The Politics of Representing Race, Gender & Ethnicity in Post-9/11 Prose Fiction

This thesis positions itself within the on-going debate on the post-9/11 discursive "transition." It examines the idea that the enduring power structures of such "transition" cannot be discussed beyond the intersection of "race," "gender" and "ethnicity" (re)produced within complex webs of socio-cultural and political discourse. The subject matter of the present study explores the politics of representing these socio-cultural constructs in post-9/11 prose fiction as a new form of literary representation that contributes to what Whitehead calls 'the genre of testimony' (2004). To achieve its main objectives, this thesis is devoted to the following post-9/11 literary narratives, namely Laila Halaby's West of the Jordan (2003), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land (2007), Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech (2008) and Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2009). The focus here is to situate these texts within a post-9/11 cultural, economic and political context that has given rise to discourses of "terrorism" and the "war on terror" as the orientalist and colonialist paradigms of the US’s neoimperialist agenda. Based on a blended theoretical framework operating within feminist theory, postcolonial studies and trauma theory, this study argues that while history speaks for power, the postcolonial diasporic novels under investigation provide a voice for the oppressed and marginalized in the diaspora. Drawing upon a comparative and analytical methodology, this study further contends that Hamid, Halaby and Abdullah provide as diasporic American writers fictional forms of representation which disempower the post-9/11 'order of discourse' and its hegemonic procedures of exclusion. To destabilize this discourse, these writers locate the conceptions of "race", "gender" and "ethnicity" within "Eurocentric" colonialist ideology. As for the post-9/11 American novels under scrutiny, this study argues that both Updike and Johnson fictionalize "terrorism" and the "war on terror" without negotiating their complicity in colonial hegemony, oppression and erasure of other identities. In other words, Updike's and Johnson's aforementioned literary texts consider "terrorism" to be the main problem that characterizes the mode of existence of the postcolonial societies without reflecting on the geopolitical dimensions bound up with the discourse of "terror(ism).

The Incarcerated Female Subject(ivity): Resisting Gendered Trauma

This paper addresses the issue of gender, trauma and resistance within the Moroccan prison apparatuses during ―Years of Lead‖ (1956-1999). Moroccan female detainees have challenged the view that they were passive. They have aligned themselves up with the resistant voices to meet the horizons and expectations of post-colonialism—as an emancipatory project. This paper is premised upon the analysis of the female testimonial writings left by some of the leading female voices during the ―Years of Lead‖ in Morocco: Mustapha Kamal, Susan Slyomovics and Fatna El Bouih‘s Talk of Darkness, (2008), Khadija Marouazi‘s The Biography of Ash (2000) and Michèle Fitoussi and Malika Oufkir‘s Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, (2001). Following François Lyotard (1995) and Barbara Harlow (1987), this paper conceives of these writings as a form of resistance. Writing and revealing what Cathy Caruth refers to as ―insidious trauma‖ in her 1995 book Trauma: Explorations in Memory is essential for the recovery of the postcolonial subjects from the trauma of the arbitrary and political incarceration. The female resisting subjectivities are reconstructed in their prison writings. In so doing, female political prisoners resist what Gayatri Spivak refers to as ―epistemic violence‖ in her 1988 text ―Can the subaltern Speak?‖ that Moroccan society exerts on female subjectivities. By articulating their voices of trauma and resistance to the patriarchal discourse (re)shaping and reshuffling their subjectivities, Moroccan female prisoners foreground a feminist/political consciousness. Finally, this paper suggests that these female prison writings should be parts of the Moroccan postcolonial feminist theorising.Keywords: Trauma, resistance, gender, Years of Lead, prison writings, Moroccan Cultural Studie