Experimental Literature, Necropolitics and Decolonial Hauntology
Brings together Iraqi, Palestinian, Egyptian and Syrian literary and political-historical contexts in the twenty-first century.
This book examines important contemporary prose works by the Iraqi-born writer Ḥasan Balāsim, the Palestinian writer ‘Āṭif Abu Sayf, the Egyptian writer Basmah ‘Abd al-‘Azīz and the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek. It theorises various forms that expand Arabic literary history in relation to magical realism, surrealism, dystopian fiction, hybrid fantasy and the literatures of nightmare and horror. It proposes ‘more-than-realism’ as a framework to address these intermedial and transmedial narratives that, through the long duration and extension of their hauntological time-spaces, accommodate the surplus of harm, trauma and death, as well as the uncontainability of resistance by humans and the more-than-human world. These narratives communicate decolonial imaginaries emerging in death-worlds that encompass war, siege, food insecurity, torture, neoliberal authoritarianism, and the securitisation of borders with manhunts. In these case studies, mutilation includes severing and affective injury, disappearance, dislocation and detention while de-composition opens to the possibilities of re-composition.