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Apprehension of Colonial Modernity: Radwa Ashour’s Granada Trilogy and the Retrieval of Past Hope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Adam Spanos
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Abstract

This essay studies the Granada Trilogy by Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour, a novel that tells of the growing constraints on and eventual expulsion of the Arabs during the Spanish Inquisition across five generations of an Andalusian family. In linking this story to that of the Palestinians in the twentieth century and beyond, Ashour ascertains a logic of modernity in which the longue durée governs the experience of time’s passage, and peoples disconnected by long intervals of chronological time bear an intimate affinity by virtue of their common subjugation. Far from being merely a reflection of her despondency over the inability to change this historical dynamic, the Granada Trilogy suggests that the hopefulness animating these refugees is a revolutionary resource with which to apprise present actors of the multiple possible futures that remain alive in the present.

Keywords

potentialityhopecolonial modernityAndalusiahistoriographytemporalitymodern Arabic literatureEgyptPalestine
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 387 - 405
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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29 In an interview, Ashour contrasts the various linguistic registers of her novel—fuṣḥā [classical Arabic] and colloquial, Koranic and biblical, the high literary and the documentary—with the “single voice” [al-ṣawt al-uḥādī] of the Inquisition. See Al-‘Aqili, Ja‘far, “Raḍwā ‘Āshūr: al-Ḥakī Asās al-Riwāya,” Āfkār 265 (2011): 107 Google Scholar.

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33 Christina Civantos, whose reading of the Granada Trilogy also focuses on the books, interprets them as symbols of hope, cultural continuity, and resilience. See Civantos, Christina, The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), 271–281 Google Scholar.

34 Giorgio Agamben critiques the received understanding of potentiality in Aristotle and his followers, pointing to the teleological nature of a potentiality that would simply await its own actualization. He instead commends a form of impotentiality that would abnegate itself in order to let others have a chance at becoming. Such a radical passivity, however admirable in its context, cannot command the same ethical force under conditions of coloniality, where impotence is enforced. Yet Agamben usefully calls us to think a form of potentiality that would not be hoarded as power but could still inspire efforts at transformation. See Agamben, Giorgio, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

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51 Ashour, “Li-kullin Gharnāṭatuhu,” 514. Edward W. Said makes a similar suggestion in “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Writings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173–86.

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