Access Provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries at 02/11/11 3:59PM GMT

hacking the modern:

arabic writing in the virtual age

Tarek El-Ariss

Introduction

With the proliferation of Arabic blogging, emailing, chatting, text messaging,

and other forms of techno-writing, contemporary Arabic literature is under-
going a series of structural and linguistic transformations. Specifically, the
encounter with the virtual and the effects of globalization are ushering in
a new set of intertextual references that cut across languages, media, and
literary traditions. A new generation of Arab authors is entering the scene
of writing from the world of blogging and scriptwriting, publishing blogs as
novels. In addition, many young novelists are appropriating the structure of
blogs in their literary production, some veiling their true identity with pen
names, others putting it on display through fantasizing narratives of persecu-
tion and censorship. A new Arabic writing is emerging from this back and
forth between virtuality and print, the novel and the blog, and Arabic and
English. In these writings, we find English words left in the Latin script or
at times transliterated; stream of consciousness; the fragmentation of the
narrator’s function; repetition; and various subversions of narrative structure.
In many instances, the difference between the blog and the novel is unclear.
“The generation of an electronic environment has led to a break with former
narrative modes,” argues Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih.1 These writing
modes are increasingly calling attention to the ways in which literature is
understood, read, and circulated, thereby forcing critics to rethink textuality
and canon formation.

comparative literature studies, vol. 47, no. 4, 2010.

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

533

CLS 47.4_06.indd 533 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 534 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Examining aesthetic shifts and stylistic transformations in new Arabic

writing, this article investigates the effects of techno-writing and virtuality
on the theorizing and teaching of Arabic literature. I focus on Egyptian
author Ahmed Alaidy’s novel An takun ‘Abbas al-‘Abd (2003) [Being Abbas
el Abd (2006)] and read it as a postmodern manifesto for a new writing
characterized by textual disruption, sabotage, and mimicry. I argue that this
new author, likened to a hacker, infiltrates the publishing establishment from
which he was excluded and disrupts the codes of Arabic literary production.
Appropriated from techno-language and used as a verb in Alaidy’s text,
hacking functions as a literary subversion that empowers a new generation
of writers to critique an Arab project of aesthetic and political modernity
through a new language and media. Elaborating on literary and philosophical
readings of new aesthetics in the works of David Damrosch, Alain Badiou,
Sabry Hafez, and Muhsin al-Musawi, my investigation challenges readings
of syncretism and hybridity that either celebrate these new texts or relegate
them to globalization’s neocolonial dynamics.

The Literary Scene

Both established Arab writers like Elias Khoury (b. 1948), Hoda Barakat
(b. 1952), and Gamal al-Ghitani (b. 1945), among others, as well as new
writers from across the Arab world are contributing to a flourishing literary
scene. Internet savvy and conversant with the products and transformations
brought about by globalization, this new generation relates to English not
as a foreign language but rather as the language that is constitutive of their
cultural landscape. From blogs and websites to satellite TV, films, and lit-
erature, global culture is pervasive in both these authors’ psychological and
material realms. In this cultural landscape, a new generation is looking for
a literary voice, an articulation of a cultural experience that can no longer
be understood in terms of neatly organized binary oppositions of resistance
and imperialism, East and West, and tradition and modernity. Facebook,
MySpace, and Twitter, cellular phones and text messaging have allowed Arab
writers to articulate new identities and experiences, as they mix languages,
address the reader, and blur the distinction between traditional genres.
These new literary voices have benefited from technological develop-
ment and the Internet but also from the decentralization and privatization
of the publishing industry in the Arab world. Dar El Shorouk in Egypt is
publishing many new works such as Khalid Khamisi’s Taxi (2007) [Taxi
(2008)] and ‘Awza atgawez (2008) [I Want to Get Married (2010)] by Ghada

CLS 47.4_06.indd 534 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 535

‘Abd al-‘Aal. Merit Publishers, which is Cairo-based as well, is likewise

giving voice to many young literary talents who are coming to writing from
the world of blogs, movie scripts, and journalism.2 From Muhammad ‘Ala’
al-Ddin’s highly modernist, one-sentence Injil Adam (2006) [“The Gospel
According to Adam”], about an obsessive character, a stalker, who fantasizes
about seduction, rape, and murder, to Yasser ‘Abd al-Latif ’s Qanun al-wiratha
(2002) [“ The Law of Inheritance”], a novel about migration, return, and
the character’s relation to the city, young authors are producing noteworthy
works. Merit’s editor, Muhammad Hashim, who was awarded the Jeri Laber
International Freedom to Publish Award in 2006, has succeeded in creat-
ing both a vibrant publishing house and a literary salon that meets daily at
Merit’s offices in central Cairo. In this new salon, authors gather and debate
cultural and political issues, thereby anchoring the relation between literature
and the political, and the aesthetic and its social context.
Critics both in the Arab world and beyond are increasingly paying
attention to these new writings. Recently, the New Yorker published an
article on new Arabic writing, shedding light on innovative and noteworthy
texts that have appeared in the last few years such as Rajaa Alsanea’s Banat
al-Riyadh (2005) [Girls of Riyadh (2007)] and Sinan Anton’s I’jam (2004)
[I’jam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (2007)].3 As part of the Hay Festival, a group of “39
authors under 39” was recently showcased at a conference in Beirut.4 This
event presented new literary talents from across the Arab world, consecrat-
ing their work as an integral part of the Arabic literary scene. In addition
to Akhbar al-adab, which systematically engages new writing, major Arabic
newspapers, from the London-based Al-Hayat to the Beirut-based Al-Akhbar,
are also running reviews of new works, making critics and readers increas-
ingly aware of and interested in this literary production.5 Critical academic
works by Moneera al-Ghadeer, Sabry Hafez, Muhsin al-Musawi, Marilyn
Booth, and others focus on the aesthetic transformations in recent Arabic
literature, examining it in the context of social, technological, and political
changes in the Arab world.6

Ahmed Alaidy’s New Writing Manifesto

Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd, an experimental novel that appeared

from Merit Publishers in 2003, exemplifies some of the new directions of
Arabic literature has gone in the virtual age.7 Alaidy (b. 1974) entered the
literary scene from the world of writing scripts for television and cinema and
comic strips, political poems, and satire for a variety of Egyptian newspapers.

CLS 47.4_06.indd 535 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 536 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

His novel stages the rants of an angry narrator, a Cairene youth who goes
about dating girls, riding public transportation, and discussing politics, cul-
ture, history, the state, and consumerism. Influenced by Chuck Palahniuk’s
Fight Club (1996) and by the works of Sonallah Ibrahim, Being Abbas el
Abd presents a split character who performs various narrative functions. As
Abdel-Messih notes, “The first/third-person narrative voice shifts inad-
vertently between past/present temporalities, showing forced relationships
and failed relationality in disconnected situations.”8 ‘Abdallah, a depressed
young man who spends most of his time hallucinating in his room, serves
a primary narrative function. ‘Abbas is ‘Abdallah’s friend; he comes to
‘Abdallah as a voice or as an image, pushing him to engage the world around
him through angry acts of violence and rebellion. ‘Awni is ‘Abdallah’s uncle,
a psychiatrist who tortured his nephew when he was a child. There are two
girls, both named Hind, whom the narrator tries to date: one is a prostitute
and the other is a girl from a “good family” [“bint nas”]. The last character
is Shahinda, who works as a nurse at the mental asylum to which the nar-
rator was sent as a child.
In his review of the novel, Hazem Abyad argues that Alaidy’s text
conjures a disembodied space, a city stripped of its materiality, and that it
relies on postmodern pastiche and parody, rupturing in this way questions
of causality and originality.9 This characterization provides the necessary
perspective for interpreting Alaidy’s text, which consists in a series of often
inexplicable events. A vulgar and violent narrative expresses anger over
Egypt’s social and political reality, language, and civilization. While discuss-
ing the relation between Egypt and the West, ‘Abbas tells the narrator: “You
want us to progress? So burn the history books and forget your precious dead
civilization. Stop trying to squeeze the juice from the past. Destroy your
pharaonic history. . . . We will only succeed when we turn our museums
into public lavatories.”10 In this way ‘Abbas lashes out against Egypt’s national
identity. ‘Abbas “explodes like a sewer pipe,” breaking the link between
‘Abdallah and a prestigious and old notion of historical identity. Progress,
in ‘Abbas’s view, not only requires a break with the past but a destruction
of the history books through which the past is imagined as constitutive of
national identity. Burning history books and turning museums into public
toilets are acts that serve to delegitimize the ways the past is mediated
through educational and cultural institutions. ‘Abbas, the angry voice in
Alaidy’s novel, exposes the discrepancy between Egypt’s imagined past and
its contemporary social and political reality.
To break with Egypt’s romanticized past means breaking with the
generation of the defeat. In a reference to the Arab defeat in the 1967 war

CLS 47.4_06.indd 536 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 537

with Israel, which was a turning point in Arab political and cultural history,
‘Abbas tells ‘Abdallah: “Egypt had its generation of the Defeat. We’re the
generation that came after it. The ‘I’ve-got-nothing-to-lose generation.’
We’re the autistic generation, living under the same roof with strangers
who have names similar to ours. . . . Pull-shit. You need to UPGRADE
your wisdom and UPDATE your experience” (36). Here ‘Abbas identifies
the means by which a model of Egyptian identity that breaks along gen-
erational lines can be overcome. “Tawahhud” [“autism”] is the condition of
the Arab youth, chatting and texting, relating to their parents, who happen
to live with them in the same house, as complete strangers.11 This powerful
metaphor of youth’s alienation, connected to one another and the Internet
through modes of silence, exposes a new generation’s disconnect from the
family and the state. The articulation of traditional forms of identity is thus
metonymic, based on an artificial proximity rather than significant symbolic
bond. Using computer language, ‘Abbas asks the narrator to update and
upgrade his system and install a new server that would supersede the cultural
model that holds young people hostage. With the expletive “pull-shit,” a
combination of “bullshit” and “don’t pull this crap on me,” which is given
in English in the Arabic text, ‘Abbas violently shakes not only ‘Abdallah but
also the reader of the text, forcing him or her to take notice of this need to
update, upgrade, that, install new software, and move on. The discourse of
technology thus transforms the “barbaric” burning of history books and the
destruction of museums into acts of computer uploads and upgrades, signal-
ing the advent of a new generation that is radically rethinking its relation to
social and political identity.
Updating and upgrading one’s server in this context are forms of prise
de conscience that replace political engagement understood in the French
sense, which characterizes the older generation that demanded and believed
in social and political change and ended up being disillusioned after the
Naksa in 1967. Alaidy’s text gradually elaborates a model of critique of the
cultural products associated with the generation of defeat, as he calls it. The
generation that matured in the 1950s and 1960s is best known for its novels,
the quintessential genre of Arab modernity. The new generation of Arab
authors and readers imagined in Alaidy’s text upgrade and update this liter-
ary form. Alaidy launches an unwavering attack against the novel and the
literary establishment that sustains it for ideological and commercial reasons,
thereby excluding young upstart authors. As the narrator says,

IF THIS WERE A NOVEL, IT WOULD NOW BE TIME FOR

YOU TO STOP and have a sandwich. Unfortunately, however,

CLS 47.4_06.indd 537 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 538 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

it isn’t. This is not a novel. No one likes to read about the torments
of the demigods when it is revealed to them what semidemihumans
they are. These are the works that go along with the critics to the lava-
tory to assist them in floating free of the burden of fat buttocks. (51)

Here the narrator redefines the genre of the text he is narrating by reposi-
tioning it at the intersection of the virtual and the material, the literary and
the nonliterary. This liminal yet literary work resists—in fact, unequivocally
renounces—the genre of the novel itself. Through this postmodern gesture,
the narrator disabuses the reader of the idea that the text he is narrating is a
novel. Through his call to arms, Alaidy raises doubts regarding the nature,
social function, and ideological framework of the genre as such. The text
interpellates the reader and calls him or her to action through blank spaces
interspersed throughout the text, yielding an interactive writing akin to that
of blogs. In this new text, the reader is asked not only to become aware of
his or her social and political reality but also to refigure it by intervening in
the act of writing. A far cry from 1960s engagement and its iconic marches
and demonstrations, Being Abbas el Abd constitutes an aesthetic of subversion
and a call to action, staged as an active participation in cultural production.
Alaidy exploits the literary genre to which his work arguably belongs by
acts of upgrades and updates, mixing Arabic and English, using parentheses
and question marks to excess and systematically repeating words and sen-
tences. Furthermore, Alaidy uploads to the novel genres like advertisements,
prayers [du‘a’], and user manuals. In one instance, he sings the praises of a
fictitious drug, Paratcozine:

You want to be unchained, to be free? You want to live your life to

the full? This is your chance. . . . Partacozine will make your life more
eventful and less painful. “Let’s go everyone. In the Name of God
the Healer.” Raise your hands to Heaven in supplication and let’s all
say together: O God, save Partacozine from all evil and bless us in
it! Aaaaaamen. “Did you know that Partacozine was much attacked
at first?” O God, curse the Zionists, the evildoers, and Your enemies,
Aaaaaamen. . . . O God, grant success to all who wish well to us and
to Partacozine, O lord of the Worlds! Aaaaaaaaaamen. “Partacozine
starts working after five minutes.” Aaaaaaaaaamen. (63–64)

In this passage, Alaidy mixes the genre of advertisement with that of

du‘a’, often uttered during the Friday prayer in countries across the Arab
world. Partacozine is thus presented as a new miracle drug for the Muslim

CLS 47.4_06.indd 538 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 539

umma. Alaidy parodies the traditional du‘a’, removing it from its religious
and ideological context and incorporating it into an advertisement for
antidepressants. Linda Hutcheon claims that the postmodern makes stra-
tegic use of parody to call attention to the constructedness of literary genres
and aesthetic traditions, exposing in this way the ideological framework
of canon formation. “Parody seems to offer a perspective on the present
and the past which allows an artist to speak to a discourse from within
it, but without being totally recuperated by it. Parody appears to have
become, for this reason, the mode of the marginalized, or of those who
are fighting marginalization by a dominant ideology.”12 In Being Abbas el
Abd, the parody and the mixing of literary with nonliterary genres serve
to articulate the postideological, post-Naksa moment in Arab history. In
this context, true victory is no longer to be achieved by defeating Zionists
and imperialists—as the traditional political discourse in the Arab world,
both secular and Islamist, would have it—but rather by engaging the state
of psychological collapse of the Arab individual, now in need of drugs to
withstand his or her social and political reality. In this way Alaidy parodies
not only du‘a’ and its political context but also consumerism and aspects
of globalization that are reflected in the proliferation of drugs in the Arab
world. This double parody operates both as a social and political critique,
on the one hand, and as a literary intervention in the genre of the novel
itself, on the other. Alaidy’s parody exposes the ideological formation of
literary and political fantasies that stifle contemporary society and cultural
production.
The critique of moribund social and political systems maintained
through discourses on history and culture takes a new shape in Alaidy’s
text. In his attempt to further infiltrate the existing power structure and
expose its fundamental weaknesses and contradictions, he rails against the
materiality of the book itself, deploying the genre of the “user manual” to
provide instructions for destroying books, and especially long novels. The
narrator enumerates the steps in the act of sabotage:

Glue together the books in the public libraries, according to the

following recipe:

1. Be sure to choose an appropriate time. . . .

2. Choose a provocatively large book, i.e., one of more than five
hundred pages . . .
3. You are at liberty to choose either an author or a topic you hate. . . .
4. Remove the lid on the liquid gum.

CLS 47.4_06.indd 539 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 540 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

5. Pour the gum into the center of the book while flipping the pages,
bearing in mind that “Knowledge is Light.”
6. Stick the front and back covers of the book to the first and last
pages, then cross out the author’s name, using an X. . . .
7. Put the book back on a shelf other than its usual shelf. . . . The
day is coming when the last barrier separating paper-backs from
bags of potato chips will disappear. . . . The day is coming when
they’ll put a picture on the front of every book of a man tossing
it into a trash can, and write underneath it:
Help Make the World
A Cleaner Place! (92–93)

Alaidy here incorporates the genres of street signs (“Hafiz ’ala al-nazafa” [“No
littering”]) and instruction manuals into the novel, transforming postmodern
parody into sabotage. The recipe in this case is reminiscent of the anarchist
cookbook, wherein food preparation becomes a violent affair. Deconstructing
the relation between food and knowledge, reading and nourishment, Alaidy
transforms the book into a target for sabotage, an object to be discarded like
an empty bag of chips. Assuming the position of a terrorist or a saboteur who
goes into the library to destroy the book, Alaidy unleashes a critique of the
power structure that the book represents. The attack on library books calls
attention to the educational system that is constitutive and symptomatic of
the social and political decay that Alaidy’s character exposes, forcing the
reader to entertain the erasure of both the book’s materiality and its politi-
cal and epistemological significance and bringing him or her into the text
as an accomplice in a project of sabotage. Marx wrote a manifesto aimed
at factory workers with the goal of making them aware of their rights and
of the need to take action to preserve them; Alaidy, by contrast, addresses
a new reader, forcing him or her to acknowledge a new political reality and
act to change it through acts of violence.
Being Abbas el Abd’s call to infiltrate and sabotage literary and political
power structures exposes their vulnerability, reflected in infiltration of the
Arabic literary realm by the Internet and blogs. The destruction of the novel’s
materiality exposes its vulnerability not only as a genre now infiltrated by other
nonliterary genres but also as a product, an object placed on a library shelf, in
the hands of the traditional reader. This destruction of the book simultane-
ously undermines the act of reading, which mediates the production of the
imagined national community in Anderson’s sense.13 Alaidy’s reference to
“autism” is thus a reference to the absence of social and political bonds that

CLS 47.4_06.indd 540 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 541

constitute the community. The autistic community prevents the production of

the national community through the act of reading. Alaidy’s critique, a violent
reaction against a form of centralized social and ideological control, exposes
the crisis and the bankruptcy of traditional structures of education in the Arab
world. The destruction of the book is the beginning of the uneducation and
the reeducation of the public. The new generation in Alaidy’s novel, an avatar
of this new age, is a barbaric horde of autistic saboteurs, unable to engage
the social given the ideological framework of a moribund political system.

Hacking and the Political

In a recent interview, the French philosopher Alain Badiou sets out to

imagine the possibility of the political in the age of globalization, violence,
and alienation.14 Badiou argues that “contrary to Hegel, for whom the nega-
tion of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that
today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys
the old, of course, but does not give rise to a new creation.”15 In this context,
Badiou suggests that the riots of November 2005 in France failed to produce
social and political change because Arab youths in France continue to feel
isolated and marginalized. As opposed to 1968, when students and workers,
sharing engagement, came together to effect change, Badiou argues that today
that convergence “is missing” because “the youths of the banlieues” are “shut
up in a collective isolation. Things will probably change, but for the moment
this is the reason why nothing came of these revolts. And, for the moment,
all they can do is revolt.”16 In this bleak assessment, Badiou identifies the end
of class struggle. This new culture of the negative is reflected in Alaidy’s call
for the destruction of the system of writing and production that maintains
this isolation both in the French banlieues and in Egypt. This call operates
as a critique of the formation of literary canons and the social and political
context with which they are associated.
Sabry Hafez’s reading of new writing in Egypt echoes Badiou’s
observation. Hafez investigates the poetics of the 1990s generation of authors,
examining their works through the lens of political, class, and urban trans-
formations. Discussing the loss of authorial authority in Egyptian writing,
Hafez writes:

If the writing “I” is no longer able to secure its position as the

controlling consciousness of the text, and the author no longer has

CLS 47.4_06.indd 541 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 542 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

confidence in his or her narrator, it is because both have become

variations of the subaltern self, inhabiting a subaltern country that has
lost its independence, its dignity and its regional role. This creates a
crisis in which the “I” is unable to identify with itself, let alone with
an “other” or a cause. Yet it also offers a narrative capable of relating
external reality “from the inside,” as if an integral part of it, while
at the same time seeing it from the outside, the viewpoint of the
marginalized, appropriate to its own insignificance. The new Arabic
novel is immersed in the most minute details of its surrounding social
reality, yet it is unable to accept it. The “novel of the closed horizon”
is the genre of an intolerable condition.17

On one level, Hafez’s understanding of the conditions of alienation relegates

the new writing by young Egyptian authors to a “closed horizon,” reinforcing
the metaphor of autism articulated in Alaidy’s text. Hafez uses his analysis
of the changing map of Cairo, which is based on urban development studies
done by André Raymond and Abu-Zaid Rajih, to understand new novel,
arguing that literary narratives reflect this material reality.18 The shrinking
of physical spaces in Cairo leads new authors into impossible, claustropho-
bic literary spaces. One might elaborate on Hafez’s reading of the material
conditions of alienation by taking into account the effects of technological
development and the Internet on this new literary and political landscape,
which would spare us the engagement with the question of the end of
history in a post-Naksa, postdialectical age. Though revolution as a viable
antithesis to the prevailing power structure is abandoned by Alaidy and other
authors, localized forms of resistance cannot be discounted. Micro-acts of
bricolage unsettle this closed horizon and create the possibility of change
and resistance. Ahmed Alaidy and many other writers of his generation in
Cairo write comic strips in newspapers and scripts for films as well as blog.
This vibrancy allows us to read new texts as contributing to a clockwork of
change, incrementally and locally intervening in the discourse and usher-
ing in new ideas and models. In her reading of the 1990s generation and of
Ahmed Alaidy’s work in the context of the “family” in contemporary writing,
Samia Mehrez argues that “it is precisely this generation of urban, savvy and
streetwise ‘I’ve-got-nothing-to-lose’ youth that has carried contemporary
Egyptian avant-garde beyond family and nation, opening up new literary
imaginings and linguistic possibilities that promise uncharted referential,
technical and aesthetic territories.”19 The attention to the aesthetic, grounded
in social and political reality, brings to light these transformations and frames
them as constitutive of novelty and change in literary canons.

CLS 47.4_06.indd 542 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 543

Analyzing the metaphor of hacking in Ahmed Alaidy’s text allows us

to engage new writing in ways that go beyond the logic of negativity and
destruction Badiou and Hafez identify. “Hack,” transliterated into Arabic
and then translated as “ikhtiraq al-nizam” (“infiltrating the system,” though
nizam means both “system” and “regime,” as in Mubarak’s nizam in Egypt).
Alaidy invokes the concept of hacking to expose the task of the new Arab
author in this liminal space of writing. “Hack” is introduced in a conversa-
tion between the narrator and ‘Abbas about a seventeen-year-old Russian
youth who succeeded in hacking the Pentagon’s website and uploading
MP3 music files. Adding that hackers are now everywhere, targeting even
the government, ‘Abbas thus defines the function of the interactive writer
and reader (98). Uploading MP3 files to the Pentagon site is a mixing of
genres, just like Alaidy’s mixing of prayer with advertisement in Partacozine’s
praise. Just as the seventeen-year-old Russian exposes the vulnerability of the
“impenetrable system,” so does the literary embodiment of such act reveal
the bankruptcy of the Arab project of modernity.
“Hack” means “to cut or sever with repeated irregular or unskillful
blows,” “to make chopping strokes or blows,” “to write computer programs
for enjoyment,” and “to gain access to a computer illegally.”20 Alaidy draws
on these different meanings, rendering hacking both an act of sabotage
as in gluing and destroying the library book and of play and negotiation.
Hacking thus operates as a literary bricolage that opens up the novel to
new forms of writing and cultural production. In Alaidy’s text, the writer
is a techno-saboteur, ushering in a different relation to tradition, departing
from the project of modernity associated with Mahfouz, Idris, and others.
After taking the axe to the novel by hacking and cutting it down, what
remains are fragments, reproduced in Alaidy’s work through “ahhhhh” and
“oohhhhh.” These fragments are akin to text messages and comments written
on Twitter and Facebook pages, further blurring the distinction between
techno-writing and literature. Alaidy’s dedication at the beginning of the
work, which resembles a confession to a criminal act, consecrates the act of
writing—new writing—as a crime. This act turns the reader into an accom-
plice and the critic into a detective who tries to decode the crime. Hacking
thus characterizes the intervention of a new generation in taking control
of cultural production through acts of violence, dissimulation, negotiation,
and play. New conceptualizations of the self that emerge through writing
and a new language reflected in distorted narrative structures with blank
spaces and affective inscriptions entail an articulation of a course of action
and a critique from the bottom up, challenging an ideological project with
clear political ends.

CLS 47.4_06.indd 543 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 544 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

The encounter between Arabic literature and blogging ushers in a

new genre located at the intersection of the local and the global, English
and Arabic. The hacking metaphor describes an incessant infiltration and
mapping out of new literary spaces. This bricolage, which has wide-ranging
aesthetic, social, and political repercussions, does not consider these new
writings to be an easily dismissible phenomena but rather to be constitu-
tive of a new Arabic writing trend best represented in Alaidy’s text. This
constant negotiation makes the work of the critic difficult yet all the more
necessary. It is important as we move beyond debates about modernism and
postmodernism to recognize the kind of negotiations and innovations that
are taking shape in these new works and to investigate ways to teach them
by engaging with questions of the global and the aesthetic that arise from
specific cultural and political contexts.

Theorizing and Teaching New Writing

Elaborating on arguments by Ella Shohat and Homi Bhabha, among

others, Muhsin al-Musawi argues that critical production of hybridity and
syncretism continues to veil material conditions of production and other
social contexts that frame literature’s circulation and reception.21 Examining
Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1991 novel, Al-Lajna [The Committee (2002)], al-Musawi
argues that although the novel critiques global capital, exposing the nation-
state’s complicity in the neocolonial onslaught on the Arab and developing
world, “this global order would soon have the same status as the nation-state
as long as there are selfish interests, corruption, and repression.”22 However,
al-Musawi claims that in many new writings “the ideological application to
the nation is rarely touched on; the politics of globalization is put aside, and
neither American capital nor European contexts are debated or criticized.”23
Al-Musawi goes on to analyze the role of the technological in framing the
role of the nation-state and its reach in a new age:

The preoccupations of literary modernity are no longer the only ones

in the minds of writers, nor are postmodern discursive anxieties. What
is at stake now relates to identity, territorial fact and meaning, as well
as to one’s cherished tradition and culture. This needs to be examined
from a focused and insightful historical perspective that takes into
account the movement from colonialism and the nation-state to a
global reality of mixed agenda and far reaching consequences.24

CLS 47.4_06.indd 544 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 545

In this crucial passage, al-Musawi identifies the stakes in the investigation

of a new Arab aesthetics. Far from being open-ended experimentation from
a position of privilege, both social and material, the new writing instead
constitutes an attempt to create a language and identity that allows a new
generation to recognize its place in relation to the political and the historical.
The new text is by no means a modernist experiment that could be discarded
as play on the margins of the material conditions of production but rather
is a vital negotiation of one’s place in relation to these material conditions.
The quest for a new language in the context of these texts and the critic’s
ability to recognize and theorize this demand are of great consequence given
the extent to which the Arab world is assailed by political violence, poverty,
and social oppression. The danger lies not just in dismissing the violent
political and economic symptoms of globalization but also in dismissing
a new generation’s attempt to speak with a new voice that would spare it
the stifling effects of those very symptoms that might lead it further into
frustration, violence, and exile.
Alaidy’s hacking in this context constitutes an aesthetic project that
calls on the younger generation, disappointed and disillusioned, to take up
a difficult “breaking loose” from the older one. The critique of the Naksa
generation and the mistrust of Arab ideological movements since the 1950s
coincide in these texts with new articulations of identity. Infiltrating the
system of writing through forms of hacking could be debated as an ethical
issue or as a symptom of the vulgarization of culture. This, however, would
be to fall prey to the elitist models against which this generation is rebelling
in the first place. Hacking functions as a means of getting the voice across;
manipulating the publishing industry through new narrative structures and
blogs ends up, in one way or another, empowering young writers. These
politically and aesthetically subversive transformations are brought about by
a new age and a new generation of authors and readers at the intersection
of literature, film, and blogs.
David Damrosch theorizes in his work new spaces of literary production
in the encounter between the local and the global. Moving beyond anti-
quated frameworks that have thus far informed and at times governed
literary critical reception of minor literatures, Damrosch argues that literary
production needs to be examined in the back and forth between cultural and
ideological forces, between the sites of literary production and the sites of
circulation of literature.25 While Damrosch reads “world Literature . . . as
a mode of circulation and of reading” beyond these texts’ cultural and national
boundaries, it is necessary to simultaneously theorize and teach these works
in light of both their social and political contexts, and the system of language

CLS 47.4_06.indd 545 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 546 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

and writing through which their authors articulate imagination, fantasy,

and identity.26 The importance of the frameworks advanced by Damrosch
and others lies in the fact that this writing is no longer considered as having
been written by authors deprived of agency—as the writing of the oppressed
and the colonized. In works such Alaidy’s authors take control and hack the
system of publishing. The new hackers’ writing cannot be read as “victim
literature.” This does not mean that social and political realities are elided
but rather that writing is a scene that offers the possibility of negotiation,
dynamic movement, resistance, and change. A reading that acknowledges the
ability of a new generation to get its voice across is very political and would
acknowledge these texts’ ability to move us beyond questions of confusion,
oppression, and the like.

Conclusion

Roger Allen accurately points out that it is Mahfouz’s earning of the Nobel
Prize in 1988 that has generally driven American academic interest in modern
Arabic literature.27 However, Allen observes, it is Mahfouz’s trilogy from the
1950s that occupies center stage in the critical literature. This observation
needs to be more deeply probed. A rethinking of the contemporary Arabic
canon in the American academic context is urgent given political change
and new aesthetic configurations. Syllabi that reduce this literature to 1940s
and 1950s works by Naguib Mahfouz and Tayeb Salih need to be updated
and upgraded, to use Alaidy’s terms. These American critical approaches
to Arabic literature have yet to acknowledge the aesthetic and political
transformations shaping new writing. Arising from a liminal space at the
intersection of the material and the virtual, these texts are ushering in new
genres and political consciousness.
The emphasis on reading a new Arabic textuality that connects
Hollywood films with Arabic literature, the novel and the blog, and Arabic
and English unsettles clearly circumscribed fields in the U.S. academy.
Reduced to a representation of Arab culture and Islam or read as staging
struggles and resistances to hegemonic models from patriarchy to imperi-
alism, “Arabic literature is not allowed to have aesthetics,” claims Marilyn
Booth, translator and scholar of modern Arabic literature.28 Both the politics
of translation and the literary criticism that ensued after Edward Said
published Orientalism in 1979 have inadvertently elided the aesthetic signifi-
cance of Arabic texts. The critical emphasis on questions of representation

CLS 47.4_06.indd 546 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 H AC KI N G T H E M O D ER N 547

along neatly defined binaries of East/West or modernity/tradition falls short

of imagining an Arabic literary textuality shaped by specific technological
developments and global culture. While it is important to ground Arabic
literary works in their social and political contexts, it is critical to explore
the ways questions of genre, style, and narrative inform and dialogue with
political and cultural frameworks.
Traditionally, Arabic literature taught in Near Eastern studies depart-
ments in the United States was classical in orientation. Contemporary Arabic
literature, on the other hand, entered the academy through comparative
literature and English departments, mediated and theorized by cultural stud-
ies. With the professional opportunities made possible by recent interest in
Arabic literature and Islam, comparatists and scholars from English depart-
ments started entering the field of Near Eastern studies. The result is that
classical and contemporary Arabic literatures, in dialogue with critical theory
and cultural studies, are now taught in the same departments by scholars
who share the same field and who are training students at the intersection of
these traditions. Such disciplinary changes allow us to rethink the models of
interpretation that have thus far governed the study of Arabic literature and
to imagine Arabic literature as a single body of texts, encompassing Shanfara,
the pre-Islamic sa’luk and rebel poet, as well as Ahmed Alaidy. Evidence of
this consolidation of Arabic literary studies in the humanities as can be seen
in the recent accession of the Arabic literature discussion group to division
status in the MLA. Engaging new aesthetic and disciplinary transformations
anchors the study of Arabic literature as an essential humanistic enterprise.
University of Texas at Austin

Notes
The author wishes to thank the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas for their
generous support that allowed the completion of this article.
1. Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih, “Hyper Texts: Avant-Gardism in Contemporary Egyptian
Narratives,” Neohelicon 36.2 (2009): 515–23, 515.
2. I Want to Get Married, trans. Nora Eltahawy (Austin: Center of Middle Eastern Studies
Press at the University of Texas at Austin, 2010).
3. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Found in Translation: The Contemporary Arabic Novel,” The
New Yorker, 18 Jan. 2010, 74–80.
4. Samuel Shimon, ed., Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World (New York: Bloomsbury,
2010).
5. Al-Hayat’s literary reviewer is Hazem Abyad; Al-Akhbar’s is Muhammad Khayr. A new
periodical entitled Wasla, which has been recently launched in Cairo, is produced entirely by
bloggers (http://wasla.anhri.net).
6. For an issue dedicated to new writing in Egypt, see Banipal 25 (2006).

CLS 47.4_06.indd 547 14/01/11 3:29 AM

 548 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

7. See my review of the novel in Banipal 30 (2007): 148–49.

8. Abdel-Messih, “Hyper Texts,” 521.
9. Hazem Abyad, review of An takun ‘Abbas al-‘Abd, Al-Hayat, 25 Dec. 2003, http://
www.arabworldbooks.com/ArabicLiterature/review20.htm (accessed 18 Dec. 2009). For an
investigation of parody and pastiche in postmodern texts, see Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics
of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Cultural Critique 5 (1986–87): 179–207.
10. Being Abbas el Abd, trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press,
2006), 34. Hereafter cited by page number.
11. For a discussion of the collapse of the family as a national icon in new Arabic fiction, see
Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2008), 123–43.
12. Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” 206.
13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
14. Alain Badiou, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis
of the Negative” (interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith), Critical Inquiry 34.4
(2008): 645–59.
15. Badiou, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline,’” 652.
16. Badiou, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline,’” 659.
17. Sabry Hafez, “The New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form,”
New Left Review 64 (2010): 62.
18. André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000); Abu-Zaid Rajih, “Al-Insan wa-l-makan: Al-Qahirah namudhaja” [“Man and Space:
A Study of Cairo”], in Misr: Nazarat nahwa al-mustaqbal [“Egypt: Future Perspectives”], ed.
Shukri Muhammad ‘Ayyad (Cairo: Dar asdiqa’ al-kitab, 1999), 111–33.
19. Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, 143.
20. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/hack (accessed 14 Dec. 2009).
21. Muhsin J. al-Musawi, “Engaging Globalization in Modern Arabic Literature: Appropria-
tion and Resistance,” Modern Language Quarterly 68.2 (2007): 305–29. For a detailed discussion
of modern Arabic literature and the postcolonial novel more specifically, see al-Musawi’s The
Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
22. Al-Musawi, “Engaging Globalization in Modern Arabic Literature,” 322.
23. Al-Musawi, “Engaging Globalization in Modern Arabic Literature,” 319.
24. Al-Musawi, “Engaging Globalization in Modern Arabic Literature,” 329.
25. David Damrosch, “Comparative Literature?” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 326–30.
26. David Damrosch,What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2003), 5.
27. See Roger Allen, “Literary History and the Arabic Novel,” World Literature Today 75.2
(2001): 205–13.
28. This is a statement Marilyn Booth made at “Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies:
Defining the Genre,” University of Texas at Austin, Jan. 25–26, 2010.

CLS 47.4_06.indd 548 14/01/11 3:29 AM