Islam and Postcolonial Narrative

In Islam and Postcolonial Narrative, John Erickson examines four major authors from the third-world - Assia Djebar, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar ben Jelloun, and Salman Rushdie - all of whom have engaged in a critique of the relationship between Islam and the West. Erickson analyses the narrative strategies they deploy to explore the encounter between Western and Islamic values and reveals their use of the cultural resources of Islam, as well as their intertextual exchanges with other ‘third-world’ writers. Erickson argues against any homogenising mode of writing labelled ‘postcolonial’ and any view of Islamic and Western discourses as monolithic or totalising. He reveals the way these writers valorise expansiveness, polyvalence and indeterminacy as part of an attempt to represent the views of individuals and groups that live in the cultural and political margins of society.

• Examines four major authors from the ‘third world’ • Brings postcolonial theory to bear on novels that relate to the intersection between East and West • Examines feminism in relation to Islam

1. Introduction: creating new discourses from old; 2. Women’s voices and woman’s space in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia; 3. Tahar ben Jelloun’s Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places; 4. ‘At the threshold of the untranslatable’: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi; 5. The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; 6. Concluding: Breaches and forgotten openings.