Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted REIMAGINING THE ORIENT: REVISITING THE ONTOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MIDDLE EAST IN POST 9/11 AMERICAN LITERATURE(Morgan State University, 2024-11-17) Aljuaid, Sara Saleh; Newson-Horst, AdeleAfter the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Arab and Middle Eastern American communities gained a new social status as hypervisible and hyphenated citizens. Sensationalized stories about the Middle East as a terrorism and violence hub prevail in American television. Hollywood broadcasts films and T.V. shows that exhibit stereotypical representations of the Middle East and Muslim women, mirroring the Orientalist legacy in the colonies dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before 9/11, the American perception of the Middle East was inherited from the European fascination and romanticization of the Orient, causing to reproduce Orientalism aesthetics to contribute to the proliferation of capitalism and the amplification of consumerist culture in America. Since the attacks, a new rhetoric has emerged pertaining to the portrayals of Muslim women in primetime American T.V. The optics of Muslim women as exotic, hypersexualized, and oppressed have been broadcasted to provoke sentiments of sympathy and fear. The dehumanization of the Middle East by adopting the rhetoric of Muslim women’s victimhood has been utilized as a soft weapon to promote the War on Terror and the US expansionist projects in the Middle East. Arab American literature post-9/11 attempts to demystify the vagueness of conflicting identities and the emergence of discourse that focuses on the depiction of Muslim women. Arab American fiction authors internalize the Orientalist discourse, implement the Arabesque narration style, and reproduce dichotomies to create subdivisions within the Orient to appeal to Western sensibilities and to mediate finding common ground with the dominant culture.30 0Item Restricted MANIFESTATIONS OF THE OIL ENCOUNTER: AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO MIDDLE EASTERN PETRO-LITERATURE(Ball State University, 2024-04-04) Alshareef, Nasser; Ferguson, MollyThis study examines fictional works from the Middle East that delve into Amitav Ghosh’s notion of the “Oil Encounter,” including novels by Ahmad Mahmoud, Leila Al-Atrash, Nawal El-Saadawi, and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film Day of the Falcon. By analyzing texts across different historical periods and national traditions, the dissertation uncovers diverse attitudes and perspectives on the oil encounter, filling a critical gap in the scholarship. The study therefore argues that the experience of the oil encounter is not a monolith, but dynamic and complex encounters and experiences influenced by historical events and socio-political norms. Furthermore, a central concern in this dissertation is the ways in which the oil industry is associated with several myths that serve its interests and influence public perception. In different ways, the texts engage with these dominant myths about the oil industry by showing how the poor, women and the environment are on the receiving end of the oil industry’s impacts. By drawing from ecocritical studies, feminist and eco-feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, this dissertation highlights the ways in which the authors under study imaginatively subvert Euro-Americans myths regarding the oil industry and foreground counter-stories of the marginalized and oppressed. In other words, whether the oil encounter is linked to notions of liberation, abundance, instant modernization, development, progress, modernity, and economic prosperity or not is irrelevant. Rather, what is relevant and undeniable is that the oil encounter in the Middle East is a violent encounter.42 0Item Restricted NAVIGATING THE UNIVERSAL: THE POLITICS OF NARRATING DISPLACEMENT IN 20TH-21ST CENTURY BRITISH AND ANGLOPHONE NOVELS(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-11-30) Almuthaybiri, Abdulaziz; Greer, ErinThis dissertation revives the long debated philosophical question of universalism, analyzing its significance to displacement narratives in select Anglophone novels published in the 20th and 21st centuries. Scholars like Edward Said and Frantz Fanon have argued about the impact of universalism on racial and cultural differences in postcolonial contexts. This dissertation extends this debate while uncovering the power discourses of universalism through the study of three novels by renowned literary figures whose literary productions center around displacement: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. With explication of each novel, it contends that their form and content strongly reflect their engagement with the question of universalism. The dissertation structure navigates backwards in time, beginning with Exit West’s universalized narrative of the 21st century refugee crisis and moving, with each novel, to narratives set roughly 50-60 years prior to the previous one. Chapter one deciphers the neocolonial discourses embedded within universal narratives of the refugee crisis. It argues that, in Exit West, such neocolonial discourses attempt to “humanize” the refugees but end up reinforcing not only the “othering” of the Muslim World - as places governed by despots, inhabited by religious fanatics, violent, intolerant, passive, misogynistic, and lustful individuals - but also support the evasion of Western responsibility that has caused massive suffering and displacement in the Middle East and elsewhere. Universalizing the refugee experience serves Western power, in other words. The second chapter turns to The Lonely Londoners’ depiction of the Caribbean migration surge to London after the British Nationality Act of 1948, the period of the Windrush Generation. This chapter uncovers the power discourses that can manifest in the critique of universalism. It argues the novel’s subjective mode, and its construction of a worldview centered on its male migrant central cast, provides a powerful critique of universal narratives at the core of racial hierarchy. But it also argues that the novel’s critique is bounded by its implicit patriarchal assumptions. Therefore, I direct attention to the way in which the novel’s limited gender politics emerge from its attempt to not only critically represent racism in postwar Britain, but to do so in a way that challenges universalizing logic at work in both racist and some antiracist discourses. The third chapter deals with Afterlives’ subversive narrative of imperial displacement during the 19th and 20th German colonial rule of East Africa. This chapter analyzes Afterlives’ approach as an alternative to Exit West’s universalism and The Lonely Londoners’ anti-universalism. I argue that the novel circumvents power discourses of universalism by decentralizing the German authoritative historiography and interrogating the hierarchies in the local community and in the Schutztruppe. In other words, it offers a model of how to resolve some of the problems of both universalisms, as seen in Exit West, and possible forms of its critique, as seen in The Lonely Londoners. In conclusion, I reflect on the novel as a genre, connecting this dissertation to literary historical questions about the relationship between novels and imperialism.73 0