capitalism that so often dominates the global South. The investigation of global South issues as relating to coloniality opens up fresh avenues for discussing space, oikos , hybrid identities, and movement across borders. Using Marxist theory from Donna Haraway, literary analysis of Arab poetics from Jaroslav Stetkevych, and postcolonial postulations from Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, the study analyzes poetry in a light that combines issues of race, coloniality, technology, cyborgs, and feminist gender theory.