The Lingering Trace and the Feint: Postcolonial Discourse in Contemporary Arabic Criticism

This book stands in the uneasy gap between contemporary Arabic criticism and postcolonial theory — not to interrogate the theory alone, but the manner of its reception in our cultural field: how concepts are translated, and how they dissemble as they move from their original context into another that carries wounds of its own.

Al-rasīs is the lingering trace — what settles in a text from a discourse that came before it. Al-mukhātala is the play of masks a discourse performs when it disguises itself. From these two ideas the author builds a reading of the mechanics of representation, of the relation between centre and margin, and of where Arab critics stand before a theoretical inheritance that was never written for them in the first place.

The book was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2014, and it remains a reference returned to whenever Arabic criticism asks the question: how do we read an imported theory without being read by it?

Criticism, at its core, is an act of knowledge before it is a technical skill.

The book is written in Arabic; this page presents it for English readers.