Neoliberal contradictions, necrocapitalist nightmares
Questions of human agency and free will in Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21726519 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jamil Khader (0000-0002-4713-5426, Bethlehem University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 195-217 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-04 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Middle Eastern Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1475-262X • E-ISSN: 1475-2638 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1475262x.2024.2318207 |
| OpenAlex | W4392366355 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 31 |
This article argues that the major fantastic conceit, the Whatsitname (the shisma), in Ahmad Sa'dāwī's novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad, functions as an allegory for the repressed totality of necrocapitalist rationality in the postcolonial global South. Sa'dāwī's novel seemingly privileges postmodern and neoliberal ideologemes such as individual choice that blame the death and violence in Iraq on people's actions and representations. Nonetheless, the novel paradoxically attributes the human condition and the consequences of human actions to invisible structural forms of power and larger-than-life supernatural powers namely, the Whatsitsname as an allegory for necrocapitalism, that ultimately undermine human agency and freedom. I will examine the ways in which this tension is articulated in the novel through the production of the fantasy of a unified nation, homoerotic desire, and class politics. The novel ultimately reflects Iraqi subjects' deeper ontological anxieties about the circulation of their bodies in the necrocapitalist market
Aesthetics · Allegory · Art · Blame · Dialectic · Epistemology · Fantasy · Literature · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Rationality · Social science · Sociology · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Psychology · Social Psychology · Turkey's Politics and Society
The Anti-Jacobin Novel
The Parallax View
What Is Sex?
Fantasy
Capital
The Attack of the Blob
The Human Condition
Bearing the Word
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
Male bonding
The Educational Legacy of Romanticism
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad as a case study of consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in Arabic–English literary translation
Scale in the Balance
Necrocapitalism
The Return of Scheherazade, or the Rise of the Iraqi Novel after 2003
Frankenstein in Baghdad
I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night
The Negative Oedipus
| Highly cited | No |
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