Ambivalent Protestors: Neo-Orientalist Depictions of the Arab Spring Revolutions in Anglophone Narrative

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate the literary representations of the Arab Spring revolutions in Anglophone memoirs and novels, arguing that a new form of neo-Orientalism has emerged to reflect the ostensibly peaceful and liberalising nature of the Arab Spring revolutions, which I term post-Arab Spring neo-Orientalism. This new iteration is different from classical Orientalism and post-9/11 neo-Orientalism in two key areas: firstly, the inclusion of Arabs into the West and the disappearance of the stereotype that indicates that Arabs are anti Western, as evidenced by the increasing emergence of themes depicting globalisation and the possible multicultural co-exitance between Arabs and Westerners; secondly, the curtailment of Islamophobia and the elimination of stereotypes concerning Islamic fundamentalism, violence and terrorism. Nevertheless, while post-Arab Spring neo-Orientalism departs from the open xenophobia that had been a staple in Western literature pertaining to the Arab world, it continues to draw on classical Orientalist stereotypes relating to other aspects of Arab culture. Specifically, it demonstrates a misreading of Arab politics by means of describing the Arab revolutions using Western political thought rather than Islamic principles for political leadership. In addition, post-Arab Spring neo-Orientalist literature depends on repackaged Orientalist abstractions such as ‘the lazy Oriental’ and ‘Oriental despotism’ to depict the disappointing outcome of the Arab revolutions. Simultaneously, despite adopting this transformed neo-Orientalist discourse, a majority of post-Arab Spring memoirs and novels belong to the genre of postcolonial literature and the authors resist Western discursive hegemony by means of employing counter-narrative strategies, including the journey into the Oriental wilderness and magic realism. Such resistance, however, is limited to the use of a host of themes and sub-plots within a predominantly neo-Orientalist voice. ‘The West’ thus, emerges as an ambivalent category that is both desired and undesired in the post-Arab Spring literary renditions of this phase of Arab political history.