The inappropriable Voice

This dissertation, “The Inappropriable Voice,” is a theoretical exploration of voice that traverses written and oral Arabic works, North African and African-American texts. One of the major concerns of this comparative study is to examine what has been marked as Third World literature in order to address some of the current analyses drawn from postcolonial interpretations. I approach this problematic by providing a reading that shows the limitations of certain post-colonial assumptions which attempt to homogenize Arab and African countries and reduce their literature to a critique of colonialism. The most recent post-colonial studies of Arabic and Francophone literatures continue to engage in cultural critique and follow themes of identity and race rather than attempting to address the other theoretical questions which these works pose. In Chapter One I introduce Bedouin women's poetry, addressing its exclusion, examining the trope of the voice with the post-colonial assumption of Third World and its anti-technology sentiments. In contrast to the almost silent resistance to technology in certain post-colonial critique, the oral Bedouin poems posit woman's relation to technology. My analysis in Chapter Two of Raja ‘Alem's The Final Death of the Actor shows the writing of modernity al-hadatha has been appropriated and misread in the postcolonial critiques. Chapter Three traces the trope of a disseminated voice in Assia Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia. My analysis also examines the encounter between music and writing as it pervades Djebar's text in order to demonstrate that this text complicates the question of writing and resists any attempt of limiting it to a commentary on coloniality. My fourth chapter elaborates on the previous chapter by attempting to draw a comparison on the way in which Toni Morrison and Assia Djebar employ tropes of voice and music. I extent my theoretical exploration of post-colonial critique by responding to Said's Musical Elaborations and an analysis of Morrison's Jazz. This dissertation present diverse texts from different locations, staging common problematics as they consistently undermine categorization or assimilation. Put briefly, approaching these texts as representative models of sociopolitical paradigms risks silencing other explicit aspects of differentiation.