The Perils of Hybridity: Resisting the Postcolonial Perspective in A. B. Yehoshua's The Liberating Bride

AJS Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-378
Author(s):  
Gilead Morahg

The Liberating Bride (2001) figures as the most discursive of A. B. Yehoshua's novels. It follows the comings and goings of Yochanan Rivlin, an aging Middle East scholar, as he tries to discover the untold cause of his son's failed marriage and struggles to breathe life into his own moribund study of the causes of internal violence in contemporary Algiers. The novel abounds in the minutiae of everyday life and the often inane nature of human conversation. Its progression is intermittently impeded by eruptions of social comedy and political parody. It dwells on the myriad routines of marital, familial, and social transactions and gives ample scope to arcane academic disputations. But this seemingly sprawling narrative surface generates a carefully crafted deep structure by means of which the novel conducts a wide-ranging exploration of personal and political conundrums. As in many of his previous novels, Yehoshua's practice of constructing analogies between family situations and national issues enables him to engage psychological motivations, moral considerations, and ideological determinants that affect both the private and the public spheres of life.

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 798-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Das

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.


2022 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Freeha Anjum ◽  
Hillary Hale

Zoonoses are human infections or diseases caused by disease spillover from vertebrate animals to people [1]. Spillover is the movement of pathogens from their normal host to a novel species [2]; this can occur through bodily fluids, bites, food, water, or contact with surfaces where infected animals have travelled [3]. Although some zoonoses remain established within populations and primarily affect only one person per spillover (classified as enzootic zoonoses—e.g., rabies), others can be transmitted between people and result in localized, or even global outbreaks [4]. Zoonoses account for over 60% of infectious diseases in humans [4] and can be caused by viruses, parasites, bacteria, or fungi. Of these, viral zoonoses prove to be of greatest detriment to the public on a widespread scale, as they are responsible for numerous epidemics and pandemics, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) [5-7]. Research has also been conducted on different taxonomic orders of species, such as Carnivora — placental animals which obtain nutrients from flesh — and their viral spillover risk [11].


Author(s):  
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa

This chapter shows how the advent of satellite television in the Maghreb constitutes a historical turn that recomposes the Maghrebin public spheres. The existing duality between national and satellite televisions has produced a unique configuration where parallel, conflicting ideas and perspectives came into existence. These perspectives, which opposed most of the official discourses’ orientations, are conveyed in daily life practices and interactions, such as the streets and semipublic spaces, and relayed by social media. Hence, the understanding of the novel and complex realities of Maghrebi political public spheres requires that the ordinary practices be considered as spaces and moments of the political fabrics in the Maghreb.


2020 ◽  
pp. 316-328
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Susca

Contemporary communicative platforms welcome and accelerate a socio-anthropological mutation in which public opinion (Habermas, 1995) based on rational individuals and alphabetic culture gives way to a public emotion whose emotion, empathy and sociality are the bases, where it is no longer the reason that directs the senses but the senses that begin to think. The public spheres that are elaborated in this way can only be disjunctive (Appadurai, 2001), since they are motivated by the desire to transgress the identity, political and social boundaries where they have been elevated and restricted. The more the daily life, in its local intension and its global extension, rests on itself and frees itself from projections or infatuations towards transcendent and distant orders, the more the modern territory is shaken by the forces that cross it and pierce it. non-stop. The widespread disobedience characterizing a significant part of the cultural events that take place in cyberspace - dark web, web porn, copyright infringement, trolls, even irreverent ... - reveals the anomic nature of the societal subjectivity that emerges from the point of intersection between technology and naked life. Behind each of these offenses is the affirmation of the obsolescence of the principles on which much of the modern nation-states and their rights have been based. Each situation in which a tribe, cloud, group or network blends in a state of ecstasy or communion around shared communications, symbols and imaginations, all that surrounds it, in material, social or ideological terms, fades away. in the air, being isolated by the power of a bubble that in itself generates culture, rooting, identification: transpolitic to inhabit


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 462-468
Author(s):  
Latika kothari ◽  
Sanskruti Wadatkar ◽  
Roshni Taori ◽  
Pavan Bajaj ◽  
Diksha Agrawal

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a communicable infection caused by the novel coronavirus resulting in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV). It was recognized to be a health crisis for the general population of international concern on 30th January 2020 and conceded as a pandemic on 11th March 2020. India is taking various measures to fight this invisible enemy by adopting different strategies and policies. To stop the COVID-19 from spreading, the Home Affairs Ministry and the health ministry, of India, has issued the nCoV 19 guidelines on travel. Screening for COVID-19 by asking questions about any symptoms, recent travel history, and exposure. India has been trying to get testing kits available. The government of India has enforced various laws like the social distancing, Janata curfew, strict lockdowns, screening door to door to control the spread of novel coronavirus. In this pandemic, innovative medical treatments are being explored, and a proper vaccine is being hunted to deal with the situation. Infection control measures are necessary to prevent the virus from further spreading and to help control the current situation. Thus, this review illustrates and explains the criteria provided by the government of India to the awareness of the public to prevent the spread of COVID-19.


Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Zhilong Guo

Abstract Public order as a protectable interest is an important criterion for determining a consistent and rational scope of crimes against public order. From the specific perspective of everyday life, Feinberg's theory of minimum welfare interests neglects those kinds of interests that relate to a smooth or harmonious life. Socio-legal perspectives make it clear that safety interests, which directly concern basic living (bodily existence), do not include various kinds of order interests – and thus life order interests in convenience, comfort and peace, distinguishable from safety interests that are protected by English public order laws, can be construed as the public order interest. By critically adopting Feinberg's individualistic approach to analysing public interests in three types of case, the test of being public is further clarified. Typical categories of public order are socially and normatively identified before concluding with a discussion of the effects the identification made by the paper might make to the scope and nature of public order law and offences.


2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.


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