Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:16:56.142Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Judeo-Arab-Muslim Continuum: Edmond Amran El Maleh's Poetics of Fragments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Irene Siegel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The work of Jewish Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh (1917–2010) explores the coextensive experience of Muslims and Jews in Morocco and the larger Arab-Mediterranean region, tracing a continuum of Judeo-Arab-Muslim affiliation. This notion of affiliation is reflected in a highly dynamic, fluid poetics, fed by a secular engagement with Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions and with a range of modernist and postcolonial writers. El Maleh found deep inspiration in Walter Benjamin's work on the ethical dimension of allegory as informed by kabbalistic notions of language. The chaotic profusion of events and images in El Maleh's third novel, Mille ans, un jour (“A Thousand Years, One Day”) reflects Benjamin's “Kabbalistic shard” and his valorization of the “scraps of history.” This discursive mode challenges the totalizing narratives and racialized binaries undergirding forms of violence that El Maleh identifies in colonialism and fascism, as well as in contemporary Zionism. His work thus aims to dissolve the false oppositional binary through which the identities of Jew and Arab have come to be understood.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 16 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1993.Google Scholar
Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Jewish Writings. edited by Kohn, Jerome and Feldman, Ron H., Schocken Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. “To Save the Jewish Homeland.” Arendt, Jewish Writings, pp. 388–401.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. “Zionism Reconsidered.” Arendt, Jewish Writings, pp. 343–74.Google Scholar
Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. U of California P, 1998.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. edited by Arendt, Hannah, Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1978.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Verso, 1987.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 253–64.Google Scholar
Berrada, Mohammed. “‘Amrān Al-Maliyyi: al-sāqy alladhi yu'ajjij ‘aashanā.” Āfāq: majalat itiād kutāb al-maghreb, vol. 56, 1995, pp. 88–94.Google Scholar
Bourget, Carine. The Star, the Cross, and the Crescent: Religions and Conflicts in Francophone Literature from the Arab World. Lexington Books, 2010.Google Scholar
Boyarin, Daniel. “Introduction: Purim and the Cultural Poetics of Judaism—Theorizing Diaspora.” Poetics Today, vol. 15, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyarin, Daniel, and Boyarin, Jonathan. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4, Summer 1993, pp. 693–725. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343903?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. U of Michigan P, 1969.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Columbia UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1955.Google Scholar
Darwish, Mahmūd. “Dhākira lil-nisyān.” al-Karmel, vols. 21–22, 1986, pp. 4–96.Google Scholar
Darwish, Mahmūd. Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. Translated by Muhawi, Ibrahim!, U of California P, 1995.Google Scholar
Dufour-El Maleh, Marie-Cécile. La nuit sauvée: Walter Benjamin et la pensée de l'histoire. Éditions OUSIA, 1993.Google Scholar
El Maleh, Edmond Amran. Le café bleu—Zrirek. Éditions La Pensée Sauvage / Éditions Le Fennec, 1998.Google Scholar
El Maleh, Edmond Amran. Mille ans, un jour. Éditions La Pensée Sauvage, 1986.Google Scholar
El Maleh, Edmond Amran. Parcours immobile: Récit. André Dimanche, 2000.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Éditions du Seuil, 1952.Google Scholar
Hochberg, Gil. “The Dispossession of (Cultural) Authenticity: Readings in Contemporary Levantine Literature.” U of California, Berkeley, 2002. PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Hochberg, Gil. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination. Princeton UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Eric. Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. Columbia UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Khatibi, Abdelkebir. Maghreb pluriel. Éditions Denoël, 1983.Google Scholar
Kronfeld, Chana. “Reading Amichai Reading.” Judaism, vol. 45, no. 3, 1996, pp. 311–23.Google Scholar
Levy, André. “A Community That Is Both a Center and a Diaspora: Jews in Late Twentieth Century Morocco.” Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places, edited by Levy, and Weingrod, Alex, Stanford UP, 2005, pp. 68–87.Google Scholar
McBride, James. “Marooned in the Realm of the Profane: Walter Benjamin's Synthesis of Kabbalah and Communism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 57, no. 2, Summer 1989, pp. 241–66. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1464382?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.Google Scholar
Mole, Gary D. Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement. UP of Florida, 1997.Google Scholar
Redonnet, Marie, and Maleh, Edmond Amran El. Entretiens avec Edmond Amran El Maleh. Publications de la Fondation Edmond Amran El Maleh, 2005.Google Scholar
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Kindle ed., Stanford UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. Vintage Books, 1979.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” Social Text, vol. 1, 1979, pp. 7–58.Google Scholar
Scharfman, Ronnie. “Fragments, traces, empreintes: L'impossible autobiographie judéo-maghrébine d'Edmond El Maleh et Michel Valensi.” Postcolonialisme et autobiographie: Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Daniel Maximin, edited by Hornung, Alfred and Ruhe, Ernstpeter, Rodopi, 1998, pp. 73–88.Google Scholar
Scharfman, Ronnie. “The Other's Other: The Moroccan-Jewish Trajectory of Edmond Amran El Maleh.” Yale French Studies, vol. 82, 1993, pp. 135–45.Google Scholar
Shohat, Ella. “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews.” Social Text, vol. 21, no. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 49–74.Google Scholar
Sokel, Walter Herbert. The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka. Wayne State UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Vogl, Mary B. “It Was and It Was Not So: Edmond El Maleh Remembers Morocco.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2003, pp. 71–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weingrod, Alex, and Levy, André. “Social Thought and Commentary: Paradoxes of Homecoming: The Jews and Their Diasporas.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 4, Autumn 2006, pp. 691–716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. U of California P, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar