Tracing the nation in French and Arabic travel narratives from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century

摘要

While postcolonial readings of French and British Orientalist texts proliferate in a variety of literary and academic contexts, from literature to art history, there are rarely any readings that address simultaneously Orientalist and "Oriental" texts, French and British narratives alongside Arabic ones. In critiquing both European and Arabic conceptual and cultural appropriation of the Orient as an extension of a European project on modernity, my work fills a gap in postcolonial scholarship, among others, but also expands the terrain of investigation neglected by critics in a variety of Middle Eastern and European disciplines. My dissertation, "Tracing the Nation in French and Arabic Travel Narratives from late Eighteenth to mid Nineteenth Century," explores French and Arabic narratives of cultural development in the works of Volney, Chateaubriand, and Tahtawi. It traces the effects of the threat to social and political institutions following the collapse of the "ancien regime" in France in 1789 and of the Mamluk rule in Egypt in 1798 upon the configuration of national narratives. I examine the ways in which particular travel encounters trigger an urgency to write the nation for the first time, both in France and in the Middle East. In this context, these narratives stage the traveler's articulation of the other and, more importantly, serve to consolidate a communal bond, weakened by the social ruptures of political transformation. I use a variety of theoretical frameworks (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and postcolonial theory) to explore the space of literary fantasy triggered by the encounter with the other. I examine poems, dreams, translations, and metaphors to investigate ordering mechanisms and structures of desire that produce the nation as a cultural project.