Postcolonial Memory, Postmodern Intertextuality: Anton Shammas'sArabesquesRevisited

Abstract

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novelArabesques.A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed inArabesqueand suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.

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