Politics, Poetics, Piety

The Epilogue returns to novelist and critic Maḥmud Al-Masʿadī, to discuss his 1957 epistolary exchange with the Egyptian critic and writer Ṭāhā Ḥusayn—the figurehead par excellence of the nahḍa [Arab ‘Renaissance’] and Arab Modernist movement. Ḥusayn transposed al-Masʿadī’s fiction into the politically charged debates on literary commitment [engagement] and existentialism that preoccupied intellectuals across the decolonizing world. The exchange sheds light on the ways in which the elision of cultural production from the Maghreb in critical literature on the nahḍa works in concert with the framing of Arab modernity as a secular project. The chapter argues that al-Masʿadī’s literary and critical writings—like those of Abdelwahab Meddeb, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi, and Muḥammad Barrāda—invite us to reimagine the relationship between culture, politics, and ethics. Their works envision the public intellectual as an ethical subject engaged in narrative acts of creation.

Postfrancophone

I conclude Pacifist Invasions by arguing for the continued relevance and urgency of the translational and intertextual perspectives afforded by poetry and poetics in both French and Arabic, and by probing the on-going debates in French and Francophone studies with regard to the new lyric studies. I develop the notion of the postfrancophone as one means of broaching these debates, a concept that I historicize and develop based on the preceding poetic analyses, and with particular reference to Jean-Marie Gleize’s recent coinage, postpoésie or ‘postpoetry.’ I end with a polemical reappraisal that revisits what I am construing to be the central case of Abdelwahab Meddeb, and with a re-evaluation of the history of Meddeb scholarship. I insist on the textual and poetic underpinnings of the field of French and Francophone studies, its future, and what I dub postfrancophonie. In light of both past and present aesthetic, translational, and intertextual engagements, I call for a thorough reassessment of the longstanding critical division between French and Arabic literary cultures.