Ali al-Dou`aji: The Jawla Within

 Lecture by Dr. Imed Nsiri, AUS Department of Arabic and Translation Studies

The impetus for the political struggle for Tunisia's independence was the urgency of defining a national identity that was staged on the literary and artistic scene in the 1930s. Ali al-Dou`aji's Jawla is a case in point. It is a text in search for identity by crossing borders: borders of the self and the collective (national) and the self and the other (the gaze into the other and the revelation of the self); East and West (the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean); maqama and Rihla genres on one hand and the novel and the picaresque on the other. In doing so it posits itself as text that challenges and blurs the boundaries and subverts the genres that these cultures produced.

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