This articles is an initial theoretical foray into what has become a dynamic burgeoning field—“Nahḍah Studies”—by proposing that literary and intellectual production of the era should not be understood as generative or productive of cultural discourses, social practices or identities. Rather, al-Nahḍah al-ʿarabīyyah is the mark of a violent epistemological wrenching that was instigated by the introduction of capitalist means of production and surplus accumulation during the Ottoman Tanzimat. Using a handful of examples such as Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī and Ḥusayn Marṣafī, the article suggests that literary and intellectual production of al-Nahḍah, like the subjectivities they imagine, are an effect of these transformations, which is first imprinted on language that is charged to organize new systems of signification to make modernity legible and logical. Literary, intellectual and cultural productions, therefore, are an effect of the ideology of modernity that has naturalized the reform movement as a necessary project for social, cultural and political success. The cultural and thought production of al-Nahḍah was not productive of “new” concepts of identity, civil society, economic production and gender as much as it was reproductive of nascent, native capitalist ideology, serving to mediate and make sense of the tensions, contradictions and violence inherent to the reorganization of the society, culture and economy of the Ottoman Arab provinces.
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Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 2008), e.g., p. 9; originally published in Arabic, Lan tatakallam lughatī (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿah, 2002).
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiographical Writing (New York: Schocken, 1986), 222.
Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in On Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 117.
Carolyn Gates, The Merchant Republic: Rise of an Open Economy (London: I.B. Taurus, 1998), 13.
Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 26.
Michael Reimer, “Contradiction and Consciousness in ʿAli Mubarak’s Description of al-Azhar,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 29:1 (Feb) 1997: 53-69.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 1972), 162.
Yumna ʿĪd, Taqnīyāt al-sard fī ḍawʾ al-manhaj al-buniyawī (Beirut: Dār al-Farābī, 1990), 185.
Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe, 105.
Among other work in the 1990s, Fawaz Trabulsi and ʿAziz ʿAzmah published a collection of al-Shidyāq’s essays and selections, see Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq: Silsilat al-aʿmāl al-majhūlah (London: Riyad El-Rayyes, 1995). For some noteworthy discussions of al-Shidyāq within the larger context of Arabic literature, see Rashid El-Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident (London: Routledge, 2006); Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe, op.cit.; Kilito, Lan tatakallam lughatī, op. cit.; Rebecca Carol Johnson, Richard Maxwell, and Katie Trumpener, “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel,” in Modern Language Quarterly vol. 68, no. 2 ( June) 2007; and Nadia al-Bagdadi, “The Cultural Function of Fiction: From the Bible to Libertine Literature: Historical Criticism and Social Critique of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq,” in Arabica, 46:3 (1993): 375-401.
Rashid Khalidi et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); A.A. Duri, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation: A Study in Identity and Consciousness, translated by Lawrence I. Conrad (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Fatma Müge Göçek, ed. Social Construction of Nationalism in the Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991) and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon 1978), particularly his discussion of “imaginative geographies” in Chapter Two.
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Peter Gran, “Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 11: No. 4 (1980), 516.
Mohammed Sawaie, “Rifaʾa Rafiʾ al-Ṭahtawi and His Contribution to the Lexical Development of Modern Literary Arabic,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 32: 3 (Aug 2000): 395-410; and Adrian Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Journal of Semitic Studies XLII: 1 (Spring 1997): 75-120; Yasir Suleiman, Arabic Language and National Identity (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003).
James Monroe, The Art of Badiʿ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani as Picturesque Narrative (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1983).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizo-Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 232.
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This articles is an initial theoretical foray into what has become a dynamic burgeoning field—“Nahḍah Studies”—by proposing that literary and intellectual production of the era should not be understood as generative or productive of cultural discourses, social practices or identities. Rather, al-Nahḍah al-ʿarabīyyah is the mark of a violent epistemological wrenching that was instigated by the introduction of capitalist means of production and surplus accumulation during the Ottoman Tanzimat. Using a handful of examples such as Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī and Ḥusayn Marṣafī, the article suggests that literary and intellectual production of al-Nahḍah, like the subjectivities they imagine, are an effect of these transformations, which is first imprinted on language that is charged to organize new systems of signification to make modernity legible and logical. Literary, intellectual and cultural productions, therefore, are an effect of the ideology of modernity that has naturalized the reform movement as a necessary project for social, cultural and political success. The cultural and thought production of al-Nahḍah was not productive of “new” concepts of identity, civil society, economic production and gender as much as it was reproductive of nascent, native capitalist ideology, serving to mediate and make sense of the tensions, contradictions and violence inherent to the reorganization of the society, culture and economy of the Ottoman Arab provinces.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 931 | 163 | 23 |
Full Text Views | 219 | 18 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 521 | 264 | 11 |