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The Returns of Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

Shaden M. Tageldin
Shaden M. Tageldin*
Affiliation:
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn.; e-mail: tageldin@umn.edu
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Extract

For the discipline of Arabic literature in the United States, “theory” is a double entendre: promise, danger. Until the mid-1990s, U.S. Arabic literary studies was landlocked in Near Eastern language departments, whose “anti-theoretical” bent Magda Al-Nowaihi imputes to dependence on U.S. government and Gulf state support. Theory is “dangerous” to such funders, Al-Nowaihi maintains, because it traffics in “the relations between knowledge and power. . . . The result is a situation where European departments produce the theory, we provide the raw material.” “Theory” is what Arabic literature needs—to become a site and an agent of aesthetic-political critique—yet lacks because powers of state insulate its energies within microtextual hermeneutics. Uniquely empowered to translate Arabic literature from particularist “ghetto” to universalist (Euro-dominant) “center” through the abstracting medium of “theory,” then, “European departments” control Arabic literature's legitimization. What emerges is a curious chiasmus: “theory” is at once a danger to state power and a desideratum for Arabic literature, on the one hand, and a seat of institutional power within the U.S. humanities and a danger to Arabic literature, on the other.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , November 2011 , pp. 728 - 730
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

NOTES

1 Al-Nowaihi, Magda M., “For a ‘Foreign’ Audience: The Challenges of Teaching Arabic Literature in the American Academy,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 35, no. 1 (2001): 24–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/Bulletin/35-1/35-1Al-Nowaihi.htm (accessed 15 May 2011).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Badawi, M. M., “Introduction: 1. The Background,” in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Badawi, M. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–23Google Scholar, quotation from 2.

5 Ibid., 1.

6 Allen, Roger, “The Post-Classical Period: Parameters and Preliminaries,” in Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, ed. Allen, Roger and Richards, D. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 17.

7 Ibid., 3.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 See Said, Edward W., Orientalism, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1978])Google Scholar; Gran, Peter, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840, 2nd ed. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999 [1979])Google Scholar; and Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991 [1988])Google Scholar.

11 See Apter, Emily, “Philosophical Translation and Untranslatability: Translation as Critical Pedagogy,” Profession (2010): 50–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotations from 57, 55.

12 In 1990, Said reported that a U.S. editor had declined to publish Arabic literature in English translation, declaring Arabic a “‘controversial language.’” See Edward W. Said, “Embargoed Literature,” The Nation, 17 September 1990, 278.