Journal Article

Alternative Histories

Hanafy, Hany H

2020

Overview

The aim of this paper is to show how Radwa Ashour's A Part of Europe is an attempt at re-inscribing the ambivalence and conflict that characterized the history of colonial modernity in Egypt and the novel form that came in its tandem in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period that has come to be known as the Arab Nahda. The novel countervails the official history, offering a version that links Khedive Ismael's project of European modernity to the colonial enterprise that leads in the end to the British occupation of Egypt, the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel as the only piece of Europe in the Arab world, and to a series of defeats that culminate in the American invasion of Iraq that looms over the end of the novel. The novel takes the form of a fictional autobiography of the narrator who introduces himself under the sobriquet of \"Al-Nazer\" (\"The Seer\" or \"The Onlooker\"). He figures as the common man-cum-historian, providing an alternative history from below, or from the margin, in which the public and the private intertwine and crisscross in a narrative patchwork/pastiche that dismantles the polarity between traditional narrative forms and the imported form of the European novel.

• Publisher: جامعة عين شمس - كلية البنات للآداب والعلوم والتربية
• Subject: الأدب العربي / النقد الأدبي / رواية قطعة من أوروبا / عاشور، رضوى