Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt

Samah Selim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030203627
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book is a critical study of the translation and adaptation of popular fiction into Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the ways in which the Egyptian nahda discourse with its emphasis on identity, authenticity and renaissance suppressed various forms of cultural and literary creation emerging from the encounter with European genres as well as indigenous popular literary forms and languages. The book explores the multiple and fluid translation practices of this period as a form of 'unauthorized' translation that was not invested in upholding nationalist binaries of originality and imitation. Instead, translators experimented with radical and complex forms of adaptation that turned these binaries upside down. Through a series of close readings of novels published in the periodical The People's Entertainments, the book explores the nineteenth century literary, intellectual, juridical and economic histories that are constituted through translation, and outlines a comparative method of reading that pays particular attention to the circulation of genre across national borders.

© The Author(s) 2019

Samah SelimPopular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in EgyptLiteratures and Cultures of the Islamic Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20362-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Samah Selim¹

(1)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Samah Selim

End Abstract

This book is a critical study of the translation of popular fiction into Arabic at the beginning of the twentieth century in Egypt, specifically, of the works published in the Cairo periodical Musamarat al-shaʿb (The People’s Entertainments, 1904–1911). More broadly, I use the periodical as a window through which to explore nahda as a discourse about modernity rooted in a socially motivated regime of translation. The book examines the ways in which the nahda simultaneously fostered and suppressed new forms of cultural and literary creativity that emerged at the turn of the century. I argue that the modernity project of reformist elites hinged on an ambivalent understanding of translation rooted in the Romantic institution of originals and copies, one that celebrated translation as the path to national enlightenment and independence while simultaneously condemning it as the source of anarchy, dependency and backwardness. As the book demonstrates, however, the fascinating translation practices of the period I examine here were not invested in nationalist binaries of authenticity and imitation. Rather, they experimented with radical and complex forms of adaptation that troubled and disarticulated these binaries.

The present introduction lays out and describes how I use the three main terms of the book’s title and proposes how, taken together, they might address key questions in the fields of cultural and postcolonial studies, comparative literature and translation studies: for example, genre formation in its social and cultural contexts; the “origins” of the novel and its place in world literature ; fidelity, equivalence and the ethics of colonial translation, and the broader and largely invisible role of translation in the production of knowledge and new cultural forms everywhere. My aim is to chip away at the hierarchies of difference that structure diffusionist and exceptionalist accounts of modernity, in both their imperial and national forms, accounts which usually tend to uphold exploitative regimes of power like the ones that are increasingly coming to dominate our contemporary world.

Nahda

What is the nahda? In both Western and Arab accounts throughout most of the last century, the term was often defined by analogy: the modern Arab “renaissance” or “awakening” instigated by the “dramatic encounter” with Europe in the nineteenth century and left at that. In the Arab world, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an intense interest in revisiting this historical moment on the part of critical theorists from North Africa to Syria, propelled by the Arab military defeat of 1967.¹ More recently, in the wake of postcolonial studies, an entire field that can loosely be described as “nahda studies” has emerged, primarily in American academia, a vibrant interdisciplinary field which includes important scholarship in intellectual and cultural history, urban studies, literary studies, gender studies and translation studies. Throughout these shifting engagements, there is a striking continuity in the way in which the term nahda marks a foundational cultural problem, in the sense of a difficulty, a puzzle or a predicament. This is the problem of Arab modernity as simulacrum or failure or trauma, a problem where the terms of engagement between a tragically renascent Arab subject and Europe are staged in a kind of melodrama of domination and affliction, and where mimicry, ambivalence, anxiety and defeat (and I might add a certain innocence in the face of domination) are alternatively or concurrently proposed as analytical keys with which to unlock the problem of nahda.

To my mind, the more preliminary problem of nahda lies in its peculiar ambiguity as a term that is both descriptive and discursive, referring simultaneously to a history and to a discourse about history that are exceedingly difficult to unwind. In the most basic sense, as a historical period, it is coterminous with the region’s integration into the imperial system and the capitalist world market, when new social and political movements, literacies, technologies, cultural forms and economic institutions and practices transformed the region. As a discourse about history, nahda typically institutes a narrative of progress that begins, for better or worse, with Europe and ends in utopias of sovereignty (the authentic or liberal self, the nation-state, the ʾumma).² Stephen Sheehi has aptly described the epistemological contours of this narrative in Foundations of Modern Arab Identity:

In the formation of modern Arab identity…the Western presence is acknowledged as a necessary mediator for social, cultural and political success and reform. Only Western intervention, specifically the physical and ontological presence of the West, bridges the gap between subjective incompetence and national unity, a gap that the Arab subject alone is allegedly unable to traverse…In their confrontation with the West’s imperialist hopes to control the region directly or indirectly…intellectuals reinscribed the very presence of the powers against which they were struggling…[which] resulted in the entrenching of a master narrative of historical success, cultural failure, and contemporary lack into the analytical apparatuses that generations would use. The West is recognized not only as masterful (in this case, mastering knowledge, social progress and civilization) but also as the eventual mediator of Arab access to, even desire for, these key objects of “concord and unity.”³

And yet, as Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss note, the nahda (as period) “…was neither a unified process or stable actor-category, nor can it be traced back to a single, incontestable moment of inception,” existing “…before there was a word for it, before that term was invested with various meanings.”⁴ The nahda discourse was largely produced from the nineteenth century onward by and for an intelligentsia thinking and writing at the intersection of orientalist and nationalist epistemes. In their auto-critiques, these nahdawi reformists, in many ways, reproduced orientalist discourse about the Arab/Muslim world.⁵ At the same time, in the 1930s and 1940s, competing and yet intersecting schools of national historiography enshrined nahda as a telos centered around the triumph of exemplary national elites, whether dynastic or bourgeois liberal.⁶ One of the most persistent ideological formations that emerged from the national school of historiography was the conception of an ethnically and culturally homogeneous Egyptian “personality” that either erased the historically plural and polyglot composition of Egyptian society or cast it as a millennial history of occupation by foreigners.⁷ In its dominant strains, the nahda discourse offered a set of disciplinary tools for managing—rather than enabling or accelerating—radical change, what Hoda Yousef refers to as the “caution and conservatism” elicited by the period’s challenges to “the natural social order.”⁸ As Omnia El Shakry explains, the “social welfare” project of nahdawi reformists referred “quite specifically to the social and political process of reproducing particular social relations –often premised on violence and coercion-…in order to ensure the successful reproduction of labor power and to minimize class antagonisms.”⁹ As implicit in its very naming, nahda discourse was backward looking: to golden ages, lost empires and pure languages. The future could only be imagined in terms of a past rooted in languages of power that for the most part considered the cultures and life worlds of the masses with contempt and also with a certain fear. As such nahda discourse was and continues to be amenable to mobilization by the authoritarian state and the most conservative political and ideological projects.¹⁰

In this book I explore the literature of a period in Egypt that is marked as nahda in the historical sense as a way of elaborating a critique of nahda in the discursive sense outlined earlier. I do this by bracketing the framework of Europe as necessary mediator and, as Tarek El-Ariss has proposed, “perform[ing] instead a careful exploration of spaces of critique”¹¹ of nahdawi discourses and institutions elaborated in the adapted fiction of the new century. My claim is that the nahda reform discourse, with its hallmark anxieties about authenticity and sovereignty, largely served to mask the very real threats to the “natural social order” posed by rapidly changing social relations as Egypt was integrated into the capitalist world economy (the imperialism that has no outside, in Walter Mignolo’s formulation).¹² In this sense, modernity does not arrive in Egypt as an already formed project, but rather it is constructed simultaneously in related, if very specific ways across all the nodal points of the imperial map.¹³ Adjectives like “alternative” or “colonial” then only serve to reproduce hierarchies of power that require theories of difference to survive. While the concept of alternative modernities continues to center Europe as the origin,¹⁴ the latter erases the force of imperialism as an order that produces both the colonized and the colonizer (which was of course Franz Fanon’s deep insight). Peter Gran...