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ABSTRACT
Excavating traces of the Racial Capitalocene in Libyan-Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni's Arabic language Bleeding of the Stone (1990) and Israeli Jewish author Yoel Hoffmann's Hebrew-language Book of Joseph (1988), this article posits a novel critical framework for comparative readings of Middle Eastern literatures. In centering the advance of the racializing commodity frontier as primary node of literary interrogation across European capital city and African desert expanse, it argues that the two texts, despite their divergent positionings, craft remarkably parallel character dramas predicated upon affective porosity. Given their similarly sensitive, self-aware protagonists, their shared recourse to the “oikos”—a larger web of life beyond the self—and their overlapping thematizations of needle and thread, and Christological imageries of redemption articulated in minor tongues, the two texts ultimately curate affective porosity as a means for addressing and unsettling the conditions of racialized capitalist accumulation and its environmental and social effects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 4.
2 Al-Koni is an Arabic language author of Tuareg descent born in 1948 in the Ghadames oasis in Libya. In addition to his native Tamashek, he began learning Arabic at age eleven. He has published over sixty titles in Arabic and is widely translated. After a period of literary study in the Soviet Union, followed by work as a journalist in Eastern Europe, he lived for many years in Switzerland before settling in Spain. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2009, he is among the most prominent magical realists writing in Arabic today. He identifies his literary project as creating a tradition of the desert novel.
3 An Israeli scholar of Zen Buddhism and Japanese poetry, Hoffmann only began publishing literary works in his 50s. Born in 1937 in Brashov in present-day Romania into a German and Hungarian speaking home, he moved to Israel with his father's family in 1938 after the death of his mother. His publications include ten books of lyric prose and numerous translations of Zen-Buddhist texts from Japanese to Hebrew and to English. Stylistically, his works are classified as participating in postmodern trends of Israeli authors publishing since the late 1980s.
4 These two sentences draw on language from Beckert et al., Commodity Frontiers.
5 Beckert et al., Commodity Frontiers, 437.
6 Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. “affectus,” https://latin-dictionary.net/definition/2165/affectus-affectus.
7 Spinoza scholar Paul Wienpahl further argues that Spinoza's understanding of emotions as inherently verbal and always already containing movement was inspired by his interpretation of Biblical Hebrew grammar, specifically that words derive from a verbal root (Wienpahl, Radical Spinoza, 48). This feature is of course shared across all Semitic languages, including Arabic.
8 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 205–11. In contrast, see, for example, affect as beyond the strictures of emotion's “sociolinguistic fixing” in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. For a typology of approaches to affect, see Siegworth and Gregg, “Inventory of Shimmers,” 2010.
9 Freud, “The Unconscious,” 177.
10 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 208.
11 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8–12, 206.
12 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132, 134.
13 See, for example, Sonia Fernandez, “Did Life Get Its Start in Micaceous Clay?” ScienceX, September 20, 2022, https://phys.org/news/2022-09-life-micaceous-clay.html (accessed 1/15/2013).
14 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 209.
15 As Brennan notes, “there is no reason why one person's repression could not be another man or woman's burden, just as the aggression of one can be the anxiety of the other” (Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 12). This is what I mean by refraction.
16 Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 12–3.
17 Ibid., 15.
18 Ibid., 12.
19 Guilmette, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Affects,” 79.
20 Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 11.
21 Benjamin, “Theses,” 257.
22 Ibid., 257–8.
23 On counterpoint as a narrative and interpretive strategy, see Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxv, 66–7, 318, et passim.
24 Allen, Arabic Novel, 245–9.
25 cooke, “Magical Realism in Libya,” 12. For another reading of Bleeding as magical realism, see Sperl, “Lunar Eclipse.”
26 Elmarsafy, Sufism, 107–38.
27 My translation; Ghazoul, “Sufi Novel in the Maghreb,” 28–9.
28 Olszok, Libyan Novel, 54.
29 Stahl, “Formal Representation of Otherness,” 222.
30 Stahl, Other and Brother, 126–46; quote from 146.
31 My translation; Albeck-Gidron, Exploring the Third Option, 13.
32 al-Koni, Bleeding, 135.
33 Ibid., 88.
34 Ibid., Bleeding, 9; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 14.
35 My translation; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 14; c.f. “great treasure” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 9.
36 Ibid. The centrality of the position of government-employed muwaẓẓaf as a type of default route to middle class respectability, at least prior to the neoliberal era, has long been reflected in Modern Arabic literature. See, for example, Firdaus's brief career change in Nawwāl al-Saʿadāwī's Imraʾa ʿinda nuqṭat al-ṣifr (Woman at Point Zero) (1977/1983), or the initially positive assumptions about the bureaucrat in Najīb Mahfuẓ's “al-Faʾr al-nūrwījī” (“The Norwegian Rat”) (1984/1992).
37 My translation, al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 15. My choice of “impotence” underscores the Marxist Feminist notion of wage labor dampening local capacities to reproduce life independent of global markets. C.f. “tired and clumsy” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 9.
38 Quotations from Olszok, Libyan Novel, 54.
39 The American military presence in Libya dates to World War Two and was dramatically intensified with the reinvention of the Mellaha Base as Wheelus Field in January 1948. See Heefner, “Empire of Bases.”
40 My translation; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 96; c.f. “merciless” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 86.
41 al-Koni, Bleeding, 86–7; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 96.
42 Van Leeuwen, “Cars in the Desert,” 64.
43 al-Koni, Bleeding, 2; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 8.
44 al-Koni, Bleeding, 86; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 97.
45 al-Koni, Bleeding, 87; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 97.
46 al-Koni, Bleeding, 91; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 101.
47 Hoffmann, Joseph, 45; Yosef, 84.
48 German for “Eastern Jews.” The term refers to poorer, Yiddish-speaking Jews displaced from their villages in Eastern Europe due to the introduction of mechanized, capitalist forms of production. Starting in the late 1860s, they began migrating to Germany and Austria, where they constituted an underclass to assimilated German Jews.
49 Hoffmann, Joseph, 57.
50 Hoffmann, Joseph, 53; Yosef, 93.
51 Hoffmann Joseph, 8.
52 Hoffmann Joseph, 10; Hoffmann, Yosef, 59.
53 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 173.
54 As Laura Robson explains, forced mass migrations were part and parcel of British and French colonial administration in the Middle East, ranging from “brutal compulsory exchange of Muslims and Christians between Greece and Turkey to encouragement and support for mass European Jewish resettlement in Palestine to a series of unrealized proposals for resettling Assyrians out of Iraq and Syria to spaces as far-flung as Brazil, British Guiana, and Timbuktu” (Robson, States of Separation, 4–5).
55 Moore, “Capitalocene Part I,” 600.
56 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2.
57 These two quotations paraphrase McBrian 2016, as quoted in Moore, Capitalocene Part I, 598.
58 Robinson, Black Marxism, 26.
59 Ibid., 27.
60 Vandertop, “Capital, World-Ecology and Enchanted Nature,” 685.
61 Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene,” 80.
62 al-Koni, Bleeding, 105.
63 Ibid., Bleeding, 110.
64 al-Koni, Bleeding, 12–3; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 19.
65 The word āthār further signposts processes of racialization when Captain John Parker, in search of gazelle tracks (āthār) by air, prods his Black American pilot with a stick to stop him from laughing (al-Koni, Bleeding, 113), as if to discipline him towards efficiency as one would whip a beast of burden.
66 My translation; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 21; the word is dropped in al-Koni, Bleeding, 15.
67 My translation; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 19; c.f. “The agitation reached his limbs” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 13.
68 Ibid.
69 al-Koni, Bleeding, 14; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 20.
70 My translation; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 22; c.f. “for reasons he couldn't fathom” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 16.
71 Racial capitalism is not yet widely used in the analysis of Israeli (pre-)history, political economy, or cultural production. Where it has been considered as a framework, it is usually in the context of Israeli mechanisms for extracting profit from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). See, for example, Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid.
72 Bell, “Unfinished Business,” 199.
73 Robinson, Black Marxism, 75.
74 Ibid., Black Marxism, 99.
75 Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.”
76 Marx discusses the commodity fetish in Volume I, Part 1, Section 4 of Capital.
77 Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 107.
78 Postone's arguments have also informed readings of the racialization of Asian-Americans. See Day, “Alien Capital.”
79 Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 113–4.
80 Ibid., 114. While Postone insists on the uniqueness of antisemitism and the Holocaust, here I adopt his Marxian reading more in the spirit of Ronit Lentin's race-critical reading. Seeking to unmask the means by which “racial rule necessarily shapeshifts, never remaining the same” (Lentin, Why Race Still Matters, 170), Lentin cautions that the narrative of European atonement for the Holocaust not be exploited to strengthen white supremacy or silence the calls of the disenfranchised, especially Palestinians, for justice. In Hoffmann's prose, including in both translated novellas of the eponymous Katschen & Book of Joseph, Palestine is humbly crafted as a site of multi-confessional spiritual longings expressed in myriad tongues.
81 Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 117; italics and capitalization in the original.
82 Hoffmann, Joseph, 1.
83 Slawomir Lotysz, “Singer goes to war,” Inventing Europe, https://www.inventingeurope.eu/story/singer-goes-to-war (accessed 1/15/2023).
84 My translation; Hoffmann, Yosef, 1988, 53. Here I render the Hebrew “aḥuzat tezazit” (literally, “gripped with hysteria,” idiomatically conjugated in the feminine) as the Irish banshee, or folkloric female creature whose crazed cry proclaims an impending death. C.f. “devil” in Hoffmann, Joseph, 50.
85 Hoffmann, Joseph, 2; Yosef, 53–4.
86 Ibid.
87 Lurie, “Private Investment,” 117.
88 On the history of the Industriebank, see Lurie, “Private Investment,” 117–20.
89 Hoffmann, Joseph, 42; Yosef, 83.
90 Hoffmann Joseph, 61; Yosef, 96.
91 Hoffmann Joseph, 61.
92 Hoffmann Joseph, 62.
93 My translation; Hoffmann, Yosef, 83; c.f. “expecting some catastrophe at any moment” in Hoffmann, Joseph, 42.
94 For more on the oikos, see Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 35–6, 44–6.
95 Hoffmann, Joseph, 56.
96 Rasmussen, “People of Solitude,” 616.
97 Casajus 1987 et. al, as cited in Rasmussen, “People of Solitude,” 609.
98 Rasmussen, “People of Solitude,” 609.
99 Both quotations from Benjamin, “Theses,” 258.
100 Mikūlskī, “O Cain,” 152.
101 al-Koni, Bleeding, 97; Nazīf, 86.
102 Guilmette, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Affects,” 74.
103 al-Koni, Bleeding, 81; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 91.
104 al-Koni, Bleeding, 33; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 43.
105 al-Koni, Bleeding, 129; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 139.
106 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, xvii.
107 My translation, al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 138. The illness is “invisible” in the way that the social relations of commodity production are, too, invisible. C.f. “strange illness” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 128.
108 Hoffmann, Joseph, 7; Yosef, 11.
109 Hoffmann, Joseph, 66; Yosef, 67.
110 Hoffmann, Joseph, 71.
111 Hoffmann, Joseph, 37.
112 My translation modifies the English grammar for ease of expression; Hoffmann, Yosef, 88; c.f. Hoffmann, Joseph, 50.
113 Hoffmann, Joseph, 50.
114 Hoffmann, Joseph, 55.
115 Hoffmann, Joseph, 59.
116 Hoffmann, Joseph, 63.
117 This and all subsequent history of the Basilisk derives from Dictionary of Literary Symbols, s.v. “Basilisk.”
118 Hoffmann, Joseph, 77; Yosef, 107.
119 Rasmussen, “People of Solitude,” 609.
120 My translation; Hoffmann, Yosef, 54; c.f. Hoffmann, Joseph, 2.
121 Hoffmann, Joseph, 75; Yosef, 105.
122 al-Koni, Bleeding, 50; al-Kūni, Nazīf, 60.
123 Religions of the World, 2nd ed., s.v. “Zen Buddhism.” Buddhist kōans, or “paradoxical questions, phrases, or stories that cannot be solved using intellectual reasoning” (ibid.) also feature prominently in the text, especially in Yingele's self-questioning.
124 Encyclopedia of Buddhism, s.v. “Karuṇā (Compassion).”
125 cooke, “Magical Realism in Libya,” 12.
126 Mikūlskī, “O Cain,” 154–5.
127 Elmarsafy, Sufism, 130.
128 cooke, “Magical Realism in Libya,” 15.
129 Elmarsafy, Sufism, 129.
130 cooke, “Magical Realism in Libya,” 14.
131 al-Koni, Bleeding, 60–1.
132 al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 53, n. 1.
133 My translation makes reference to the length of a human grave; al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 61; c.f. “two feet of ground” in al-Koni, Bleeding, 50.
134 al-Koni, Bleeding, 60–1.
135 cooke, “Magical Realism in Libya,” 19.
136 al-Koni, Bleeding, 65.
137 Ibid., 65–6.
138 al-Koni, Bleeding, 68; al-Kūni, Nazīf, 78.
139 On enchantment, capitalism, the commons, see Federici, Re-Enchanting the World.
140 al-Koni, Bleeding, 129.
141 Ibid., 74.
142 Hoffmann, Joseph, 76.
143 Hoffmann, Joseph, 54.
144 Hoffmann, Joseph, 76 [italics added].
145 Hoffmann, Yosef, 53.
146 Hoffmann Joseph, 53; Yosef, 90.
147 Hoffmann, Joseph, 5; Yosef, 56.
148 This and the quote that follows are from Hoffmann, Joseph, 54; Yosef, 91.
149 Hoffmann, Joseph, 77.
150 Hoffmann Joseph, 77–8; Yosef, 107–8.
151 Stahl, Other and Brother, 128.
152 Hoffmann, Joseph, 73.
153 Hoffmann, Joseph, 79. The phrase comes from Psalms 22:1 (NRSV).
154 Stahl, Other and Brother, 210 n. 4.
155 Hoffmann, Yosef, 117; translation modified. C.f. “is behind” in Yosef, 87.
156 Hoffmann, Joseph, 78.
157 My translation, al-Kūnī, Nazīf, 146; c.f. al-Koni, Bleeding, 135. This phrase, like Hoffmann's “O Mammal!,” recasts a line from Genesis 3 (NRSV).
158 On competitive and multidirectional memory, see Rothberg Citation2009.