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Postcolonial Memory, Postmodern Intertextuality: Anton Shammas's Arabesques Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Yael S. Feldman
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Abstract

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novel Arabesques. A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed in Arabesque and suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 3: Material Evidence , May 1999, pp. 373 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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