Tense Eruptions in Driss Chraïbi’s Le passé simple

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Hoda El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
Ethical Agency

Chapter 5 analyzes Driss Chraïbi’s (1926–2007) controversial 1954 novel Le passé simple [the Simple Past], which traces the rebellion of nineteen-year-old Driss Ferdi against his seemingly pious wealthy father Haj Ferdi. Readings of the novel as an orientalist portrayal of Moroccan culture and a heretical attack on Islam resulted in a decades-long controversy known as l’affaire Chraïbi, as well as a government ban until 1977. The novel stages a double-critique against colonial and nationalist teleologies—a tension that emerges most explicitly in its engagement with the Qurʾan. The chapter investigates the novel’s critique of imbricated modes of genealogical historical inscription under Protectorate Morocco: French imperial discourses of civil society and the Moroccan monarchy’s, and Hajj Ferdi’s, filiation with the Prophet Muhammad. It argues that Chraïbi offers an alternative mode of ethical agency in the recurring image of la ligne mince [the thin line]: a hallucinatory apparition with Qurʾanic and Sufi valences that haunts the narrator throughout the novel.

“Voice Might Discover Him”: Representations and Failures of Voice in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-69
Author(s):  
Diego Millan
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article takes up the representation of voice in Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends to examine the relationship between Blackness, aurality, and text. Doing so requires an approach tuned to the novel's aural-linguistic dimensions that acknowledges that a character's speaking produces a diegetic sound and that the way characters interact with one another relies, in part, on how each perceives another's voice. It also means looking for how a text conveys a sense of sound both through techniques such as italics and capitalization and through instances of overt narration. Specifically, moments of mistaken identity pivot on the disruption of one character's accumulated presumptions concerning the sound of another character's voice and highlight how sound and listening reinforce processes of racialization, a dynamic Jennifer Lynn Stoever identifies through her work on the sonic color line. Instances of vocalization—moments when characters are depicted speaking and when the text itself performs vocality—defamiliarize social formations along the sonic color line long enough for the novel to scrutinize their underlying premises. Scenes in which characters' voices escape their assumed meaning trouble constructions of racial identity, particularly whiteness and its assumed control over speech. The Garies and Their Friends thus generates an alternative mode through which to critique the safeguarding of whiteness. Ultimately, the novel brings together overlapping meanings of voice, such as physiologically produced acoustic sounds and distinctive literary or authorial decisions, as a meditation on the interplay between voice and writing.

Merchant Colonies

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-33
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Patterns ◽  
Ambiguous Situation ◽  
Raison D’État ◽  
Equal Citizenship ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Jewish Merchant

This chapter discusses the merchant colonies who invited Jewish merchants into their cities on exceptionally propitious terms, constituting the west European region of emancipation. Raison d'état and shifting trade patterns induced governments in such cities as Ancona, Livorno, and Venice to grant Jews extensive privileges of residence and trade, worship, and communal autonomy. In Bordeaux, Jews originally gained privileges as New Christians; over time they emerged as Jews and received confirmation of those privileges. In Livorno and Bordeaux, those privileges entailed virtual parity with Christian merchants. Meanwhile, Hamburg's Senate first attracted a Jewish merchant colony by extending privileges but later, by imposing heavy taxes, drove it away. In Amsterdam and London, which had ceased granting charters to foreign merchant colonies, Jews found themselves in the novel and ambiguous situation of functioning without a charter. They therefore gained rights on an ad hoc basis, becoming members of an emerging civil society. The Jews of Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and London were to make virtually seamless transitions from corporate or civic parity to equal citizenship.

scholarly journals Entrepreneurial ecosystems in cities: The role of institutions

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0247609
Author(s):  
David Bruce Audretsch ◽  
Maksim Belitski ◽  
Nataliia Cherkas
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Transition Economies ◽  
High Growth ◽  
Institutional Arrangement ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems ◽  
Practical Implications

Entrepreneurship activity varies significantly across cities. We use the novel data for 1,652 ecosystem actors across sixteen cities in nine developing and transition economies during 2018–2019 to examine the role that institutional context plays in facilitating the productive entrepreneurship and reducing the unproductive entrepreneurship. This study is the first to develop and test a model of multi-dimensional institutional arrangements in cities. It demonstrates that not just that institutions matter in shaping the entrepreneurship ecosystem in cities, but in particular those institutional arrangements enhancing the productive and reducing unproductive entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that differences between normative, cognitive, and regulatory pillars are associated with variance in both types of entrepreneurship in cities. For the formation of productive and high-growth entrepreneurs, all three pillars of institutional arrangement matter. For unproductive entrepreneurship normative pillar of institutions and the role of civil society matter most. This study has theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurship ecosystem policy in cities.

scholarly journals Assessing the Impact of Coronavirus Crisis on the Nature and Trends of Remote Employment in Ukraine

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (514) ◽  
pp. 139-145
Author(s):  
M. R. Lychkovska ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Partnership ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Technologies

The article is aimed at generalizing the essential content of the concept of «remote employment» in the context of components that form it, analyzing the main factors of influence on these components, determining trends and features of development and spread of remote employment in coronavirus crisis. Analyzing and summarizing the scientific works of many scholars and practitioners, the sequence of development and implementation of the novel alternative forms of employment is researched. The tendency to change their essential content is defined as being dependent on the development and introduction of modern technologies. The main factors influencing the possibility of transferring novel forms of employment into a virtual mode are analyzed. The main advantages and disadvantages of spread of remote employment in lockdown conditions are allocated and analyzed. It is specified that a significant part of them can be formulated as follows: the first ones – as an advance that needs to be shared; the second ones – as problems to be solved. Doing this is quite feasible and necessary in order to develop the appropriate policy. As a result of the research, the main obstacles to the development of remote employment are identified, which include a large-scale downturn in the economic attitudes of business entities and the growth of social tension. It is reasoned that under such conditions, the strong-willed orders on the part of government can only worsen the existing situation. It is proved that only strengthening the partnership between the State, business and civil society on the basis of restoring mutual trust of all economic actors will provide an opportunity to develop a deliberate policy of recovery, part of which is the large-scale proliferation of remote labor. Remote labor will become not only a mechanism for overcoming coronavirus crisis, but also a mechanism for large-scale renewal of Ukraine’s economy on the basis of the use of the latest technologies. Prospects for further research in this direction are the creation and adapting of novel forms of remote labor, their formalization, institutional and legal support, the construction of new models of full-fledged social partnership between the State, business and civil society in the sphere of labor and employment, etc.

At the Door of the Theater: Kafka’s Oklahama Theater and the Nature Theater Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-123
Author(s):  
Marit Grøtta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Nature

Abstract The Nature theater of Oklahama in Der Verschollene is one of Kafka’s most enigmatic inventions, widely known through Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reading of it as a theater of gestures. This article explores the intertextual archive of Kafka’s novel, bringing into play an entry hitherto overlooked: the nature theater movement in the early twentieth century, promoted by the conservative Heimatkunstbewegung. Discussing the historical nature theater, on the one hand, and Benjamin’s and Agamben’s theater of gestures, on the other, the article examines the conceptions of life that come into play in the novel (life as career, life as theater, life as gesture) and considers the fate of the protagonist in this light. Seeing the question of inclusion/exclusion as key to Kafka’s novel, the article argues that it exposes the thin line between utopia and dystopia and allows us to reflect on the dangers as well as the possibilities of modernity.

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-138
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Almost All

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.

Had There Been a Papist

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-44
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
American Religion ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Litmus Test

This opening chapter revisits Hawthorne’s foundational The Scarlet Letter to initiate a proto-Catholic mode of inquiry and to leverage a renegade Catholic sense of divinity already at work within the Protestant American reflexive imagination. It begins with the recognition that The Scarlet Letter is mandatory not only because the novel has been used as the primary scene of instruction, top to bottom, in what constitutes true, and truly American, religion—correct conviction, just action, clear conscience—but also because, countermanding that instruction, the novel makes the bodily experience of spirit—a felt consecration of sexuality, including its violence—the litmus test for religious matters, in anticipation of Robert Orsi and the new religious historians. This chapter initiates a three-part experiment in analytical counter-exegesis: it explores the Marian-Catholic force of Hester’s felt sexual consecration, radiant motherhood, and supernatural issue (her daughter Pearl); it re-identifies the origins of Hawthorne’s story of homosocial stalking (Chillingworth) and ratcheted-up guilt (Dimmesdale) in the ancient Mediterranean folk tales of wandering prelates, cuckolded husbands, and murderous vengeance; and it presses beyond the transcendentalist claims of Hawthornian symbolism (that letter “A” on Hester’s smock) to discover and effect his nascent practice of material sacramentality. Tutoring a shift in the reader’s relationship to the novel, the chapter instigates an alternative mode of anti-Puritan dissent than Emersonian proto-feminist individualism, while practicing stylized criticism as a Catholicizing of criticism—establishing not only content (text, archive, value) but form, including modes of evidence, channels of access, and strategies of address, for a Catholic criticism.

scholarly journals CONCERNING CULTURAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENT; THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN GRISHAM’S THE STREET LAWYER

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Nasrullah Nasrullah
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Condition ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Interesting Aspect ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The Social

This paper is about the role of intellectuals and America’s civil society movement in the struggle of poor people and the homeless in Washington, USA, to claim their rights in Grisham’s The Street Lawyer. Both of these are called cultural and political movement. The author analyzes the discrepancy in USA in Reagan’s era. The interesting aspect of the novel is the role of legal clinic for homeless and the intellectual from NGO and social organization constructed in the novel. This paper uses genetic structuralism in analysis. Aspect of intrinsic and extrinsic of the work is the object of material of the analysis. Otherwise, the theories about intellectual and civil society movement by Antonio Gramsci are the extrinsic tools to describe how the social condition in that era is. The results of the analysis indicates the discrepancy in America, especially in Washington DC. The street lawyer and the intellectuals of some social organizations have the significant roles as the part of America’s social movement in creating equality and social welfare for all. Those case are founded in the analysis of the novel.

The Politics Through Arts and Culture: On Slovenian Literary Nationalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-110
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National State ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
Political Agents ◽  
Expanded Concept

The expanded concept of work of art that challenges the boundaries of aesthetic theory and directs the attention toward the artistic service as a flexible cognitive activity is useful in the field of politics. Today's societies are faced with the expanded concept of the political that is set at the intersection of politics-as-we-know-it (including the national state and the parliament) and the novel modes of the (post)political including the activities of civil society, international organizations, and the cultural. This chapter refers to the Slovenian literary nationalism as one of the key Slovenian ideological state apparatuses that is at play in today's Slovenian politics and is deeply affected by not-just-political agents from economy, religion, lifestyle, and culture. The criticism of literary nationalism is not directed towards the activity of writing and the literary world but towards institutions that form a literary-ideological, interpretative, and propaganda context of national literary production.

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