Saturday, October 31th 9:00 – 10:30

Session Room: Loft 2

1) John Trenton, University of Pittsburgh
Fishing for Arab national unity in Tahar Ouettar’s “Le Poisson ne mord pas”

Following the Algerian War for Independence and as president of the newly independent Algerian nation, Ahmed Ben Bella famously exclaimed in 1962 that “Nous sommes arabes!”. He then launched Algeria into a rapid state of arabization in order integrate into what appeared to the pan-Arab Nation. Moreover, he seized the opportunity to enforce a social policy that mirrored communism and became one of the many leaders of this young nation to be labeled as an autocrat who ignored the will of the people.

One of these people was the author Tahar Ouettar. Amongst the most prolific Algerian writers in Arabic, Ouettar condemned the post-colonial Algerian francophone authors and supported arabization, but actively and personally pursued an Algerian identity that was Arab-Berber-Islamic or, in other words, a national identity that remained within the context of Algeria. While a strict adherent to socialist doctrine, he remained part of the left leaning minority of the FLN and became a critic of the Arab Nations’ social policies, especially in in his homeland that he saw as becoming more and more autocratic and internally divided.

In this paper, I will investigate Ouettar’s use of allegory in “Le poisson ne mord pas” (1980) in order to shed light on the author’s critique of the social policies that were supposed to form the Arab Algerian identity but instead created the separation of classes that still exists in contemporary Algeria. I will further examine how Ouettar’s use of fishing as the main allegorical device and fishing’s processes align with the events that unraveled after the Arab Revolution of the early 20th century and continued through decolonization and led to the destabilization of the Algerian national identity and its adherence to pan-Arab nationalism.

2) Navneet Kumar, Medicine Hat College
Tribalism as Nationalism: The Role of Ethnicity and Nationalism in Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

In their seminal work on nationalism, "Who Sings the Nation-State?" Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravaorty Spivak discuss the lineages of the modern nation-state to conclude that "the modern nation-state is ...bound up structurally with the recurrent expulsion of national minorities" (30). They propose that the nation-state assumes that the nation expresses a certain national identity that is singular and homogeneous or at least it becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of the nation-state. The state expels the minorities that do not qualify for national belonging and justifies its existence through creating and inventing certain modes of stipulative belonging/citizenship based on race, language, ethnicity, religion and even gender.

Chimamanda Adichie's 2006 novel, Half of a Yellow Sun examines first the systematic exclusion of the Igbo people from mainstream Nigerian identity and citizenship and when the Igbo people create their own nation-state of Biafra in 1967, Nigeria attacks Biafra in order to force an ironic reunification. Adichie's novel examines this important contradiction at the heart of debates about Nigerian nationalism where once they have been excluded and rendered stateless for all practical purposes, these same people are not allowed to possess any mode of autonomy or self-sufficiency. While the Igbo are excluded from national consideration and citizenship, I argue that their efforts at restoring some of their autonomy through the creation of a Biafran state (no doubt an act of performative power, according to Butler and Spivak) stays short of being seen a real act of insurgency as the Nigerian national state enforces hunger, deprivation and death to ultimately champion modes of its own national belongings and identity.

3) Jessie Forsyth, McMaster University
Difficult Urban Intimacies: Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon and Intra-African Mobilities

In May 2008 and again in April/May of this year, violence targeting non-South African nationals living in South Africa – pejoratively referred to as makwerekwere – broke out in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. An estimated 69 people were killed, largely Mozambican and Zimbabwean, and xenophobia has been the commonly cited cause (Hassim, Kupe, and Worby).

Almost a decade prior to the 2008 attacks, a National Plan of Action had already identified xenophobia as a particularly pernicious problem post-apartheid that demanded political attention. Yet scholars have troubled the ease with which this kind of analysis has gained explicative authority. David Matsinhe, for example, argues that “the history of colonial group relations” and “South Africa’s ‘we-image’ vis-à-vis the rest of Africa” (Mario Matsinhe 295) combine to complicate catch-all assumptions about xenophobia in the region. Helene Strauss critiques an associated assumption about bare life in the operations of xenophobia by foregrounding “concrete, everyday social and affective networks that give migrant lives their unique subjective integrity” (Strauss 103).

This paper contributes to both those analyses, in conjunction with Francis Nyamnjoh’s work on “flexible citizenship,” by turning to a South African film released prior to the 2008 attacks that takes seriously the complicated challenges of intra-African mobility and racialized foreignness in the ‘rainbow nation’ of post-1994 South Africa. Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon is a docu-drama set in Hillbrow, Johannesburg that raises difficult questions about xenophobia without determining their interpretive significance by following a South African man’s fictionalized search for a Somali woman. I argue that the film critically evokes conversation as both the protagonist’s longing and as a critical practice within the cross-cultural space of the city that helps negotiate, without resolving, asymmetrical experiences of home and belonging.