Gender and the politics of Arab literary culture, 1945--1975 (Layla Ba'lbakki, Lebanon, Nizar Kabbani, Syria, Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian)

In contrast to the established narratives of late twentieth century Arabic literature, this dissertation argues that gender was fundamental to the construction of politically engaged literature. Typically, the period from the early 1950s through the 1970s is narrativized in one of two ways. One narrative of the era stresses the post-World War II turn in literature toward public, political values in which matters of gender and sexuality play a tangential role. A second narrative of the era details the rise of women's literature from the late 1950s onward. In this narrative, gender plays a significant role, while politics are subsidiary. A more nuanced reading of the era's criticism and literature, and the roles of socialism and feminism in shaping them, reveals that masculinity and femininity, and public and private values, were neither clear nor determined. Instead, writers manipulated these values to ask their most important question of the post-independence era: what is the relationship, now, between the individual writer and the public?; Chapter 1 introduces the different strains of political engagement that emerged in the Levant and Egypt, reviewing the influence of Sartrean commitment, Marxism, feminism and more idiosyncratic leftist programs on writers and works. Chapter 2 examines how the 1964 obscenity trial of Lebanese writer Layla Ba'lbakki served as a referendum on the Lebanese nation. Chapter 3 considers the erotic works of Syrian poet Nizar Kabbani as an indication of his political intention to achieve an unmediated relationship between a “private public” and the public poet. In Chapter 4, two novels by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani are reviewed as primary examples of the masculine Palestinian return narrative forged in Palestinian politics of the same era. The feminization and popularization of this narrative after 1967 is explained in Chapter 5.