UCLA

Left Behind: Literature and Left Critique in Neoliberal Egypt traces trajectories of the Left literary critique of neoliberalism in Egypt from the aftermath of Nasser’s imprisonment of the communists in 1959-64 and the 1967 defeat to Israel, through the present aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. I contend that despite the 1967 defeat and the Left’s political capitulations, disillusionment, and rents that emerged in its fallout, the literary Left has remained a force for engagement. Its approach shifted from literary forms of political commitment (iltizām) – rooted in socialism and national liberation, but also tied to the Nasserist state – to forms of Left literary critique marked by alienation, Marxism, and innovative literary aesthetics. I extend the lineage of Left literary critique from the Sixties Generation’s New Sensibility (Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm), through the rightward swing of infitāḥ (Arwa Ṣāliḥ), and to the consolidation of the postrevolutionary neoliberal order (Nādiya Kāmil and Muḥammad Rabīʿ). I am primarily concerned with gendered aesthetic and epistemological aspects of the literature of iltizām and its legacies in the neoliberal era. Specifically, I refer here to sexual-political symbolism, gendered affect, and modes of reading and critique that were produced during the hegemony of the Nasser era. The authors I examine deform, intensify, reroute and reject these aesthetic aspects of iltizām as central components of their critiques of neoliberalism.

My attention to the symbolism and aesthetics of these literary critiques of neoliberalism is grounded in a concern for sex and gender: gendered affect, sexual-political symbolism, and gendered language and literary forms. This is a divergence from dominant scholarly approaches to iltizām and its legacies, which are articulated largely in terms of literary theory and political critique. While I engage this scholarship and these aspects of iltizām’s literary and intellectual history, my focus on aesthetics and symbolism is important because they are among the most enduring aspects of iltizām in the literature of the neoliberal era and in modes of reading Arabic literature broadly speaking. The critical literary works discussed in Left Behind are marked by exhausted and grotesque aesthetics (Ibrāhīm, Rabīʿ), analytical rigor and principled despair (Ṣāliḥ), and reanimated and reframed past political commitments (Kāmil). These aesthetic, methodological, and formal aspects direct our authors’ literary critiques of neoliberalism Egypt. Together they form the contours of the Left literary critique of neoliberalism in Egypt.