Subjects of the Global: An Aesthetic and Historical Inquiry into Neoliberal Change in Palestine, Israel and France 1945-2010

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The dissertation proposes a new historical understanding of Palestinian, Israeli and French-Algerian (Beur) literary imagination beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. This line of thought concentrates on the relationship between literary production and state formation, and in so doing contests and at times rejects the historical and aesthetic categories of post-Zionism and postcolonial studies, which privilege nationalism and its ideological content. Taking a new direction, the dissertation advances two claims. First, I argue that to understand changes in literary form, as well as the conditions for the emergence of aesthetic autonomy we need to account for the changing conjuncture of global capital, national political forms and the entry of immigrant population into civil society. I maintain that as economic liberalization processes separate the categories of the personal and the political, whether in a nationalist or ethnicized communities, civil society, as the site of the private, emerges as a semiautonomous third term, providing the ground and forms of literary imagination. My inquiry is then attentive to the consequences of privatization - establishment of NGOs in Palestine after the 1993 Oslo Accords, liberalization in Israel beginning in 1985, and the shift of the Algerian community from immigrants to citizens in France in the early 1980s - and understands them as moments of historical and aesthetic transformation. Second, as the sphere of private life (civil society) is separated from the sphere of the political (state), the conditions for "aesthetic autonomy" in Immanuel Kant's sense of an aesthetic activity lacking a concept emerge. For if in the first historical moment the immediacy of the "the political" provided the determinate concept, or universal, for the literary work, in the second moment the social separation of the "political" from the "private" allows for the indeterminate relation between the particular and the universal, akin to reflective (aesthetic) judgments in Kant's sense. In Palestine (Ch. 1), I trace the changes in literary political imagination as Palestine enters the global network of foreign capital flows. Such changes are associated with the creation of proto-state institutions such as the Palestinian National Authority (PA), but more importantly with the constitution of a professional civil society in the form of foreign funded NGOs. Such changes initiated a symbolic separation between the political and civil spheres and correspondingly reoriented the literary gaze. As a civil activity, separated from the Palestinian national struggle, now novels not only imagine Palestine through the individual lives of private citizens gazing into the political as a separate sphere, they are also written for a global rather than a Palestinian readership. Comparing between Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns (al-Subar, 1976) and the 21st century works of Adania Shibli, I demonstrate how the latter develops figures of "inwardness" - diaries, letters, perception - that re-imagine the relation between the subject of civil society and the sphere of the political. In Israel (Ch. 2, 3), I trace the shift from Zionist-centric to a neoliberal imagination through readings in Shimon Ballas's trilogy Tel-Aviv East, written in installments between 1950s and the 1990s. Following new globalization studies on Israel, I show that since 1985 the liberalization of the Israeli economy altered the statist model and brought about the autonomization of civil society in which private interests began operating separately from the state. Drawing from these studies, I argue that such a structural transition concomitantly altered both social subjectivities and the manner in which Israeli society is imagined. In Ballas's first and second installments, The Transit Camp and Tel-Aviv East (1950s; 1960s) we see how the struggle between the Zionist state and the Mizrahi subaltern constitutes the spatio-temporal dimensions of the world such that the outcome of the struggle is bound up with the fate of the novelistic world and its space-time. In comparison, the third installment, Outsiders (1990s), imagines a world where characters meet each other not as political subjects but as private producers and distributors of texts on the grounds of a cultural industry allegorized as the Israeli society as a whole. With the evacuation of the temporality of political organization, the novel takes a synchronic temporality, a spatial urban mapping based on the principle of paradigmatic equivalence where all characters meet each other as equivalent identities. In France (Ch. 4, 5), I argue that the shift of the Algerian immigration from the category of "migrant labor" devoid of political rights to the category of "citizen" in the 1980s concomitantly altered the nature of their literary production. If the post-1945 generation was exclusively inscribed in the category of labor and in the aesthetic category of "testimony" in which no separation exists between the body of the immigrant and his speech, then with the entry into the French state and the separation of the private from the political, work from culture, intellectual from manual labor, the conditions for the autonomy of the signifier emerged. This change is most evident in the generic shift from Mehdi Charef's picaresque novel Tea in the Harem (Le thÃ© au harem d'Archi Ahmed, 1983) to Azouz Begag's bildungsroman Shantytown Kid (Le gone du ChaÃ¢ba, 1986).