Abstract
It is a given nowadays to speak of history and narrative as basically sharing the same properties and directions. Borderlines are no longer as strongly demarcated as they were in the heyday of literary writing in the last century, when “new critics” exercised close analysis of the makeup of texts without contexts. With the conspicuous rhetorical turn in the humanities and social sciences under the strident poststructuralist theories and global economic decentralization processes there is more conflation than separation. Narrative and history sound synonymously applicable to any art that has something to tell: an anecdote, a happening, even a piece of news. Hayden White’s writings were received with this understanding among generations of scholars who were told that in each work of fiction there is a blurred component of hi/story.1 Gérard Genette and the French school provide many sophisticated proposals in this context.2 The dominating postmodernist mode with a strong deconstructionist bent can no longer accept a one-sided view of reading that deprives readers from an understanding that is wider than the mechanics of a text. This may fail to account for the place of a text in knowledge formation processes; the text assumes more meaning in relation to other texts that make up an attitude or a movement. This is a dynamic that operates no less in narrative than history.
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Notes
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
See Muhsin al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 62–63. In his autobiography al Ayyām, Taha Husayn, then a student in Paris, reports a meeting with Zaghlul, where the latter gives his
Taha Husayn, An Egyptian Childhood: The Autobiography of Taha Hussein, trans. E. H. Paxton (London: Routledge and Sons, 1932; reprint London: Heinemann, 1981.
Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, trans. Salma Khadra Jayussi and Trevor Le Gassick (New York: Vantage, 1982), 51.
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1969; reprint Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1992).
Sultan ibn Muhammad al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
Ahmad Bilal, “A Voice From the Earth,” in Oranges in the Sun: Short Stories from the Arabian Gulf, ed. and trans. Deborah A. Akers and Abubaker A. Bagader (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008), 112–17. This anthology presents 49 short stories from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
Yacoub Yousef al-Hijji, Nawakhidhat al-Safar al-Shira‘i fi al-Kuwayt (The Deep-Sea Nakhodas of Kuwait) (Kuwait: Al-Rubay‘an, 1993). See also Fahad Ahmad Bishara, “Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf,” in this volume.
Muhammad al-Murr, Fayadan qalb (Overflow of Feelings) (Dubai: Al-Bayan Printing House, 2000), 33–56.
Muhammad al-Murr, “Jasmine,” in Dubai Tales, trans. Peter Clark (London: Forest Books, 1991), 96.
Muhammad al-Murr, “The Visit,” in The Wink of the Mona Lisa and Other Stories from the Gulf, trans. Jack Briggs (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 1994), 107.
Amina Abu Shihab, “Hayāj,” in Qisas qasīrah min al-Imārāt (Short Stories from the Emirates) (Sharjah: Writers’ Union Publications, 1992).
‘Abd al-Khaliq Abd-Allah, Al-Harakah al-thaqāfiyyah f al-Imārāt (The Cultural Movement in the Emirates) (Abu Dhabi: Cultural Foundation Publications, 2000). 14
Salma Matar Seif, “Al-Nashid” (“The Sound of Singing”), in Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), 100–07.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 50.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xvii.
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© 2014 Lawrence G. Potter
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al-Musawi, M. (2014). Narrating the Gulf: Literary Evidence for History. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in Modern Times. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485779_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485779_5
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