Mapping exile: post-Arab Spring revolutionaries’ diasporic voices in Serag Mounir’s Diaspora Spring

ABSTRACT

Serag Mounir’s Diaspora Spring (Rabīʿ al-shatāt, 2019) scrutinizes the critical effects of the Arab Spring on Arab youth, offering a multilayered portrayal of the present Middle East and its revolutionaries who have disappeared from both local and international discourse. In particular, the novel depicts the purposeful marginalization of Arab Spring revolutionaries in the diaspora—a considerable sector of the Arab community. This study places Diaspora Spring within the context of the contemporary post-Arab Spring novel, finding in the work a post-postcolonial vision of the revolutionary movement and the reign of counterrevolution. The novel censures what it depicts as obsolete postcolonial paradigms that fail to account for the persistence of neocolonialism. Second, this study draws on the theoretical framework of Homi Bhabha’s “third space” and “unhomeliness” in order to analyze the revolutionaries’ distinguished, yet liminal position during the Arab Spring and in the current counterrevolutionary era.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• Arab Spring
• post-postcolonialism
• counterrevolution
• third space
• unhomeliness

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratefulness to Dr Nora Parr for her recurrent revisions of this research and her insightful guidance. This achievement would not have been possible without her thoughtful recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 110. All translations from Arabic are ours.

2 Serag Mounir, (Sirāg Munīr) Diaspora Spring. This English version of the author’s name is commonly used in English references.

3 Fishīr, Exit Door.

4 Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins.

5 Arriḥāni, ʿAdaw ashshams.

6 Wannous, The Frightened Ones.

7 Maksūr, Ayyām fi baba ʿmr.

8 El-Wardani, “Book Review: Repercussions of a January revolution.”

9 Talya Zax, “How did the Arab Spring Change Fiction?”

10 Al Aswany, The Republic of False Truths.

11 Merritt, “The Republic of False Truths.”

12 Khaled and Moghrabi, Sun on Closed Windows.

13 Qualey, “10 Books, 10 Years Later.”

14 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, The Queue.

15 Fishīr, All That Rubblish.

16 Manai, The Ardent Swarm.

17 Mounir, Diaspora Spring.

18 AlAmar, Silence is a Sense.

19 Rooney, “Popular Culture and the Arab Spring,” 412.

20 Ibid.

21 Agnani et al., “Editor’s Column,” 633–51; Hassan, “Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature,” 43–56.

22 Agnani et al., “Editor’s Column,” 636–7.

23 Hassan, “Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature,” 43–56.

24 Dabashi, The Arab Spring, xvii.

25 Hassan, “Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature,” 43–56; Rooney, “Popular Culture and the Arab Spring,” 412.

26 Karam and Khalifa, “Counter-current Travel Memoirs and New Directions in Palestine Studies,” 185–212.

27 Falk, Chaos and Counterrevolution.

28 Dabashi, The Arab Spring, xvii.

29 Falk, Chaos and Counterrevolution, 68.

30 Dabashi, The Arab Spring, xviii.

31 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 26.

32 Ibid., 25.

33 Ibid., 11.

34 See for example Chaos and Counterrevolution, where Falk explains, the American strategy in the region has generally been to lend US support to repressive and authoritarian governments so long as they continue serving western interests.

35 Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

36 Bhabha, “On the Irremovable Strangeness,” 35.

37 Ibid., 35–6.

38 Ibid., 38.

39 Zhou and Pilcher, “Revisiting the ‘Third Space’,” 1–8.

40 Venger, “Geographical Proximity is not Enough,” 1–24.

41 Qutait, Nostalgia in Anglophone Arab Literature.

42 Karam and Eisaa, “Compression We Live By.”

43 Venger, “Geographical Proximity is not Enough,” 1–24.

44 Ibid., 18.

45 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 238.

46 Kalua, “Homi Bhabha's Third Space,” 23–32.

47 Ibid., 12.

48 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 12.

49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

50 Falk, Chaos and Counterrevolution, 88.

51 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 199.

52 Ibid., 200.

53 Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 195.

54 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 205.

55 Ibid., 124.

56 Ibid., 149.

57 Ibid., 25.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 19.

60 Ibid., 18.

61 Toivanen, “Spaces of In-between-ness and Unbelonging,” 1–11.

62 Ibid., 3.

63 Ibid., 82.

64 Ibid., 83.

65 Ibid., 100.

66 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 196.

67 Ibid., 38.

68 Dabashi, The Arab Spring.

69 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 148.

70 Dabashi, The Arab Spring, xix.

71 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 101.

72 Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 421.

73 Tyson, Using Critical Theory, 250.

74 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 68.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., 124.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid., 85.

80 Ibid., 36.

81 Qutait, Nostalgia in Anglophone Arab Literature, 100.

82 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 188–9.

83 Ibid., 110.

84 Moss, “Voice After Exit,” 2.

85 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 151.

86 Ibid., 188–9.

87 Ibid., 193.

88 Ibid., 208.

89 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 141.

90 Ibid.

91 Mounir, Diaspora Spring, 210–11.

92 Ibid., 227.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

95 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 145.