Embodied Knowledges: Visceral and Parietal Poetics in Contemporary Arabic and Persian Literature of the Gulf
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Alalawi, Hanan
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 20, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Rosemary Jolly, Major Field Member
Lior Sternfeld, Outside Unit & Field Member
Maha Marouan, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Anna Ziajka Stanton, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Charlotte Eubanks, Program Head/Chair
Nasrin Rahimieh, Special Member - Keywords:
- Arabic Literature
Persian Literature
Gulf Studies
Dispossession
Body Politics
Embodied Knowledge - Abstract:
- My dissertation centers on 20th- and 21st- century Arabic and Persian minoritized literatures from Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran and their diasporas. I explore the literary contributions of six dispossessed Arab and Persian writers who have published works since the late 1980s. I explore how Muḥammad al-‘Atābī’ and Hanadī al- Shammirī, Mona Kareem, Shookoofeh Azar, Muḥammad Na‘īm al-Ḥamrānī and Moniru Ravanipour have reframed the literary scene in the Arabian/Persian Gulf through an emphasis on the dispossessed body. Dispossession, as an ongoing sociopolitical and economic structure causing the loss of citizenship, gender expression and safety, sexual freedom, and Indigenous ways of knowing, has shaped the lives and literature of such writers. Centering fiction and poetry written in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the 2001 Global War on Terrorism, and the 2010 Arab Spring, I examine the role of literature in navigating forms of dispossession through bodily depictions of memory and trauma, and affective acts of resistance. I argue that each writer fictionalizes their lived experience of dispossession (statelessness, non-citizen residence, womanhood, queerness, and Indigeneity) to create embodied knowledges through “visceral and parietal poetics.” Denoting vital organs and the walls separating, yet engulfing them, such poetics appear as palimpsests, spectrality, and mythmaking. In each chapter, I demonstrate how these poetics are a method that reframe the discourse of citizenship and belonging to the homeland, gender and queerness in feminist movements, and Indigeneity beyond ethnography and settler colonialism. Such poetics play a key intersectional role in exposing the way structures of power instrumentalize bodies to uphold fixed categories of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. The poetics ultimately form an alternative archive of knowledges that preclude full co-option by mechanisms of social reproduction in global capitalism. The poetics then reshape meanings of sovereign subjectivity, tokenistic representation, progress narratives, and nativist logic under oppression. As an active porous site of knowledge production, I view the body as a dynamic heuristic. It offers an ethical approach to understanding the historical impact of dispossession on marginalized communities, and to forming communal solidarities advocating for social justice in the Gulf and its diaspora.