The Litterscape and the Nude
History Escapes in Mansur Bushnaf's Al-ʿilka (Chewing Gum)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8965620 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Charis Olszok (University of Cambridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020743818000478 |
| OpenAlex | W2906082023 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Mansur Bushnaf's al-ʿIlka (Chewing Gum; 2008) is the author's sole novel, born of his twelve-year imprisonment in a Libyan jail, and his reflection on the nation's subjection to international marginalization and dictatorial rule under Gaddafi. The novel is centered on a 19th-century nude which confounds all who encounter it, and which lies neglected in a corner of Tripoli's Red Palace Museum. Through this statue, and the novel's broader poetics of stasis and “chewing,” I explore how turāth in Bushnaf's work, and wider Libyan fiction, is depicted through its abject vulnerability and exposure to historical vicissitudes, reflecting the parallel exclusion of human lives from rights and agency. In al-ʿIlka , I examine how this is formulated into a defamiliarizing perspective on the postmodern, and on historical trauma and erasure, in which the possibility of narrative is a driving concern, rooted in existential reflection, as well as the real precarity of those who tell stories in Libya
Agency (philosophy · Art · Criminology · Existentialism · Imprisonment · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology
A History of Modern Libya
A History of Modern Libya
Conflicted Antiquities
The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited
Egypt as a Woman
Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Forgotten Voices
Identity, Modernity, and the Destruction of Heritage
On Creaturely Life
Creaturely Poetics
The origin of German tragic drama
Of Other Spaces
Dans les sables libyens
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |