Caroline R. Rooney

Narratives of Southern African farms.

This paper will attempt to specify a literary genre of farm narrative, canonically exemplified by Schreiner, Lessing and Coetzee, in order to raise the question of what alternative narratives there may be. Narratives of entrapment or regression will be juxtaposed with artistic and autobiographical expositions offering a pioneering myth and logic, served to open up overlooked questions of autonomy and local community. Particular attention will be given to one illustration (author will supply illustration), literally a watercolour painting that can be seen to undo certain expectations of the farm setting established by the dominant literary tradition.

Prison Israel-Palestine: literalities of criminalization and imaginative resistance

This article offers a reflection on the Palestinian experience of imprisonment. It begins by addressing the settler logic of criminalization and goes on to identify how this criminalization extends to the systematic thwarting of resistance. In engaging with different kinds of prison writing and art, it further explores the relationship between the literality of imprisonment and the imagination as a question of collective consciousness.

What is the oceanic

Is there such a thing as the oceanic? Can we just say (the) oceanic is? The oceanic is . . . as movement, yet it does nothing, goes nowhere. It is being as a verb. The oceanic is to be. The oceanic is not to come. The oceanic is not the event of an arrival. It is the desire to be as only the desire to be. It is a desiring to live as only the desire to live. It is a desire for no thing other than being the desire that it is, a desire that wishes to go on desiring: to be. This wants to be left and allowed. So this essay can but be an interruption of the oceanic, a non-miraculous parting of the sea. As a psychological term of affect, ‘‘the oceanic’’ or ‘‘oceanic feeling’’ is often traced to the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland, a correspondence that is made partially public in the opening pages of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. In being made public, the key question is whether or not the oceanic can be recognised. That is what Freud specifically considers: to what extent is it a familiar feeling or not? His discussion of the oceanic has a strangely and appropriately liminal, or littoral, status in his book. It is turfed up or surfed between the confessional intimacies of a friendship and a discussion of civilisation no less, a discussion that turns out to have little to do with the oceanic. It arises as a betweenyou-and-me that prefaces, even as it is excluded from, a civil discourse of the civil. In this attempt to introduce the oceanic, I will begin with this psychoanalytic mise-en-scène before addressing the oceanic in terms of a literary prefacing, specifically as can be found in the opening pages of Moby Dick. I hope thereby to indicate why it might be useful to consider the oceanic in terms of a poetics and an ethics. The two full-length psychoanalytic studies of the oceanic feeling that follow on from the dialogue of Rolland and Freud are: J.M. Masson’s The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Mysticism in Ancient India and W.B. Parsons’ The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Oceanic Feeling of Mysticism. As these titles indicate, the oceanic borders on the mystical; relatively less explored is the oceanic’s widespread aesthetic and literary significance. I wish to deploy the term ‘‘the oceanic’’ in much the same way as we would speak aesthetically of ‘‘the sublime’’ or ‘‘the uncanny.’’ However, it will also be my concern to problematise this as a generic classification; ultimately the oceanic, in pertaining to the cosmic, might be best understood as a-generic. Nonetheless, the open question is one of caroline rooney

Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Conscious Pariah: Harare, Ramallah, Cairo

This article entertains the possibility that new, locally-embedded cosmopolitanisms, critical of the violence inflicted by various forms of colonialism and globalization, are not just a matter of locus, or location, or topos, but also a question of the utopian. I begin with some autobiographically based observations related to a certain barely-documented social formation I witnessed as a young woman in colonial Rhodesia, and develop the scope of analysis by relating the notion of utopian solidarity among pariahs to cultural imaginings of three differently cosmopolitan cities. It will be proposed that what is at stake in defining utopian cosmopolitanism is a certain cultural metaphori city (a term that will be gradually explicated), encapsulated here in the process of tracing submerged similarities in the cultural histories of Harare, Ramallah and Cairo, and engaging with the work of Dambudzo Marechera, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif.

“In less than five years”: Rehab Bassam interviewed by Caroline Rooney, Dar Al-Shorouk, Nasr City, Cairo, April 2010

Rehab Bassam is a young Egyptian woman blogger whose blog was published in Arabic as the best-selling Orz Belaban L’shakhseen [2008; Rice Pudding for Two]. The interview was conducted at the Dar Al-Shorouk publishing house in Cairo, for which Rehab works. The discussion attends to the culture of blogging in Egypt, and its role in developing activist networks and forms of democratic consciousness. Towards the end of the interview, there is an expression of optimism in the growing movement for social justice, an affirmation of the observed momentum of what was to become, less than a year later, the Egyptian revolution.

THE DISAPPOINTED OF THE EARTH

This essay offers a consideration of how the affect of chronic disappointment contributes to the formation of extreme beliefs. It debates how the disappointment in question is a matter of social class and the desire for self-betterment, contesting the assumption that fundamentalism constitutes a simple rejection of modernity. The essay also attempts to theorize the ways in which chronic disappointment can lead to the establishment of what is formulated in terms of ‘pariah elitism’. In moving from a consideration of Al Aswanys The Yacoubian Building and Herzls Alteneuland to a consideration of colonial and postcolonial situations in Southern Africa, it broaches the question of how chronic disappointment serves to challenge both the othering of extremism and extremisms otherings. Finally, the essay suggests that there is a distinction to be maintained between the idealism of extremism and a praxis of good faith.

Egypt’s revolution, our revolution: revolutionary women and the transnational avant-garde

This article addresses the phenomenon of the Egyptian revolution as an event that is simultaneously specifically Egyptian and universal in its import. It does so through developing the concept of a transnational avant-garde as a constellation of aspirations from ‘the common ground’, the advancements of revolutionary women, and the undoing of the distinction between art and life. Particular attention is paid to insights offered by the work of Ahdaf Soueif, Maggie Awadalla, Ethel Mannin and Huda Lutfi, especially with respect to how the past is maintained in the present.

From Cairo to Tottenham: Big Societies, Neoliberal States, Colonial Utopias

While the August riots are quite readily understood as an outburst provoked by the negligence of the neoliberal state, there has been a widespread failure amongst Western commentators and politicians to understand the extent to which the Egyptian revolution should also be understood as an uprising against neoliberalism. This essay draws on cultural sources, journalism and socio-economic analyses to make the case that Mubarak’s Egypt could be understood in terms of neoliberal forms of the Big Society, especially, that of the gated community. In demonstrating the reliance of the neoliberal state on security policies based on policing, the essay goes on to analyse the riots in such terms. Even as the Egyptian revolution and the riots shared similar sources of frustration, their quite different manifestations are explained in terms of differing structures of feeling, those of dignity and pride. Finally, a postcolonial framework of analysis is brought to bear on the material considered by the essay to show the persistence of the colonial structures of neoliberal capitalism.

Arab Cultural Studies – Thinking Aloud: Theorizing and Planning for the Future of a Discipline

AV: In putting together this volume on Arab cultural studies, I have had to be sensitive to the discursively loaded term “culture”. What would you say are the areas most in need of critical attention today? TS: One question concerning Arab “culture” that has yet to be answered in any systematic or meaningful way is that of “cultural temporality” or what we call in Arabic, since this is a volume about Arab cultural studies, al-zaman al-thakafi. What is the relationship between time and culture? How do we define cultural time? Making use of Jean Piaget’s concept of l’inconscient cognitif, alJabri (1991, p. 44) argues that Arab cultural temporality is itself problematic and calls for the structural reorganization of its parts or phases so that it can function in a linear fashion. He shows how the temporality of a reason’s structure shares the same temporality with the culture to which it belongs. As such, he argues that Arab reason’s temporality is also the temporality of Arab culture. In the case of Arab culture, and unlike European cultural temporality, argues alJabri (1991, pp. 38–39), the old and the contemporary coexist on the same stage, creating a kind of confusion in Arab cultural temporality. This relationship we have between the old and the new, argues al-Jabri, is unconscious, as what we forget of culture does not simply vanish but stays in the unconscious. In this case, advances al-Jabri (1991, pp. 38–39), reason as an epistemological tool produces and is constructed in “an unconscious way”. Other examples can be given from Arab “cultural criticism”, especially work by the Saudi scholar Abdullah al-Ghathami, whose archaeological project on modern Arab poetry JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2–3 (APRIL–JULY 2012)

Ahdaf Soueif in conversation with Caroline Rooney, Cairo University, 12 April 2010

This conversation between Caroline Rooney and Ahdaf Soueif took place at Cairo University on 12 April 2010 as part of a symposium on “Egyptian Literary Culture and Egyptian Modernity”.