Eman El-Meligi’s slim volume Deconstructing Hegemony: Contemporary Middle East Literature, Theory, and Historiography is a study of Middle Eastern Laureates invoking the theoretical framework of stalwarts like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Julia Kristeva, and Patrick Murphy. Eman El-Meligi is a locally spun academic from the University of Alexandria, in Egypt. She has published various books on literary theory in which she has examined Middle Eastern texts with the modernist or postmodernist analytical tools.

Her rigorous analysis and the way she articulates complex ideas are commendable. The writers whose works she has examined in the first chapter of this book are David Grossman an Israeli author, Mourid Barghouti a Palestinian poet and writer, and Louise Erdrich an American novelist, poet and writer of children’s books featuring Native American characters and settings. El-Meligi has also discussed Amos Oz (1939-2018) an Israeli novelist, journalist and intellectual and Sahar Hamouda, Egyptian academic and writer based at Alexandria University with reference to their writings on Jerusalem. She has then discussed an Emirati writer Salma Matar Seif who wrote The Sound of Singing and an Italian author Susanna Tamaro in Chapter 3. This chapter offers a comparative reading of the two authors, with some discussion on the overall theoretical frame extracted from Foucault’s works, Archaeology of Knowledge in particular. In the next chapter, El-Meligi studies Noam Chomsky and renowned Egyptian philosopher, critic, and historian Abdelwahab Elmessiri (1938-2008) with the focus on Chomsky’s impact on Elmessiri.

Three scholars analysed in the last chapter are Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein and William Engdahl. Ilan Pappé is an expatriate Israeli historian and socialist activist. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist, professor and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. The last one in the line is William Engdahl. Frederick William Engdahl is an American writer and conspiracy theorist based in Germany. He identifies himself as an economic researcher, historian and freelance journalist.

The introduction of the book reads, “Deconstruction as an approach is embraced by the writers in the texts analyzed here, dismantling grand narratives and stereotypes, coining terminology, and unsettling lexicon, in addition to undermining the abused mythology that drives human beings apart.” That assertion explicates the scheme of the book and also the choice of the author herself in choosing the writers and their texts. The analytical tools to examine the literary texts are borrowed from the American academy, which is a common practice in the postcolonial world. Edward Said, despite being Palestinian by origin, nevertheless was steeped in the intellectual climate that had its origin in the 1968 movement that took European and American universities by storm. Selected texts and writers scrutinised in the book are linked through both deep as well as surface structure. To my reckoning, the surface structure is informed by the political and economic system(s) that are deployed in a certain society. The deep structure is long durée in its scope and span. It is articulated through culture and social norms.

The dichotomy in the analytical/ theoretical work is hard not to notice. In the Middle East as also in the case of South Asia, the deep structures remained intact when the colonial power(s) asserted their own systems, devised in the light of serving their interests. Partha Chatterji calls them ‘inner domain’ from where the resistance against colonialism emanated. Deep structure or ‘inner domain’ was lying beneath the emergence of ‘nationalisms’ in the colonised world. In the long durée terms, the deep structures had come about by striking the balance between religious and tribal differences, which obviously was a convoluted process. However, the surface structure is punctuated with religious differences, sectarian cleavage and lack of interactive modality within Arabs and between them and other nationalities. One may infer that the surface structure does not correspond with the deep structure. However, in Deconstructing Hegemony: Contemporary Middle East Literature, Theory, and Historiography this formulation has been inverted. Thus, the attempt to draw a connection between the two structures lends complexity to the narrative.

One wonders why Lebanon and particularly Beirut has been omitted from this study. Along with Egypt, Lebanon is the most productive locus of literary production. Beirut is significant because it has always been the epicentre of socio-cultural convergence, a precondition for literary and epistemic novelty. But that is entirely, my personal inference. I wish such works were produced in Pakistan too.

Deconstructing Hegemony: Contemporary Middle East Literature, Theory, and Historiography

Author: Eman El-Meligi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2020

Pages: 166

Price: Rs 695

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore