Literature and Development in North Africa: The Modernizing Mission (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

254 Pages·2008·1.04 MB·English

by  Perri Giovannucci

Literary Criticism and
Cultural Theory
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A Routledge Series
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
William E. Cain, General Editor
Negotiating the Modern Race, Immigration, and American
Orientalism and Indianness in the Identity in the Fiction of Salman
Anglophone World Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and
Amit Ray William Faulkner
Randy Boyagoda
Novels, Maps, Modernity
The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 Cosmopolitan Culture and
Eric Bulson Consumerism in Chick Lit
Caroline J. Smith
Novel Notions
Medical Discourse and the Mapping of Asian Diaspora Poetry in
the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century North America
English Fiction Benzi Zhang
Katherine E. Kickel
William Morris and the Society for
Masculinity and the English the Protection of Ancient Buildings
Working Class Andrea Elizabeth Donovan
Studies in Victorian Autobiography
Zionism and Revolution in
and Fiction
European-Jewish Literature
Ying S. Lee
Laurel Plapp
Aesthetic Hysteria
Shakespeare and the Cultural
The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama
Colonization of Ireland
and Contemporary Fiction
Robin E. Bates
Ankhi Mukherjee
Spaces of the Sacred and Profane
The Rise of Corporate Publishing and
Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian
Its Effects on Authorship in Early
Cathedral Town
Twentieth-Century America
Elizabeth A. Bridgham
Kim Becnel
The Contemporary Anglophone
Conspiracy, Revolution, and
Travel Novel
Terrorism from Victorian Fiction
The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the
to the Modern Novel
Era of Globalization
Adrian S. Wisnicki
Stephen M. Levin
City/Stage/Globe
Literature and Development in
Performance and Space in
North Africa
Shakespeare’s London
The Modernizing Mission
D.J. Hopkins
Perri Giovannucci
Transatlantic Engagements with
the British Eighteenth Century
Pamela J. Albert
Literature and Development
in North Africa
The Modernizing Mission
Perri Giovannucci
New York London
First published 2008
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giovannucci, Perri.
Literature and development in North Africa : the modernizing mission / by Perri Giovannucci.
p. cm. — (Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-95818-9
1. Arabic literature—Africa, North—History and criticism. 2. Arabic literature—20th cen-
tury—History and criticism. 3. North African literature (French)—20th century—History and
criticism 4. Literature and globalization—Africa, North. I. Title.
PJ8390.A355G56 2008
892.7’09961—dc22 2007043393
ISBN 0-203-92808-3 Mastere-bookISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-95818-0 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-92808-3 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-95818-9 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-92808-0 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Modernization and its Discontents 12
Chapter Two
North Africa and the Anti-Colonial Critics: Fanon, Memmi,
Sartre, Camus 41
Chapter Three
Camus, Djebar, and the “Non-Color” of Nonviolence 71
Chapter Four
Paris on the Nile, Egypt on the Plantation: Development
after Muhammad Ali 101
Chapter Five
Letters of a Lost Generation: Alhadeff, Aciman, Said,
Durrell, Mahfouz 121
Chapter Six
The Radical Surgery of a Woman Doctor: Nawal El Saadawi 171
Conclusion 217
Notes 221
v
vi Contents
Bibliography 233
Index 241
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge a number of people whose insight, guidance, experi-
ence, and friendship accompanied me throughout the project of this book.
Foremost, I would like to thank John Paul Russo, Ranen Omer Sherman,
Lindsay Tucker, and John Ready at the University of Miami in Coral Gables.
This work would not have been completed without them; however, any
mistakes are entirely my own. To Leslie Bow, I am grateful for an excellent
suggestion. To Justine Buisson, Margaret McPeake Maraviglia, and Linda
Weissman, I offer my affection and gratitude. I thank also Lolita Hernandez
of the University of Michigan, Michele Beer of Florida International Univer-
sity, and Jessica Harvey of the American University in Dubai. Finally, I thank
Rayfield Allen Waller for a thousand points of light.
vii

Introduction
Postcolonial critics such as Edward Said and Abdul JanMohamed have
argued that Western conceptions about the global “East” derive from Orien-
talist or colonial discourse. However, with the break-up of the old colonial
empires—e.g., the British and the French—in the latter half of the twen-
tieth century, the Western conception of the East began to reflect another
influence, that of “modernization.” “Modernization” refers to the Western
“development” of poor nations said to be “underdeveloped,” or lacking in the
attributes of Western capitalist society, i.e., innovation technology, privatized
economy, etc. A broad program of cultural, economic and political agenda,
“modernization” encompasses both an ideology and a “praxis.” Ultimately,
it subsumed the “civilizing mission” as the ideological mandate of Western
intervention in the East. One may say that since the fall of the old empires,
the West has assumed the mantle of a “modernizing” mission in the “devel-
oping” worlds of the East.
The influence of “modernization” corresponds with the rise of U.S.
domination in Western global politics after the Second World War. The
“modernizing” view is characteristically “American,” as distinct from “Euro-
pean,” in that it lacks historical depth and is based upon the fetishization of
technology and American notions about the “free market” economy. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and the emer-
gence of the U.S. as the sole global superpower, “modernization” has gar-
nered nearly universal acceptance as a theory and as a discourse throughout
the West and internationally, though it has undergone various refinements.
Thus, pluralistically, it is now seen that there are many ways in which mod-
ern development may occur, not merely the “standardized” American style.
Lately, the “modernizing” world view is called, “globalization.” In short,
“modernization,” “globalization,” and relatedly, “development,” are more
or less interchangeable discursive terms which issue from an international
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