Sexualized Collaborations and the Politics of Ghostwriting in Franco-Arab Literature: From Paul Bowles to Tout le monde aime Mohamed
AbstractIn the last few decades, the landscape of Franco-Arab fiction has seen a great many authorship scandals, in which French non-Arab authors have impersonated Arabs and found publishing success. In this essay, I revisit these scandals while focusing on a recent “autobiographical” novel that raised suspicions of ghostwriting: 2011’s Tout le monde aime Mohamed (Everyone Loves Mohamed ) by Malik Kuzman. An impressionistic collage of homo-erotic encounters, its fleeting structure recalls that of Barthes’ Incidents, a series of social vignettes culled from the author’s time in Morocco. I explore the simultaneity of Barthes’ Death of the Author argument and the emergence of these authorship scandals in post-colonial Franco-Arab fiction, and suggest that it is not accidental. In a similar vein, I analyze how the heritage of literary collaborations between Europeans and North Africans, often eroticized, has informed authorship scandals in post-immigration France.
Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism
This essay theorizes an aspect of colonial discourse omitted from most critiques of orientalism by focusing on an array of Western male writers whose representations of an eroticized Arabic Orient cannot be disentangled from their imagined and real encounters abroad with male homosexuality. Suggesting that the historical possibility of sexual contact with and between Near Eastern men has often covertly underwritten the appeal of orientalism as a Western mode of perception and control. I examine three homoeroticizing strands of colonialist discourse: depictions of Egypt as a symbol of polymorphous desire, accounts of masquerading as the foreign other, and narratives of the colonial trade in boys. The contingency of Western conceptions of “homosexuality”—as identity category, sexual practice, and site of theoretical speculation—becomes apparent when they are brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures and crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.
Los escritores de la Restauración y las polémicas literarias del siglo XIX en España
Las ultimas decadas del siglo xix representan un periodo agitado a la vez que fecundo en la literatura espanola. La polemica de los 80 en torno al naturalismo literario no es mas que la logica consecuencia de las polemicas sobre el idealismo y el realismo, asi como sobre el arte docente y el arte por el arte de la decada precedente. Frente a los que por prejuicios politicos o literarios radicalizan sus posiciones en estas cuestiones, forman grupo aparte los que como Pardo Bazan, « Clarin » y Galdos — el de las novelas contemporaneas — emplean con ventaja y de una manera muy original las nuevas tecnicas del naturalismo frances, a la vez que manifiestan un decidido proposito de conciliar la necesidad de cambio con el mantenimiento de la tradicion literaria nacional.