Book contents
- The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous
- Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre
- The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Transliteration and Translation
- Chronology of Wannous’ Life, Plays, and Selected Writings
- Introduction
- Part I Situating Wannous
- Part II Reading Wannous
- 3 Keeping Silent, or the Silence That Kept Wannous
- 4 The Failure of Revolutionary Humanism: Reading Wannous with Fanon
- 5 Historiography as Resistance in the Later Plays of Wannous
- Part III Staging Wannous
- Part IV Remembering Wannous
- List of Wannous’ Plays
- Summaries of Wannous’ Principal Plays
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Failure of Revolutionary Humanism: Reading Wannous with Fanon
from Part II - Reading Wannous
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2021
- The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous
- Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre
- The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Transliteration and Translation
- Chronology of Wannous’ Life, Plays, and Selected Writings
- Introduction
- Part I Situating Wannous
- Part II Reading Wannous
- 3 Keeping Silent, or the Silence That Kept Wannous
- 4 The Failure of Revolutionary Humanism: Reading Wannous with Fanon
- 5 Historiography as Resistance in the Later Plays of Wannous
- Part III Staging Wannous
- Part IV Remembering Wannous
- List of Wannous’ Plays
- Summaries of Wannous’ Principal Plays
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on The Rape, Sa’dallah Wannous’ 1989 play in which he broke his literal silence after almost a decade of not writing plays. It reads Wannous’ work in tandem with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of violence in postcolonial societies in The Wretched of the Earth--which appears in Arabic translation among the books in Wannous’ personal library housed at the American University of Beirut--as a means of assessing Wannous’ significance now, after the uprisings that began in 2011 in a number of Arab countries that led to violent state repression and war. The chapter argues that, like Fanon, Wannous warned that authoritarianism and “blind nationalism” would severely undermine the development of a self-critical and realistic national consciousness as a basis for a democratic postcolonial future.
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- Information
- The Theatre of Sa'dallah WannousA Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual, pp. 78 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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