Postcolonial Recycling of the Oriental Vampire in Habiby&apos;s <i>Saraya, the Ghoul&apos;s Daughter</i> and Mukherjee&apos;s <i>Jasmine</i>

Ahmed Gamal, null

doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.35.1.0004

ScienceOpen: research and publishing network

For Publishers

For Researchers

Blog
About

Search
Advanced search

250

views

recommends

If you have found this article useful and you think it is important that researchers across the world have access, please consider donating, to ensure that this valuable collection remains Open Access.

Arab Studies Quarterly is published by Pluto Journals, an Open Access publisher. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles from our international collection of social science journals. Furthermore Pluto Journals authors don’t pay article processing charges (APCs).

scite_

Arab Studies Quarterly

Volume 35, Issue 1

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Postcolonial Recycling of the Oriental Vampire in Habiby's Saraya, the Ghoul's Daughter and Mukherjee's Jasmine

Published

research-article

Author(s): Ahmed Gamal

Publication date (Print): Winter 2013

Journal: Arab Studies Quarterly

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Keywords: postcolonial gothic, vampire, ghoul, Arabic folktale, Hindu myth, otherness

Bookmark

Abstract

This article examines Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989) as two postcolonial novels seeking to rewrite the history of Palestinian and Indian diaspora according to their respective myths of Oriental vampires. Habiby's recycling of the Palestinian folktale of the ghoul and Mukherjee's recuperation of the Hindu myth of Lord Shiva aim to spotlight the classical vampiric topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Postcolonial Gothic writing is thus shown to foreground gender, nationality, and ethnicity as sites of both power conflict and cultural exchange. Adopting a counter-Orientalist approach, the study sheds light on the different strategies these two postcolonial texts employ to deconstruct the demonic and ghostly constructions of Arabs and Indians.

Content

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.13169

Journal ID (publisher-id): arabstudquar

Title: Arab Studies Quarterly

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Print): 02713519

ISSN (Electronic): 20436920

Publication date (Print): Winter 2013

Volume: 35

Issue: 1

Pages: 4-19

Article

Publisher ID: arabstudquar.35.1.0004

DOI: 10.13169/arabstudquar.35.1.0004

SO-VID: a8f26cc8-c47c-4a19-a858-0b0d5e668d98

License:

All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Notes

The Yazidi are a Kurdish-speaking people who adhere to a branch of Yazdanism that blends elements of Mithraism, pre-Islamic Mesopotamian religious traditions, Christianity and Islam.
Translations from Saraya in the present text are mine.
The Six-Day War, known in Arabic as an-Naksah (The Setback), was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon between September 16 and 18, 1982, during the Lebanese civil war.
The Sikhs wished to secure an official homeland for a Sikh majority population in the northwestern part of the subcontinent. Khalistan (Land of the Pure), however, is a territory that was never created, and since Independence in 1947, the desire for a Sikh homeland has cast a dark shadow over the part of northwestern India known by the name of Punjab—itself an unstable designation over the decades.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] The Yazidi are a Kurdish-speaking people who adhere to a branch of Yazdanism that blends elements of Mithraism, pre-Islamic Mesopotamian religious traditions, Christianity and Islam.

[2] Translations from Saraya in the present text are mine.

[3] The Six-Day War, known in Arabic as an-Naksah (The Setback), was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon between September 16 and 18, 1982, during the Lebanese civil war.

[4] The Sikhs wished to secure an official homeland for a Sikh majority population in the northwestern part of the subcontinent. Khalistan (Land of the Pure), however, is a territory that was never created, and since Independence in 1947, the desire for a Sikh homeland has cast a dark shadow over the part of northwestern India known by the name of Punjab—itself an unstable designation over the decades.