Subjectivities of exclusion in a Kuwaiti novel: A postcolonial, decolonial and Foucauldian analysis

Annette Dupont

doi:10.25907/00943

After winning the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013, the controversial postcolonial Arabic novel Saq al-bambu (2012) by the Kuwaiti author Saud Alsanousi was translated into many languages. This dissertation offers a social and literary critique of the East Asian and Arab Gulf societies and subjectivities of Alsanousi’s marginalised characters, as these are imagined and portrayed in the English edition by Jonathan Wright, The Bamboo Stalk (2015). The global scholarship on the Arabic and English editions published between 2013 and 2023 is rich and extensive, engaging with social science disciplines, as well as cultural and literary studies. Inter alia, the existing studies reflect cultural grafting and cultural narrative theory, narratology and intercultural communication theory, Islamic and human rights perspectives, descriptive discourse analysis, feminist, intersectionality and intersubjectivity theory, psychological archetypes, self-authorship models, the politics of translation, literary genres of meta-fiction, realism and postmodernism, and other self-styled “mimetic” approaches. This investigation responds to a number of key lacunae in the existing scholarship. Firstly, most studies of the novel focus wholly or almost exclusively on the central male protagonist and narrator, while paying little or no attention to the social and literary significance of its secondary characters. Secondly, the few studies which engage with postcolonial and/or decolonial notions to explicate the narrative and its characters, tend to assume that the explanatory value of these twentieth century concepts extends to the highly disparate sociopolitical contexts of both the twenty-first century Philippines and Kuwait. Thirdly, few authors of these studies pay critical attention to the definition, problematisation, and/or contextual translation of the theoretical concepts they employ in their analyses; nor do they articulate their positionalities or reflect upon their underlying philosophical assumptions. In a departure from existing studies, this multi-theoretical enquiry explores the novel’s imagined social realms, shifting subjectivities, and inter-relationships of two of its Philippines-born female characters and two of its Kuwaiti-born male characters. The analysis draws on postcolonial and decolonial concepts and attempts to identify the explanatory potential and limitations of both frameworks within these narrative settings. In addition, this investigation introduces a range of Foucauldian concepts which inform the analysis of the contextual specificities of the settings described in Alsanousi’s novel, and which explore the biopolitical, discursive, institutional and other means by which his characters’ subjectivities are constructed in their societies, and how their exclusion is both naturalised and perpetuated. By combining these theoretical frameworks with the findings of social research conducted in The Philippines and Kuwait, this investigation contributes new insights into the neocolonial societies and subjectivities of exclusion of its key and secondary characters. Through a close reading of Josephine, a Filipina whose domestic labour is sponsored under the Arabian Gulf system of kafala; José/Isa, her mobile, transnational Filipino-Kuwaiti son who narrates the novel; Merla, his gay Eurasian “mestiza” older cousin who lives in the Philippines, and Ghassan, José/Isa’s stateless Bidoon father figure in Kuwait, this enquiry advances several new readings of the novel which underscore its social and literary significance. It interrogates the assumed explanatory value of postcolonial and/or decolonial concepts for elucidating literary figures situated in the Arabian Gulf and identifies a lack of postcolonial studies of the six Gulf States, under the broader rubric of Middle Eastern postcolonial scholarship. Finally, the theoretical contributions of this enquiry open up new avenues for the future development of Eastern translation theory and invite further biopolitical studies inspired by Foucault of neocolonial and neoliberal subjectification and resilience; sociopolitical spatialised exclusion and stratification, and issues of Indigeneity, statelessness, and growing existential precarity.

Subjectivities of exclusion in a Kuwaiti novel: A postcolonial, decolonial and Foucauldian analysis

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