My dissertation examines the representation of dispossession in Maghrebian and Arab diasporic literature from the late 1950s to the present. "Dispossession" signifies "practices of land encroachment" and has been "historically mobilized by colonial and racist assumptions to justify and naturalize the process of misrecognition, appropriation and occupation of indigenous lands in colonial and postcolonial settler contexts" (Butler and Athanasiou 10). These contexts have been the subject of anti-colonial and postcolonial theories by critics ranging from Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon to Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. My project, however, follows Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou's theoretical framework and extends the concept of dispossession beyond its colonial-bound definition to the forced deprivation of ontoepistemological norms that sustain subjects and render subjectivities intelligible, such as dispossessing subjects of modes of belonging, of community, of livelihood, of rights, and of ownership of one's body. Dispossession in this broader conceptualization encompasses various socio-political phenomena identified by Butler and Athanasiou, including the "histories of slavery," "subjection to military" and "economic violence," "biopolitical subjectification," and "neoliberal governmentality and precaritization," among others (Butler and Athanasiou 2).Drawing on anticolonial and postcolonial theory, in conjunction with Butler and Athanasiou's framework, I analyze the literary representations of dispossession in effort to elaborate typologies and conceptualizations of dispossession within and beyond colonial and postcolonial contexts while also highlighting the formal qualities of the literary texts. Chapter One examines the largely overlooked motif of listening in Assia Djebar's The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. I emphasize the figuration of "listening" as a means of healing for the female characters subjected to traumatizing gendered and sexual forms of dispossession and the value of listening in readings of trauma, which primarily stress "speaking" and "witnessing." In Chapter Two, I look into the representation of corporeal dispossession in Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse and Sitt Marie Rose. I study Adnan's surrealist, cryptic style in The Arab Apocalypse. My reading sheds light on the poem's abject-evoking imagery, which serves as an ethical solicitation to readers that elicits outrage at the violence and destruction taking over the Arab World. I analyze Adnan's understudied modernist aesthetics in Sitt Marie Rose and its predominant metaphorics of predation to reveal how the text critiques masculinism and emphasizes the central role ethical relationality to the sexual other plays in conditioning ethical relationality to all others. My reading reinstates the value of theorizations of sexual difference in conceptualizing collective violence. Chapter Three examines representations of subjective, corporeal, and sexual dispossession in Wajdi Mouawad's Tideline and Scorched. I highlight the adequacy of Mouawad's Artaud-like aesthetics for evoking traumatic experiences that defy representation and underlining the significance of an ethical relation to alterity in order to both preclude and come to terms with dispossession.
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