The politics of imagining the West in the Egyptian novel: Resignifications of the European woman trope from the 1960s to the Arab Spring

Abstract

This article is a study in the poetics and politics of imagining the West in modern Arabic literature. It focuses on the deployment of the European woman trope in four Egyptian novels published between 1959 and 2012 and describes the re-enactment and transformation of this trope in relationship to the authors’ new critical attitudes toward hegemonic nationalist imaginaries in the second decade of the Twentieth century and in the early 2000s. After the 1960s, de-othering the European woman trope became also a means of questioning the hegemonic images of the Self that had been constructed against stereotyped images of Europe. This process led the authors in the early 2000s to re-imagine collective identity in the light of their aspiration to a democratisation of political life.