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The nineteenth-century American novelist, Herman Melville, is oftentimes viewed as a multi-cultured innovator who possibly anticipated post-modernism. In his epic romance, Mardi, Melville incorporates aspects of Orientalism within a Westernized framework, thereby eroding cultural borders. This article focuses on Arabian Nights as one possible parent text for Mardi on the one hand, and on Melville's naturalization of certain Orientalist concepts in his novel on the other. Furthermore, it explores the question of whether Melville “whitewashes” the Eastern narrative to naturalize the text and thus familiarize Westerners with a foreign culture in the spirit of multi-culturalism, or whether he simply subscribes to the Orientalist stereotypes prevalent in nineteenth-century America.

This article argues that Jordanian American novelist Diana Abu-Jaber subverts the Western Orientalist representations of Arab masculinity by introducing the image of the emasculated Other in her novel Crescent (2003). In the novel, Hanif Al Eyad's loss of home triggers an internalized sense of failed masculinity, as the agony of being severed from his family ties in Iraq engenders male impotence. This discussion draws on the notion of the unheimlich to examine the recurring, crippling anxieties that disrupt Hanif's love affair with Sirine, and explores the influence of the sociopolitical movement of Al-Futuwwa on Hanif's conceptions of masculinity and national allegiance.Drawing on the notion of the unheimlich, which suggests an encounter with something that is simultaneously strange and familiar, together with the Arab sociopolitical construction of Al-Futuwwa, this article explores the diasporic anxieties of Iraqi male subjectivity in Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent (2003). Abu- Jaber's novel tells the story of Hanif Al Eyad, an exiled Iraqi professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at a university in Los Angeles. Hanif grew up in Iraq during the height of Al-Futuwwa, a sociopolitical movement that was initiated and that flourished during the first half of the twentieth century, which marked the intersection of institutionalized nationality and Iraqi male identity. Not only does Hanif lament the loss of Iraq, but he is also distressed by the disappearance of Al-Futuwwa and the fracturing of his masculine identity, which he fears acknowledging to his hybridized, half-American girlfriend, Sirine. This internalized rupture of masculinity manifests in the recurrence of the unheimlich, which generates an estranging feeling of impotence.Diana Abu-Jaber has enjoyed literary success as one of the few Arab American women writers whose works emphasize Arab American ethnicity. Critics such as Abdelrazek have often argued that Abu-Jaber, like other Arab American writers, explores issues of hyphenated identities and living between two worlds,in the sense of always being both Arab and American and yet being completely neither Arab nor American ... [with] characters who simultaneously embrace and resist both American and Arab culture as they are forever negotiating the two cultures ... working to explore and create fluid dynamic hybrid identities for themselves. (xiii)Similarly, Nouri Gana points out that what distinguishes Abu-Jaber's Crescent is the intense feeling of the loss of home or homeland, as "the novel manages-albeit provisionally-to figure forth a complex mosaic of Arab singularities on American soil. In particular, the novel dramatizes, with compelling poignancy, both the piercing sense of dislocation and alienation that permeates Arab exilic identity" (2008: 242). Moreover, Carol Fadda-Conrey explores the ethnic ambiguities associated with Arab identity as the novel "raises an important question about the overriding ethnic ambiguities that often engulf people of color in the US" (2006: 203). Indeed, Crescent depicts the ways in which the anxiety and estrangement felt by immigrants and exiles affect Arab masculinity. In the novel, recurring motifs such as terror and guilt, the results of his sense of obligation to Al-Futuwwa, define Hanif's unheimlich reality.The notion of the "uncanny" can be traced to Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche," and its influence can still be felt strongly in the twenty-first century: "At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, the Freudian uncanny leaps from the domain of criticism back into the domain of art, where it influences the visual arts as well as fiction" (Masschelein, 2011: 3). Freud explores the uncanny in terms of language, semantics, and literature, and in relation to psychoanalytical practice: "In the most basic definition, proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1919, the uncanny is the feeling of unease that arises when something familiar suddenly becomes strange and unfamiliar" (Masschelein, 2011: 1). …

IntroductionEdward Said's Orientalism (1978), adopting Michel Foucault's formula was a genealogical attempt to expose an error around Orient history which the West had adopted as a truth. Said was proclaiming that the Orientalists' as "shoddy historians"2 utilizing Ursprungsphilosophie3 had manufactured a "system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later Western empire."4 The Orientalists' and colonial officials' customary pursuit of a flawed Ursprung [origin] in the Orient was to confirm that their imperial ventures rested on rigid historical necessities and erudite intentions.5 Yet, although unheeded, Said goes one-step further, for him, complex fabricated mythologies founded and embellished by EurocentricOrientalist6 historical illusions did not only subjectify7 the Oriental subject but also its Weltanschauung [cosmovision], subjectivity,8 and aspirations.Taking Said's proposition into perspective, this work exposes another case of Nietzschean pudenda origo [shameful origins]9-what I call counter-revolution- ary discourse (CRD). This is a historicized regime of truth and a system of thought with distinctive but homologous analytical devices which I have previously denominated: recrudescence of fanaticism, progress fetishism, and outsourcing of agency. I hypothesized that through this regime of truth and its various dispositions, techniques, and functionings, Western colonial apparatus surveils, familiarizes, gauges, labels, and finally subjectifies the colonized subject's resistance.Via Foucault's genealogy, this philosophical historicization aims to further explore the "archeology of the silence"10 of the Arab and Middle Eastern rebel. The questions I put forward here are simple, if everything about the Oriental is objectified by imperial hegemonic discourses, as Said postulates, what does that mean for its resistance? How have imperial structures of power and its Youngean "white mythologies"11 historically re-presented the thingified subject's revolutions? Is there a hidden and buried Saidian "evaluative judgment" and an "implicit program of action" regarding Middle Eastern resistance in Western history? If so, what is its specific norm, what are the conditions of its rise, expansion, and variation?In the first section, I introduce and give a detailed genealogical account of the emergence of this CRD and its three analytical devices. I investigate the ensembles of this discursive formation through tracking and tracing its enonces [discursive statements] from William of Tyre, Louis VII of France, Comte de Volney, and Napoleon to Gustave Le Bon, among many others. In the process, I demonstrate how the production of a certain kind of Eurocentric-Orientalist savoir12 [institutionalized knowledge] (CRD), colonial institutions of power, and the infinite technicians of evaluation13 (Orientalist scholars, colonial officials, military officers, journalists, novelists, etc.) conjointly come to symbolically and materially create a subject (the Oriental rebel).In the second section, through a close textual reading of British, French, and American archives, declassified government documents, military and intelligence reports, memoirs, as well as journalistic and scholarly materials, drawing from the case studies of Urabi (1879-82), Mahdi (1881-89), Egyptian Revolutions of 1919 and 1952, Mossadegh Revolt (1952), Lebanese Revolution (1958), Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO 1964), Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK 1978), and the more recent Arab uprisings (2010), I empirically demonstrate not only how CRD and its three symbolic instruments of violence, in an Althusserian sense, hail to the Oriental's resistance and subjectify it,14 but also reaffirm that the Oriental rebel, in Western history, is the product of nothing but the nexus of specific techniques of imperial power and its ever-expanding system of knowledges. …

Retranslation is of special importance to the aesthetics of pluralism and translatability in new immigrant writing, a literary subgenre that pieces together the dialogic potential of translation and postcolonial writing. Thus, a theoretical study of Arab-British immigrant narratives and their representation of Arabs against a long history of invisibility and exclusion can be inextricably linked up to the politics of retranslation, rewriting, relocation, and cultural repollination that are abundantly featured in the postcolonial era. This article examines the politics of retranslation in Arab-British literature that is represented by Leila Aboulela's The Translator (1999) and Lyrics Alley (2010).In a broad sense, this article examines how new immigrant writing employs retranslation according to the postcolonial paradigms of identity and gender. The question of identity and gender has gained a wide currency in the post-Arab-Spring political and cultural discourse due to the escalating tensions among the different Arab social strata that resulted from emerging identitarian politics and gendered exclusion. Many post-revolution workshops and seminars, for instance, focused on the risk of identityand gender-based marginalization, the concept of citizenship in relation to diverse identities (religious, ethnic, tribal, and familial) that sometimes interfere in the expectedly direct relationship between the citizen and the state, and basically the problematic relationship between religion, identity, and democracy.3 Inscribed as migration-oriented in new immigrant writing, the identity paradigm offered by Aboulela foregrounds relocation and retranslation across different cultural zones. It seeks to deconstruct how the classical identitarian and essentialist grids of region, nation, religion, race, ethnicity, and class are rewritten according to the new politics of what Bassam Tibi calls "post-bipolarity", fundamentally a political ideology that is grounded in cultural dialogue and transnational exchange as viable tools of the resolution of cultural tensions and international conflicts. The gender paradigm spotlights the mechanism through which gendered memory reinforces self-empowerment and the construction of selfhood in migrant societies. It similarly seeks to destabilize cultural stereotypes of Arab women at homeland and abroad.Co unter-Orientalism and RetranslationIn his article, "Orientalism Once More," Edward Said inexplicitly articulates the urgent need for embracing cultural translation and counter-Orientalism in the post-9/11 political discourse that is basically concerned with the (misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims in Western media and political communities. Framed in response to the apocalyptic events of 9/11 and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, Said's article attempts to conceptualize the significance of reconstructing revisionary and oppositional spaces that could stand against unverifiable fictions about Arab backwardness and Islamic menace. He pinpoints that such counterdiscourse must be produced by cultural translators or what he calls "independent intellectuals," who can "provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones based on mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long" (Said, 2004: 875). In other words, Arab intellectuals and writers are recommended to follow Said's intellectual stance that attempts to relink two incompatible worlds by forging a new humanistic space comprising a historical knowledge of both self and other.4 Such an alternative humanistic model of counter-Orientalism thus adopts a critical universalism that implies the double process of deconstructing canonical myths of self and reinscribing potential solidarity with the other. Founded on a liminal structure that befits times of transition, counter-Orientalism stands at the medial position between what Sadik Jalal Al-'Azm calls "Ontological Orientalism" and "Orientalism in Reverse" or "reversed Orientalism. …

There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's thesis of the "affiliation of knowledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature, Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).Keywords: Edward Said, Orientalism, power, imperialism, discourse, cultureEdward Said was obsessed with beginnings. However, his beginnings were never really about going back passively, but about actively making something new, or as Timothy Brennan prefers, Said "translated it [counter-tradition] into a particular idiom" (2008: 4), which inevitably meant challenging what was already there - and Orientalism was a part of what was there. It can safely be said that Said effectively began the interrogation of Western discourse on the other, and thus began a new field of study called "postcolonialism." Orientalist discourse represented for Said an especially poignant example of the "affiliation of knowledge with power" (Said, 1997: xlix):Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient- dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (1978: 3)Said's detractors, however, contend that many Western Orientalist scholars were in it for intellectual curiosity as Said observes: "Lewis has been busy responding to my argument, insisting that the Western quest for knowledge about other societies is unique, that it is motivated by pure curiosity" (1985 : 96); or even for showing Arabs and Muslims in a positive light as Ibn Warraq has attempted to do in Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007). How easily Ibn Warraq wipes out the disastrous effects of colonization and conquest, seeing it as a force of modernization, i.e. a civilizing mission (2007: 29). Even more mainstream scholars of Muslim backgrounds from the Arab world have attempted to discredit Said in their own quest for Western recognition and accolades; one of these writers calls literary Orientalism a "labour of love" (Al-Dabbagh, 2010: 29). Other Orientalist scholars, such as Robert Irwin (2006) and Daniel Martin Varisco (2007), have disputed Said's thesis of the pivotal link between Orientalist scholarship and power by pointing out some weakly translated words and phrases in Said's work and isolated "sympathetic" Orientalist examples, which they believe would dismantle Said's thesis. However, the isolated example, the allegedly misused word, the bothersome turn of phrase or the weakly translated quotation from one source or another do not detract from the overpowering discourse, partly made up of Orientalist scholarship, carefully constructed media images, think tank and area expert discourses that are aimed at bringing about a certain cultural and political reality, which would be translated into military action and economic and cultural policies and strategies for generations to come. Is Orientalist thinking innocent, and was Said wrong about his main thesis of linking the West's archive on the East to power? Why are area studies in the United States well funded and carefully watched? The US House of Representatives passed a bill, "HR 3077," which would require international studies departments to "show more support" for American foreign policy or lose federal funding, especially after the "pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies departments" (Michelle Goldberg quoted in Afzal-Khan, 2005: 22). …

This article examines Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989) as two postcolonial novels seeking to rewrite the history of Palestinian and Indian diaspora according to their respective myths of Oriental vampires. Habiby's recycling of the Palestinian folktale of the ghoul and Mukherjee's recuperation of the Hindu myth of Lord Shiva aim to spotlight the classical vampirictopoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Postcolonial Gothic writing is thus shown to foreground gender, nationality, and ethnicity as sites of both power conflict and cultural exchange. Adopting a counter-Orientalist approach, the study sheds light on the different strategies these two postcolonial texts employ to deconstruct the demonic and ghostly constructions of Arabs and Indians.Keywords: postcolonial gothic, vampire, ghoul, Arabic folktale, Hindu myth, othernessThis article seeks to examine how postcolonial texts profit from the mythical narratives of vampires to problematize the power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. The vampire tradition is accordingly inscribed and recycled according to the collective Oriental heritage to articulate the untold stories of the muffled Eastern subject. Drawing on the mythical narratives of the ghoul (ogre) in classical Arabic culture and old Arabic folktales and of Lord Shiva in the Hindu myth, this article compares the rewritings of the vampire topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in both Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul 's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989). The metamorphosis of Saraya into a laughing muse and Jasmine into a potent goddess can be taken to represent the liminal state of Dracula between life and death on the one hand and the convergence of cultures on the other hand. Where these two works differ principally is in the geographic location of this site of cultural interaction. Whereas Habiby (1 922- 1 996), the Palestinian writer, traces the predicament of Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian diaspora, Mukherjee (1940-), the Indian American writer, writes of the potential synthesis of Indian and American culture in the context of globalization. The mythical nameless horror of both the Arabic ghoul and the Indian lord Shiva is thus rewritten to counter the taboo on speaking on behalf of the victim rather than the victimizer and the colonized rather than the colonizer. This article argues that the Western Gothic trope of the vampire is appropriated by the postcolonial texts under study to represent native subject matter and perspective without slipping into the dominant discourse. It, moreover, considers these two postcolonial works in terms of counter-Orientalist discourse that simultaneously deconstructs Orientalist exoticism and eroticism and constructs a counter-image of Oriental agency as put to use at different geopolitical and historical contexts.The Oriental Vampire and the PostcolonialThe connection between the Gothic and the postcolonial is inescapable in a globalized culture governed by a hyperreal universe that presents itself as its own simulation. Popular Culture representations of otherness in relation to the ghostly and the demonic are intrinsically associated with an exquisite amalgam of the imagery of Eurocentrism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Edward Said discusses the abnormality and extremism of "terrorism" and "fundamentalism" as basically grounded in "international or transnational imaginary made up of foreign devils," a typical simulacrum in which "Others' are finally seen as enemies, bent on destroying our civilization and way of life" (1993: 375-376). By comparison, in the realm of literary studies, the intermeshing of the Gothic and the postcolonial or rather the dominance of Gothic motifs in postcolonial fiction has been critically surveyed with special regard to the prevalence of Otherness, reverse-colonization, and the issue of identity politics. …