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Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the vulnerabilities of groups including lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, as well as migrants. Zeyn Joukhadar’s novel, The Thirty Names of Night (2020), comprises two alternating narratives of three generations of Syrian Americans questing to establish their identities in societies that quell otherness. Drawing on the insights of Jean-Michel Ganteau, I trace the novel’s representations of vulnerability, but supplement Ganteau’s theoretical analysis with another category, that of resistance, illustrated by the intersectional queer and trans resistance Joukhadar’s text limns. This analysis is informed by work by Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam. I argue that while The Thirty Names of Night represents the vulnerability of non-hegemonic characters, it emphasizes the resistance, collective strength and creative agency of such individuals. Reading this internationally published text during a pandemic enables an empathetic understanding of intersectional struggles to prevail against prejudices and othering.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Adichie, “Interview.”
2 Adichie, “Clarifying.”
3 Adichie, “It is Obscene.”
4 Tomson, Always Anastasia.
5 Mabenga, Becoming Him.
6 Mardoll, Afterland; Stobie, “Text, Pandemics, Human Rights.”
7 Broockman and Kalla, “Durably Reducing”; Lee and Yu Kwan, “The Trans Panic Defense.”
8 Johnson, “Transportation into Literary Fiction.”
9 Bal and Veltkamp, “How Does Fiction Reading.”
10 Johnson, “Transportation into a Story.”
11 Orellana, Totterdell and Iyer, “The Association between Transgender-related Fiction.”
12 Flores, Brown and Park, “Public Support.”
13 Winnberg, An Aesthetics, 19.
14 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics.
15 Ibid., 46.
16 Joukhadar, The Thirty Names, 3.
17 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics, 102.
18 Ibid., 109.
19 Joukhadar, The Thirty Names, 6.
20 Ibid., 72.
21 Ibid., 76.
22 Whitehead, “The Past,” 131.
23 Derrida, Specters, xvii.
24 LaCapra, Writing History, 41.
25 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics, 115.
26 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics, 76.
27 Joukhandar, The Thirty Names, 25–6.
28 Ibid., 15.
29 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics, 90.
30 Althusser, Lenin, 115.
31 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics, 93.
32 Joukhadar, The Thirty Names, 188.
33 Cavarero, Stately Bodies, 66.
34 Ibid., 67.
35 Ibid., 69.
36 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 188.
37 Ibid., 7.
38 Ibid., 221.
39 Ibid., 122.
40 Ibid., 125.
41 Ibid., 141.
42 Ibid., 219.
43 Ibid., 164.
44 Ibid., 151.
45 Winnberg, An Aesthetics, 19.
46 See for example Radway, Reading the Romance; Fuchs, Romance.
47 Elam, Romancing the Postmodern, 23.
48 Pearce and Wisker, Fatal Attractions, 15.
49 Joukhadar, The Thirty Names, 106.
50 Ibid., 110.
51 Ibid., 136.
52 Ibid., 262.
53 Ibid., 264.
54 Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics, 62–3.
55 Ibid., 63.
56 Butler, “Rethinking,” 24.
57 Ibid., 25.
58 Hayward, “Spider City Sex,” 229.
59 Halberstam, Trans*.
60 Halberstam defines the term “trans*” as marking “a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation,” in distinction to the term “transgender,” which represents “the acceptable edge of gender variance” (ibid., 50). As I am using the term to refer to two time periods, and as no term for shifts of gender presentation and identity are used in the novel, I find the more general usage to be appropriate in my discussion.
61 Ibid., 50.
62 Ibid., 50.
63 Joukhadar, The Thirty Names, 164.
64 Ibid., 165.
65 Ibid., 184.
66 Ibid., 212.
67 Halberstam, Trans*, 3.
68 Joukhadar, The Thirty Names, 239.
69 Ibid., 264
70 Ibid., 264.
71 Ibid., 214.
72 Butler, “Rethinking,” 21.
73 Halberstam, Trans*, 88.
74 Ibid., 87.
75 Ibid., 37.
76 Butler, “Rethinking,” 20.
77 Halberstam, Trans*, 40.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Cheryl Stobie
Cheryl Stobie is a Professor Emerita of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. Her current research and teaching interests focus on representations of gender, sexuality, race and nation in contemporary written and visual texts, mainly South/African. Recent publications include articles on representations of precarity, conviviality, poverty porn and vernacular cosmopolitanism in South African novels. She is a National Research Foundation rated scholar, who is involved in a South Africa–Sweden collaborative project, Conviviality and Contamination. As one of the editors of Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa she regularly edits special issues of the journal.