Abstract
In the Introduction, Selim provides a summary of the book’s main theses and situates them within a range of interdisciplinary fields, mainly translation studies, comparative and world literature studies and nahda studies. She reflects on each of the keywords in the book’s title—nahda, popular fiction and translation—and outlines a theory of literary and cultural adaptation that operates as a tool for critiquing essentialist and proprietary notions of self and text that have structured nahda discourse in Egypt.
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Notes
- 1.
See Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab’s excellent study, Contemporary Arab Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) for a detailed overview of the post-1967 Arab debates on heritage and modernity.
- 2.
In their introduction to Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age, Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss offer an excellent genealogy and description of nahda in the discursive sense and show how, whether celebrated (Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, 1963) or mourned (Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1962), this narrative of encounter and progress was constitutive of writing about modernity in the Arab world. “Introduction: Language, Mind, Freedom and Time: the Modern Arab Intellectual Tradition in Four Words,” Arabic Thought, eds. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- 3.
Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 136–7.
- 4.
Hanssen and Weiss, Arabic Thought, 1.
- 5.
Though as Omnia El Shakry correctly notes, “the larger ideological projects in which [this discourse] was embedded remained fundamentally distinct.” The Great Social Laboratory, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 8.
- 6.
See Chap. 4 of Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
- 7.
Urban Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was ethnically and linguistically diverse: Turkish, Armenian, Levantine, North African, Nubian, Sudanese, Greek, Italian merchants and businessmen, students, workers, professionals (as distinct from the French and British colonial administrator class, for whom Cairo was like “an English town in which any quantity of novel oriental sights are kept for the satisfaction of the inhabitants,” speaking as many languages and dialects. Fullerton quoted in Janet Abu-Lughod, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 4 [1965]: 430). By the turn of the twentieth century, and as Turkish began to recede along with the dominance of the Ottoman state, Arabic, French and English functioned as languages of culture and politics for the educated middle class, and in the case of the latter two languages, not only for families of Syrian extraction, as documented by Masʿud Dahir: see Part 2 of Hijrat al-shawam (Cairo: Dar al-shuruq, 2009) for his detailed biographical profile of notable Syrian émigré families in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. Dahir’s fascinating study is an example of the way in which the ethnic Syrian middle class and bourgeoisie in modern Egypt are either altogether excluded from national historiography or relegated to a specialized and separate subfield. Feminist accounts of women’s history in this period in Egypt tend to be an exception to this phenomenon since their political stake is not grounded in the nation-state paradigm to the same degree.
- 8.
Huda Yousef, Composing Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 66.
- 9.
El Shakry, Social Laboratory, 6.
- 10.
Sherif Younis has articulated this problematic in terms of the bloated, romanticized subjectivity (al-dhat al-rumantikiyyya) common to both the enlightenment and Islamist intelligentsia of the nahda. See Sayyid Qutb wal ʾusuliyya al-islamiyya (Cairo: Dar tiba lil-dirasat wal-nashr, 1995), 10–13. See also his more recent Al-Bahth ʿan khulas: ʾazmat al-dawla wal-islam wal-hadatha fi misr (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 2014) for a fascinating exploration of the rhetoric and political mechanisms of domination shared by both projects across the twentieth century.
- 11.
Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 11.
- 12.
Walter Mignolo, “Rethinking the Colonial Model” in Rethinking Literary History: a Dialogue on Theory, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdes (Oxford University Press, 2002), 156–8.
- 13.
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi uses the term “nodal cities” to describe “imperial metropoles, particularly London and Paris” in The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 26. I use it here to refer to the global capital cities integrated into the world economy by the end of the nineteenth century: London and Paris, but also Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Cairo and so on.
- 14.
See Keith Watenpaugh’s nuanced discussion of this concept in the introduction to his Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 12–14.
- 15.
Peter Gran, The Rise of the Rich (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009), xiv.
- 16.
Khuri-Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 16–17.
- 17.
Ibid., 2.
- 18.
Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
- 19.
Khuri-Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 7.
- 20.
Ibid., 1.
- 21.
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 43.
- 22.
Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 50.
- 23.
Williams, Problems, 40–43.
- 24.
On the difficulty of accessing the Egyptian National Archives, see Lucia Carminati, “Dead Ends in and out of the Archive: an Ethnography of Dar al-wathaʾiq al-qawmiyya, the National Egyptian Archive,” Rethinking History, the Journal of History and Practice 23, no. 1 (2019): 34–51.
- 25.
El-Ariss, Trials, 51.
- 26.
Both modes overlap in the “efendi” culture that Lucie Ryzova has explored in detail in her groundbreaking book, The Age of the Efendiya (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 27.
The etymology of the genre’s naming in different national contexts is telling. In Factual Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), Lennard Davis has explored this etymology in the English context: “novel” specifically related to the modern English obsession with the “the new” and “news.” In the French context on the other hand, roman looks back to the medieval romance genre as its precursor. The novel first enters the Arabic literary field as “story” (qissa). Today’s standard naming—riwaya—was originally used in the late nineteenth century to refer to stage plays of the kind that were becoming increasingly popular from the 1860s onward. It was adopted by writers, critics and publishers at the turn of the century to differentiate the novel from the standard form of short popular medieval narratives.
- 28.
Daniel Fondanèche in Paralittérature (Paris: Vuibert, 2005) prefers to group these genres into “zones of influence” or thematic axes: speculative (detective fiction; science fiction), psychological (the sentimental novel; the pornographic novel), documentary (historical or rural genres) and adventure (spy novels; the Western). This taxonomy has the advantage of blurring the line between socially determined hierarchies of literary value as well as conventionalized genre systems where, for example, Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin would not be classed in the same genre category as Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte Cristo.
- 29.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
- 30.
Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6.
- 31.
Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 32.
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6.
- 33.
Pascale Casanova, World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 43.
- 34.
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (New York: Verso, 1998), 187.
- 35.
Ibid., 190–94.
- 36.
Ibid., 173.
- 37.
Casanova, World Republic, 41.
- 38.
Ibid., 45–6.
- 39.
Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, “Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars” in Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice, eds. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), 4.
- 40.
Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (New York: Verso, 2004), 1.
- 41.
Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: a Critical Introduction (New York: Wiley, 1993), 23–27.
- 42.
Moretti’s later work gestures in this direction. See “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–228.
- 43.
Appiah quoted in Tanoukhi, “The Scale of World Literature,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 600–1.
- 44.
Ibid., 600.
- 45.
See the PMLA special issue Literature in the World, edited by Simon Gikandi, 131, no. 5 (2016).
- 46.
Initiated by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere with their 1990 edited volume Translation, History and Culture (London and New York: Pinter Publishers), which is widely acknowledged to have represented a “breakthrough” in the field. See Edwin Gentzler, “Foreword” in Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary Translation, eds. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), xii.
- 47.
Inaugurated by Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) and Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
- 48.
Niranjana, Siting Translation, 21.
- 49.
See El Shakry, Social Laboratory, and The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017). See also Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- 50.
See Shaden Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
- 51.
Moretti, “Slaughterhouse,” 208–9.
- 52.
Rosemary Peters, Stealing Things: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth Century France (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).
- 53.
See Borges’ famous pair of essays on translation, “The Translators of the Arabian Nights” (92–109) and “The Homeric Versions” (69–74) in Selected Non-Fictions (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
- 54.
Margaret Cohen, “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (2003): 481–2.
- 55.
See Stephen Heath, “The Politics of Genre” in Debating World Literature, 163–174 for a historicist-structuralist poetics of genre of the kind described here.
- 56.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xviii.
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Selim, S. (2019). Introduction. In: Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20362-7_1
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