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“Let’s Take a Leap”: Decolonizing Modernity, Double Critique, and Sexuality in Mohamed Leftah’s Le Dernier Combat du Captain Niʿmat

“Let’s Take a Leap”: Decolonizing Modernity, Double Critique, and Sexuality in Mohamed Leftah’s... This article examines how the Moroccan Francophone writer Mohamed Leftah negotiates a decolonized modernity in his novel Le dernier combat du Captain Niʿmat (2011). This understanding of decolonization is based on Abdelkebir Khatibi’s pensée-autre, a mode of thinking that simultaneously embraces and disavows its constitutive traditions and attempts to formulate its own episteme. Living in Egypt, a queer diaspora for a Moroccan, Leftah employs queer male sexuality in a Sufialist text that tells the story of Niʿmat, an Egyptian retired army officer who pursues a love affair with his young Nubian servant, Islam. Transgressive sexuality, anachronistic gender typology, narrative modes, and historicizing onomastics decenter the metropole of France and articulate a decolonized modernity. Even as it centers male sexual unruliness and invites a queer reading, the text stabilizes other sexual and gender hierarchies, pointing to the need for texts revolving around queer feminist discourse in the Arab world. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Duke University Press

“Let’s Take a Leap”: Decolonizing Modernity, Double Critique, and Sexuality in Mohamed Leftah’s Le Dernier Combat du Captain Niʿmat

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Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies
ISSN
1552-5864
eISSN
1558-9579
DOI
10.1215/15525864-6680231
Publisher site
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Abstract

This article examines how the Moroccan Francophone writer Mohamed Leftah negotiates a decolonized modernity in his novel Le dernier combat du Captain Niʿmat (2011). This understanding of decolonization is based on Abdelkebir Khatibi’s pensée-autre, a mode of thinking that simultaneously embraces and disavows its constitutive traditions and attempts to formulate its own episteme. Living in Egypt, a queer diaspora for a Moroccan, Leftah employs queer male sexuality in a Sufialist text that tells the story of Niʿmat, an Egyptian retired army officer who pursues a love affair with his young Nubian servant, Islam. Transgressive sexuality, anachronistic gender typology, narrative modes, and historicizing onomastics decenter the metropole of France and articulate a decolonized modernity. Even as it centers male sexual unruliness and invites a queer reading, the text stabilizes other sexual and gender hierarchies, pointing to the need for texts revolving around queer feminist discourse in the Arab world.

Journal

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies – Duke University Press

Published: Jul 1, 2018

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