فهرست مطالب انسیه درزی نژاد

Nefrin-e-Zamin (The Curse of the Land) is a novel by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad about a teacher who narrates his presence in a nameless village. The novel displays the transition from tradition to modernity. It takes place during land reforms of the then government. The present article is an analysis of the novel from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre challenges the alleged static features of space and introduces it as vibrant and multi-layered. From this stance, the village is an active and dynamic space redefined in the course of the story. The teacher’s entry into the village, as a stranger, becomes a means to depict the multifaceted nature of the village. Lefebvre’s three-part dialectic, comprising the teacher’s perceived, conceived, and lived experiences in the village – represented in spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces – are investigated in this study. The teacher’s visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile perceptions of the village space are studied in detail. The correspondence or discrepancy of the teacher’s mental conception and his lived social experience in the village are discussed next in this paper. The fragmentation of the homogeneous space of the village and its hierarchization to exercise the power of the ruling class of the village are also investigated. Finally, the paper looks into the right of the villagers and strangers to the city and its two subcategories – the right to participate and the right to occupy. The teacher, the steward, and the painter from Shurab are the strangers in the village whose right to the city is important. From Lefebvre’s viewpoint, the village is not a neutral and passive space; rather a dynamic and multifaceted space that has significance and undergoes change and reinterpretations.

The present paper is an attempt to study Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Ten Things I Hate about Me (2006) from Judith Butler's performative perspective. The main question of the research is whether the diasporic subjectivity of the Muslim protagonist of the novel is innate, static, and finalized or rather performatively constructed. It is argued that Jamilah, as a diasporic Muslim woman, is not a being with an essentialized identity; rather she is a becoming whose identity is constructed in diaspora. It is contended that Jamilah is a discursive subject, hailed by the dominant Lebanese, Australian, and Islamic discourses. Butler's attestation of the infelicity of some performances leaves space for the resignification and reappropriation of the discourses, which attempt to interpellate the subject. The study seeks to demonstrate that Jamilah as the diasporic doer, who is constituted as a result of the performative linguistic, corporal, culinary, and artistic deeds, is not determined by any of the discourses she is immersed in, and thus becomes a hybridized liminal subject who negotiates the discourses of home and host cultures through evading the dualistic logic.

Due to its diasporic features and being 'in-between' competing Pakistani-American discourses, Mohsin Hamid (1971--)'s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) has the potential to deconstruct the dominant perceptions about influential incidents like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The major concept which is dislodged in this novel is the paradigm shift which occurs in the West and especially the United States after the event. The United States claims that its strategic alteration toward the Muslim immigrants in the post 9/11 era is a reaction against the fundamentalism and terrorism engendered by them; whereas, Hamid's critical reading against the grain, regards the post 9/11 alterations in the reception of Muslim migrants as anterior to the global fundamentalism and terrorism, rather than posterior to them. Put differently, the marginalized and oft-neglected narrative of a Muslim migrant author of the post 9/11 tumults, recognizes the United States as the origin of the global fundamentalism and terrorism and not the victim of them as widely claimed. The redefinition of this change in American policies in post 9/11 is depicted through the perspective of Changez, the novel's protagonist. He is a Muslim Pakistani young man, a Princeton graduate, and employed by a prosperous economic company. Hamid's redefinition of the post 9/11 paradigm shift is investigated along three axes and three important binary oppositions are deconstructed in his novel; the cosmopolitan/nationalist United States, the religious/ economic fundamentalism, and the military/economic terrorism.