Hiba Ghanem

This article argues that Hassan Blasim’s short story selection, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, distinctively portrays the migrant resistance to the state of precarity inherent in the experience of migration and statelessness. Adopting Agamben’s concept of “testimony”, this article offers a comparative analysis of how migrants use language to narratively construct their testimonies within the context of the global North and global South, respectively. Narrative qua testimony-giving will be shown to highlight a linguistic form of resistance that redefines the meaning of precarity and safety upon which migration law is founded. It is within this linguistic form of resistance that the promise of salvation from precarity lies, a salvation, however, that can only be achieved through an Agambenian ‘play with the law’, potentially creating alternative meanings of safety and precarity fundamental to all law.

This book chapter analyses the role of Mustafa Sa’eed as a Derridean ‘guest’ in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. It specifically investigates the aesthetic role that Sa’eed plays in the parallel murder-suicide plot in Britain and Wad Hamid. While Sa’eed finds himself being tried for the murder-suicide of his lovers in London, he plays a less obvious role as instigator in the murder-suicide of his wife Hosna and Wad Rayyes in Sudan later-on. As a foreigner, Sa’eed lays bare the dynamics of hospitality in both settings. On one hand, London extends him a conditional form of hospitality that gives sovereignty to the rule of law when he is accused of murder. On the other, Wad Hamid practices unconditional hospitality by accepting his foreignness, asking nothing about his past and allowing him to settle and have a life amongst its inhabitants. In both settings, however, the question of justice and forgiveness are raised. In Wad Hamid, the narrator refuses to forgive Sa’eed for being the cause of Husna’s murder-suicide. In London, the murder trial becomes a scene for forgiveness-granting and seeking.

This book chapter argues that by rereading these scenes in terms of hospitality, the novel highlights the aesthetic role that Sa’eed plays in the pursuit of justice. In London, Sa’eed appeals to Orientalist fantasies, poetry and ornamentation to maintain the illusion of his foreignness. These elements play a pivotal role in constructing Sa’eed’s familiarity as a foreigner for the characters defending him at court. In Wad Hamid, Sa’eed resigns his foreignness to a locked room. The room holds the same aesthetic motifs as those in London: the mirror, photos and poetry. In this room, however, the narrator decides to forsake his pursuit to define who Sa’eed really is at the end of the novel. The narrator reconciles himself with the enigmatic state of Sa’eed’s foreignness. He forsakes the need to define Sa’eed analytically and embraces the openness of the unknown in Sa’eed’s case. Despite his decision not to forgive him, the narrator decides to keep the room intact. He preserves the room as an aesthetic appeal to justice. While the bedouins ask for forgiveness from the ‘almighty God’, Sa’eed introduces the narrator to another form of this appeal: the aesthetics of hospitality.

The book chapter holds that the maintenance of the same aesthetic motifs in Wad Hamid and London highlights the pivotal role that aesthetics plays in redefining the pursuit of justice. This appeal to justice transcends the borders of cultures. Through the parallelism of its plot and motifs, the novel invests in Sa’eed’s foreignness to illustrate the Derridean claim that hospitality is ‘an art and a poetics‘ on which ‘an entire politics depends‘.  By rewriting the appeal to justice, the novel introduces a ‘new’ politics that could rewrite what an empire is and how cultures could and should interact.

While most literature on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution chants highlights the revolutionary role of poetry, little attention has been paid to the role that theology plays within this domain. This article argues that reading Abu al-Qassim al-Shabbi’s poem, ‘Life’s Will’ (1933), which inspired the chant for the fall of the regime, through the lens of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) sheds light on the political relevance of the theological theme within this poem. The essay re-reads al-Shabbi’s investment in the Islamic muʿtāzilī doctrine of free will in terms of the creative role that Taylor gives to romantic poetry in creating a community’s ‘moral order’. Such an analysis brings to light the contribution that a comparative theological-literary framework can have to the political deliberation on the Arab Spring revolutions, especially the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

Inspired by Derridean deconstruction, contemporary translation studies hold that translation is a process of transformation that is characterized by indeterminacy. However, little attention has been given to the political aspects of that transformation. By exploring this aspect, this thesis argues that translation is a transformation within sovereignty from a divine to a more secular model that is guided by justice. By offering a comparative reading of Derrida’s and the medieval Turkish/Persian philosopher’s, al-Farabi’s, works on sovereignty and translation, it holds that the switch in the paradigms of sovereignty from a Derridean kingly cape to an al-Farabian imam implies a change in the dynamics of translating sovereignty that is aesthetic in nature.
The research starts by exploring the political and theological implications implicit in the translation of sovereignty as expounded in Derrida’s ‘Des Tours de Babel’. Adopting Derrida’s image of the kingly cape turned into a wedding gown, it argues that the translation of sovereignty is an aesthetic shift from a divine-kingly model to a more secular one. The thesis, then, explores traces of this shift within al-Farabi’s model of the Virtuous City where the weeds, dissenting citizens, contest the imam’s logocentric sovereignty in an affective and imaginative medium. Both models will be shown to highlight a reverse structure within the ceremonial aspect of power, which Agamben denotes as ‘acclamation’ or ‘glory’. Acclamation’s reverse role in the translation of sovereignty, the thesis argues, best figures in the political cartoons on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. These cartoons illustrate how contestation becomes a creative event of redefining sovereignty that is negotiated in terms of language and image. The Egyptian protestors demonstrate how language escapes the fatalism of its role in mediating meaning to acquire the role of poetic mediation in linguistic play. In poetic mediation, the thesis argues, sovereignty is translated within a collectively-shared imaginative construct that a creative form of justice guides.