Lorenzo Casini, Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel. Politics, Poetics and Modernity (IB Tauris – Bloomsbury, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Lorenzo Casini (LC): This book stems from a reaction to the pervasive and acritical use of civilizational paradigms in the study of modern Arabic literature.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

LC: Since the publication of the first travel chronicles of the nineteenth century, representations of European societies have performed a distinctive role in modern Arabic literature, reflecting the importance of Europe as a reference point for internal debates on modernity, collective identity, and political reform. Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel provides a novel approach to the study of the European theme in modern Arabic literature based on a radical critique of civilizational paradigms. This book focuses on representations of Europe in Egyptian novels and examines how deployment of the European theme unfolds the authors’ conceptions of modernity, gender, and national identity. In doing so, this work moves beyond existing descriptive approaches in the study of “the East-West encounter”—aimed at mapping the shifting perceptions/images of the Western other—and connects this research field to current transdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and the history of ideas. The book provides a grounded theoretical framework to examine the European theme in the Arabic novel and combines critical insights offered by Occidentalist studies—as framed by authors such as Xiaomei Chen and Alastair Bonnett—with a political reading of literary texts, one that draws from the socio-critical tradition of authors such as Michail Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson. 

The book is structured in five chapters according to diachronic and thematic criteria. All chapters focus on the analysis of several novels with the exception of Chapter 1, “Setting the ideological framework,” which is dedicated to the deployment of Occidentalism in newspaper articles published by Muhammad Husayn Haykal between 1913 and 1933.

Chapter 2, “Writing the nation,” examines the relationship between Occidentalism and the national allegory in three milestones in the development of the Arabic novel, namely Zaynab by Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Awdat al-ruh by Tawfiq al-Hakim, and al-Bab al-maftuh (The Open Door, 1960) by Latifa al-Zayyat. 

Chapter 3, “The emergence of the European woman trope,” provides a study of the European woman trope in the decade from 1935 to 1945 through the analysis of Usfur min al-sharq by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Adib by Taha Husayn, and Qindil Umm Hashim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim, 1944) by Yahya Haqqi. The formation of the European woman trope is discussed in relationship to the trope of Egypt as a woman that appears in the first novels of the Arabic canon. Following the theoretical framework that informs this book, the analytical focus is not placed on the image of European female characters but on the pattern of their relationship with Egyptian male heroes. 

Chapter 4, “De-othering the European woman trope,” shows the transformations of the European woman trope after the late 1950s. These are examined through the analysis of five novels published between 1959 and 2013: al-Sayyida Fiyina (Lady Vienna, 1959) by Yusuf Idris; al-Sakhin wa al-barid (The Hot and the Cold, 1960) by Fathi Ghanim; Aswat (Voices, 1972) by Sulayman Fayyad; Wahat al-gurub (The Sunset Oasis, 2006) by Bahaa Tahir; and Nadi al-sayyarat (The Automobile Club of Egypt, 2013) by Alaa al-Aswani.

Chapter 5, “Beyond the national allegory,” surveys the original deployment of the European theme beyond the national paradigm in three contemporary novels by women novelists published between 1994 and 2001: Gharnata (Granada,1994) by Radwa Ashur; The Map of Love (1999) by Ahdaf Soueif; and Awraq al-Narjis (Leaves of Narcissus, 2001) by Sumaya Ramadan.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

LC: My academic work has long been informed by a critical reflection on the entanglements between the European theme, narrative form, and political ideology in the Arabic novel. In this sense, Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel connects with several earlier articles and my monograph Modernità arabe which I co-authored with Maria Elena Paniconi and Lucia Sorbera in 2012. I was born in Florence, Tuscany. In the course of my formative years, the leftist political culture that had permeated my home society was first overcome by the euphoria of the immediate post-Cold War order with its identitarian wave and the belief that history had come to an end. A few years later, when this initial euphoria was shaken by the multiplication of wars across the globe, the idea of a world divided into different civilizations emerged as the dominant paradigm for understanding the new world order. The paradigm of civilization proved functional to sustaining the new neoliberal hegemony by denying even the theoretical possibility of a universal emancipatory narrative. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States contributed to strengthening this civilizational paradigm and generated a political debate grounded in the binary clash versus dialogue between Islam and the West. This intellectual atmosphere has had a deep impact on my study of the European theme in the Egyptian novel. During my research, theoretical and methodological reflections interlaced with the need to restore visibility to the role of social classes and ideologies in historical processes, as they had been obscured under the banner of civilization.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

LC: This book is primarily aimed at a readership of students and scholars of modern Arabic literature. However, it is also conceived as a more general contribution to the theoretical debates on Orientalism/Occidentalism. In this sense, I believe that it can have a wider impact on the study of other literary traditions. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LC: Right now, I am beginning to sketch a new book project on a political reading of modern Arabic literature as a means to deconstruct hegemonic paradigms that are used to think about the world we live in. 

J: What is the book’s theoretical approach to Occidentalism?

LC: The book can be regarded as a contribution to the expanding tradition of Occidentalist studies. In her theorization of Occidentalism, Xiaomei Chen criticizes the reductionist manner in which Edward Said employs Foucault’s notion of discourse in Orientalism. She begins by quoting Liebmann Schaub to highlight that by ignoring critical Western discourses on the Orient that oppose expansionism, Said seems to make no allowance for the emergence of counter-discourses beneath the official discourse of power in the West.

My understanding of Occidentalism in this book shares several aspects with Chen’s theorization but differs in one fundamental point: the possibility of defining it as a counter-discourse of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism. Similar to Chen, Ketelaar, and later contributors to this field, I maintain that representations of the West have frequently been used by individuals, institutions, and social groups as strategic devices for various political ends in the context of domestic ideological debates. But precisely because of its strategic nature, Occidentalism cannot be defined in Chen’s sense as a “counter-discourse, a counter-memory and a counter-other to Said’s Orientalism.” More than as a process of self-appropriation, Occidentalism can be better grasped as a powerful rhetoric device deployed in colonial and postcolonial societies in the internal struggle for cultural and political hegemony. In the study of the Arabic novel, Occidentalism may be defined with reference to Jameson’s notion of the “political unconscious” as a common and recurrent pattern through which ideology manifests within the texts by permeating their “strategies of containment.” These narrative “strategies of containment,” which seek to endow their object of representation with formal unity, can be unmasked only by confrontation with “the ideal of totality which they at once imply and repress.” As a theoretical perspective and a field of research, Occidentalism refers to the study of these strategies of containment grounded on specific constructions of the West.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, Emergence of the European Woman Trope (1935–45))

In Egyptian novels published during the first half of the twentieth century, Occidentalism takes often the form of the representation of a tormented love affair between the Egyptian hero and the character of a European woman who acts as a trope of modern Western civilization. The existing critical literature on these novels tends to focus its attention on the image of the European female characters and examine it as a reflection of the authors’ perception of the Occident. This approach, however, confuses at several levels the represented world with the world outside the text and could be well used to exemplify Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of naïve realism. On the one hand, it assumes uncritically the texts’ civilizational divide between East and West (a literary construct) as a natural way of thinking about the world. On the other, it deals with literary constructs of the West (the represented world) as reflections of the authors’ perceptions (the world outside the text). 

This chapter examines the European woman trope in three canonical novels published between 1935 and 1945, ‘Uṣfūr min al-sharq (A Bird from the East) by Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1938), Adīb (A Man of Letters) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1935), and Qindīl Umm Hāshim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim) by Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī (1944), and focuses on how this trope has been used in the construction and critique of specific modernist ideologies. In these works, the European woman trope can be described as the quintessence of the ‘internal mediator’ that René Girard theorized with reference to the nineteenth-century European novel. As the embodiment of modern European civilization, the European woman trope condenses specific imaginaries and desires that the Egyptian heroes project onto Europe. Alongside the relationship with the character of a European woman, the hero undergoes a temporary metamorphosis – the supreme aim of triangular desire according to Girard – into what he believes to be the ‘ontological essence’ of the woman-mediator. The hero’s dissatisfaction with his new being, often associated with a nervous breakdown, leads him to repudiate the mediator in the name of his old self (Adīb), a new identity which results from an alternative mediation (‘Uṣfūr min al-sharq), or a difficult synthesis between his popular cultural heritage and the scientific spirit of European civilization (Qindīl Umm Hāshim). A passage of Franz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks effectively exemplifies – in the expressive style typical of the author – the way Girard’s model of triangular desire applies to the European woman trope:

Out of the blackest part of my soul, through the zone of hachures, surges up this desire to be suddenly white. I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. But – and this is the form of recognition that Hegel never described – who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me, she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love opens the illustrious path that leads to total fulfilment…I espouse white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilizations and worthiness become mine.

Both Girard and Fanon focus their attention on the extra-textual psychological dynamics of the relationship subject-mediator even when they examine literary texts. Differently from them, this study contextualizes the relationship subject-mediator within the wider narrative structure of each novel and its specific ideological configuration. Although the pattern of the subject-mediator relationship works along similar lines in the three novels examined in this chapter, each subsumes this pattern within its own narrative strategy, an original vision of modernity and a specific political ideology. 

The context: the genesis of the European woman trope in early twentieth century Egypt

The formation of the European woman trope in the Egyptian novel can be conveniently explained in relationship to the woman-as-the-nation trope that was used as a recurrent icon in pictures published in the early twentieth-century press and as a prominent character in nationalist novels such as ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāy (The Maiden of Dinshaway, 1906) by Mahmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī and Zaynab by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal. Although the two tropes have been used to characterize alternative symbolic spaces, nationhood and foreignness respectively, the ideas associated with them have often overlapped. Until the mid-1920s the woman-as-the-nation trope was mostly represented as an Egyptian peasant or a Pharaonic queen who embodied the mythical and unchanging time of the nation, its perpetual essence. In the following decade, however, the same trope came to be represented as ‘the new Egyptian woman’ and became associated with specific ideas and desires of modernization and progress. The replacement of this trope by that of the European woman in the most influential novels of the decade 1935–45 allowed the authors to articulate their critical attitudes towards hegemonic models of modernization and specific modernist ideologies. 

Beth Baron devoted a large part of her monograph Egypt as a Woman to the study of feminized images of the Egyptian nation in cartoons, sculptures, pictures and stamps from the first half of the twentieth century. In her study she found that the spread of the woman-as-the-nation trope in Egypt was mainly related to the development of the notion of national honour against the backdrop of British imperial intervention and occupation:

National honor made sense, it worked, because Egyptians were imagined as a family, and nationalist rhetoric constantly reinforced this notion of the collective. At the same time (…) Egypt was represented as a woman whose honor had to be defended.

The most renowned artists who represented Egypt as a woman were men who aimed to create an emotional bond between the male addressees of their works and the nation. But despite this male-gendered dimension of the trope, women’s political activism had a decisive influence on the way they were characterized in these works, as the cartoons published across the 1920s testify. Following the increasing activism of women nationalists after the ‘Ladies’ Demonstrations’ of March 1919, the modern urban Egyptian woman – the new woman – became the main icon of the Egyptian nation in the cartoons published by newspapers such as al-Laṭā’if al-Muṣawwara, al-Kashkūl and Rūz al-Yūsuf. In 1921 al-Laṭā’if al-Muṣawwara published a picture of a woman driving a car with flags and a banner, transporting other women to the harbour of Alexandria and a reception in honour of Liberal Party members. Two years later al-Kashkūl published a cartoon that depicts Egypt as a ‘new woman driving a car and navigating to avoid dangers on the road’. Like her counterpart in Republican China (1911–49), the Egyptian new woman represented ‘a positive view of linear modernity and hopes for a strong future’ but she was also a problematic presence for the country’s male elite, revealing ‘deep anxieties over alienation and loss that accompany modernity’.

A similar transformation of the iconography of the woman-as-the-nation trope also occurs in the narrative field, through changes in the characterization of the Egyptian heroine. The eponymous heroine of Haykal’s novel Zaynab is an uneducated peasant who accepts the fate that has been determined for her by her family according to ancestral social traditions. In contrast, Saniyya, the heroine of al-Hakim’s influential national allegory ‘Awdat al-rūḥ (The Return of the Spirit, 1933), is an educated middle-class girl with significant agency. In the allegorical structure of the novel, Saniyya symbolizes Isis, the Goddess who unites the torn pieces of Egypt, but she is also depicted as the new woman, an assertive and modern character who manages to convince her mother to invite the novel’s young hero to their house in order to sing for her while she plays the piano. As a national trope, Saniyya embodies the mythical pharaonic roots of Egypt but also its transformative present and the ideals of modernization that the nationalist elite desired for the country.

The emergence of the European woman trope in the novels of the 1930s can be explained considering the contradictions inherent in the use of the new woman as a national icon by the male authors belonging to the landowning elite. Not only was the latter difficult to reconcile with the authors’ gendered vision of the nation – in the topical moment of the national revolution of 1919 Saniyya is ousted from the narrative, and thus from the national community –, but the very ideal of linear modernity that the new woman embodied had become the object of severe criticism during the 1930s. The European woman trope allowed the authors to articulate this criticism through a consolidated pattern in the 19^th century European narrative – the hero’s repudiation of the internal mediator – and, at the same time, remove the troubling modern female subjectivity from the domain of the collective Self.