Transcript
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/1570064x-12341235 Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2012) 510-531 brill.com/jal Fiction of Scandal 1 Tarek El-Ariss University of Texas at Austin Abstract is article examines the tribulations of the Arab author in the age of social media. Focusing on Youssef Rakha, Abdo Khal, Ahmad Alaidy, Rajaa Alsanea, and Khaled Alkhamissi, I tie in acts of hacking, manipulation, and marketing in and of their works to questions of ethical ambivalenceand aesthetic uctuation, translational politics and canon formation that arise from threatening and violent encounters occurring on the street, in writing workshops, and on Twitter. I arguethat the author emerges in new writing as the fad d ā h /ah [exposer, scandalizer] who exposes andhacks political models and literary tradition only to be hacked and exposed by his/her own hack-ing and fad h . Engaging the political dimension of hacking and scandal, I examine how literatureis recoded, reimagined, and rea rmed through greed, exhibitionism, and confrontation. isstudy expands the eld of Arabic literary studies by exploring new sites of meaning and signi ca-tion, connections and associations—between browsing practices and reading; activism and writing—in a rapidly changing technological, literary, and political landscape. Keywords Scandal, Hacking, Rakha, Alaidy, Alsanea, Alkhamissi, Khal Who are you?? Why are you pretending to be me? Release this username. You area phony. All followers please note.—Salman Rushdie to an imposter on Twitter 2 Since the beginning of this century, the Arab world has been witnessing a liter-ary boom that made being an author cool again. New voices are emerging froman array of presses such as Merit, Shourouk, and Malamih in Cairo, and Adab, 1 I would like to thank Moneera Al-Ghadeer for the invaluable insights and suggestions thathelped shape this article. Names of writers discussed are as they appear in their social media communications and writings. 2 When Salman Rushdie decided to open a Twitter account, he realized that someone hadalready usurped his name. In addition to addressing the imposter directly as quoted in this pas-sage, Rushdie “then faced the indignity of having to prove his identity, answering a barrage of obscure questions from would-be followers about, among other things, his late sister Nabeela’snickname, and the sometime hiding place of the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.” In “Sal-man Rushdie Twitter Debut,” e Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/20/salman-rushdie-twitter-debut>. T. El-Ariss / Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2012) 510-531 511 Saqi, Jamal, and Jadid in Beirut, to name a few. is vibrancy has greatly ben-e ted from various local and international writing festivals (Hay), awards(International Prize for Arabic Fiction or the Arabic Booker), and literary magazines and websites ( Banipal, Wasla, Kikah ). New novels and short-story collections exhibit multiple forms of linguistic play and narrative structure,mixing techno-writing with J ā hil ī poetry, the diary genre with political cri-tique. With varying aesthetic qualities, they include one-time hits and best-sellers, vulgar scandal literature, experimental texts and postmodern takes onthe Mahfouzian narrative. ey also involve abundant references to worksby international authors such as Milan Kundera, Paolo Coelho, and Chuck Palahniuk, and are systematically in dialogue with popular culture and lmboth in the Arab world and in the US. While some are self-published andcirculate within small communities of readers, others are marketed by largerpresses and play into a new culture of “celebrity literature,” with media limelight and big-budget translation deals. ese works could be found inbookstores in Cairo and Beirut, or circulate online as PDFs, which allowsthem to reach a wider audience in countries where they might be censored orare simply unavailable. Given their modes of production and circulation,themes and narrative structures, these texts re gure notions of canon, author-ship, readership, and the literary in a rapidly changing technological and polit-ical environment. is heterogeneous body of works hailing from di erent parts of the Arab world and the diaspora has often been ignored or sidelined for being insu ciently engaged in combatting imperialism and neoliberalism. ese works have been reduced to class-based critiques of economic privilege, orread as a manifestation of new forms of disenfranchisement. For instance,Sabry Hafez identi es the new Egyptian novel as “the novel of the closed hori-zon,” which narratively and aesthetically re ects a claustrophobic materialreality tied to poverty and urban sprawl in modern day Cairo. 3 is new writing has also been dismissed as individualistic and self-centered, dealing with questions of desire and everyday life, a far cry from the concerns of Nahd aw ī udab ā [literati] 4 or the 1950s and 1960s practitioners of iltiz ā m (political commitment). 5 Moreover, sensationalist, scandalous, and tell-all 3 Sabry Hafez, “ e New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form,” New Left Review 64 (2010): 47-62, 62. 4 Authors and intellectuals in the Nahd aw ī tradition such as T ā h ā H usayn (b. 1889), Tawf ī qal-H ak ī m (b. 1898), and Yah y ā H aqq ī (b. 1905). 5 e notion of iltiz ā m , which echoes the Sartrean model of littérature engagée , takesshape in the Arab context of anti-colonial struggle, class struggle, and pan-Arabism fromthe 1950s onward. ough it is T ā h ā H usayn who rst coins the word iltiz ā m in 1947, it isSuhayl Idr ī s (b. 1923), author of al-H ayy al-Lat ī n ī [“ e Latin Quarter”], who becomes its 512 T. El-Ariss / Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2012) 510-531 narratives, which are of particular interest in this study, have been cast in post-colonial criticism as enactments of a voyeuristic Western gaze onto Arab soci-ety and Islam.In her study of Egyptian avant-gardism from the 1960s, Elisabeth Kendallo ers a nuanced de nition of “generation” as a group of innovators partaking in the same spirit and impetus in “a liminal space of contestation and change.” 6 e new writing I engage operates across class, gender, and political lines, andthus could not be associated with a cohesive group of individuals or a set of isomorphic aesthetic qualities. Rather than produce a conclusive account of a new literary genre and identify its main protagonists, it’s important to analyzethe ways in which a complex interplay of aesthetic, commercial, and politicalforces shape the contemporary scene of writing. is requires a new set of critical terms and concepts that adequately engage interactive spaces of literary production mediated by the Internet, global culture, and travel and displace-ment in the Arab world and beyond. is article focuses on the tribulations of the Arab author in the age of social media, political upheavals, and the commercialization of literature. Itexamines how new writing is de ned by its practitioners, and how authorialfunctions are produced through acts of hacking, manipulation, and market-ing. Focusing on authors such as Youssef Rakha (b. 1976), Abdo Khal (b. 1962), Ahmad Alaidy (b. 1974), Rajaa Alsanea (b. 1981), and Khaled Alkhamissi(b. 1962), I explore questions of ethical ambivalence and aesthetic uctuation,translational politics and canon formation, which arise from threatening and violent encounters occurring on the street, in writing workshops, and onTwitter. I argue that the author, traditionally understood as the function of discourse in Foucault or as the object of sacri ce in Barthes, emerges innew writing as scandalous, sensational, and vulgar. Contesting formalistic, most recognizable advocate. Idr ī s’s journal, al- Ā d ā b , founded in Beirut in 1953, becomes oneof the crucibles for iltiz ā m ’s leftist and nationalist articulations through literary criticism andphilosophy from across the Arab world. For more on this application in a number of postco-lonial novels, see Muhsin al-Musawi, e Postcolonial Arabic Novel (Leiden: Brill, 2003; reprint2005). Given its various articulations by Arab intellectuals in 1950s and 1960s, iltiz ā m calls fora literature that socially and ethically engages Arab reality within a larger nationalist narrative of progress and emancipation, thereby critiquing modernist aesthetics as bourgeois and regressive. Iltiz ā m thus becomes a vehicle of social and political transformation through writing and cul-tural production. For more on this point see Boutheina Khaldi, “Multiple Engagements,” in thisissue. See also on the reverberations and the situation in the 1950s across the region in poetry and criticism, Muhsin al-Musawi, Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (London:Routledge, 2006). Discussions in Arabic are many, especially in the writings of the 1960s, by Az ī z al-Sayyid J ā sim, S abry H ā z , Gh ā l ī Shukr ī , Iliyy ā H ā w ī and others in Al- Ā d ā b journal. 6 Elisabeth Kendall, Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde (New York: Routledge, 2006),4. See chapter three for a rigorous engagement with the theoretical framework of this term. T. El-Ariss / Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2012) 510-531 513 historical, and sociological approaches in Arabic literary studies, I explore thepolitical dimension of sensationalism and scandal and examine how literatureis recoded, reimagined, and rea rmed in instances of greed, exhibitionism,confrontation, and hacking. e Scene of Writing Hacking is rapidly replacing terrorism as the new threat to world order. emedia landscape abounds in scandals of hacking emails, mobile phones, and websites, and tampering with secure structures in order to obtain and spreadclassi ed information. Jinn-like, hackers are both good and bad, and thusambivalent in their social and political aims and constitution. 7 In Britain, thescandal of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World has been making headlinessince 2009, highlighting hacking as a way of obtaining and producing news. 8 In May 2010, Iraq-based Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, collaborating with a hacker in California, copied thousands of classi ed documents anddiplomatic correspondences and leaked them to Julian Assange, Wikileaks ’founder. 9 e hacking in both cases caused scandals for the Rupert Murdochmedia empire, British and American governments, and political groups andorganizations the world over. Anonymous , an organization of anarchist hackersor hacktivists, systematically targets government sites and nancial institu-tions. Raise Your Voice , a self-proclaimed o shoot of Anonymous , repeatedly hacked the Lebanese government websites in April 2012, protesting economicpolicies and inadequate social services. 10 is organization’s video manifestoportrays an individual wearing the mask featured in the lm, V for Vendetta 7 In the hacking world, there are white, black, and grey “hat crackers,” thereby characterizing various ethics and aims of in ltration. See “Black Hat,” Jargon File <http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/black-hat.html>. 8 As a result of the scandal, which involved hacking family victims’ mobile phones in orderfor the newspapers to in uence events and increase sales, a British parliamentary panel foundMurdoch “un t” to run his corporation. See John Burns and Ravi Somaiya, “Panel in Hacking Case Finds Murdoch Un t as News Titan,” e New York Times , 1 May 2012 <http://www .nytimes.com/2012/05/02/world/europe/murdoch-hacking-scandal-to-be-examined-by-british-parliamentary-panel.html?_r=1&hp>. 9 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Army Leak Suspect Is Turned in, by Ex-Hacker,” e New York Times ,7 June 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/08leaks.html>. 10 Oliver Holmes, “Hackers Take Down 15 Lebanese Government Websites,” Reuters , 17 April 2012 <http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/17/net-us-lebanon-hackers-idUSBRE83G0IQ20120417>.
