Islam and Postcolonial Narrative (review)

Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. By John Erickson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ix + 202 pp. $69.95.

In Islam and Poscolonial Narrative, John Erickson questions the usefulness of postcolonial theory, which, he believes, "often overemphasizes disparities and fails to take into account the negotiation that has transpired between different countries and different cultures" (5). Postcolonial theory, and much of postcolonial writing, he claims, tend to be oppositional and leave little room for productive exchange between languages and cultures.

By focusing on the works of four Moslem writers, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Salman Rushdie, Erickson argues that the "counterdiscourses" formulated by these writers challenge the limits of postcolonial theory. Acknowledging the somewhat odd grouping of three French speaking writers from the Arab world and British writer Salman Rushdie, Erickson suggests that they all have in common the ability to "'appropriate Western (Judeo-Christian) or Islamic beliefs and practices while elaborating a third, distanced, position lying "elsewhere"' (6). These writers, he argues, have succeeded in positioning themselves in an in-between space by refusing to wholly assimilate themselves into dominant Western or Islamic cultures or to occupy a position of radical alterity in relation to those cultures.

In an early footnote, Erickson justifies his representation of Rushdie as a Moslem writer by referring to his essay, "Why I have embraced Islam," published on the heels of an earlier essay, "Good Faith," in which Rushdie explains that since he is not a Moslem, the fatwa should not apply to him. Those essays were, it seems to me, the desperate attempts of a man attempting to reverse his death sentence; Rushdie's performance of reliogiosity should be read ironically with a view to the political circumstances of the time.

Erickson claims, however, that each author negotiates a place of writing and expression between the strictures of Islamic culture and the oppressiveness of European colonial systems. Most postcolonial writers, according to Erickson, are faced with only two options: that of complete acceptance of European linguistic hegemony or its complete rejection through "radical exteriorization" (10). There is, however, a third option, the space between "identity and difference," which enables a transformation of the language into "a vehicle for the re-vision and reworking of its foreign linguistic and cultural values and their reinscription into a new context of value reflective of the indivisible union of two languages" (10-11).

One of the effects of writing from this third space is a refusal to privilege the authority of the dominant European or Islamic cultural systems. Erickson calls this the "leveling" of discourses since it discloses the arbitrariness of the universal truths that underpin dominant discourses. These oppositional texts, he argues, work within prevailing power structures and between dominant discourses in order "to modify, democratize, humanize the system from within" (35).

While Erickson presents an engaging discussion about the limits of postcolonial theory and the ways in which these Moslem writers create a hybridized discourse that challenges Western and Islamic discursive systems, there are some puzzling omissions in the book. For example, he suggests that Rushdie's theory of migrancy exemplifies the position of the postcolonial writer who transcends boundaries. Rushdie's space of "unbelonging" becomes a productive space in which the writer can engage in the crossing of boundaries of genre, discourse, and culture. Rushdie's celebration of the figure of the migrant has been most famously criticized by Aijaz Ahmad for his elitist conceptualization of migrancy and diasporic existence. Curiously, Erickson makes no reference to Ahmad's critique of Rushdie, and chooses instead to take Rushdie's celebratory rhetoric of the concept of displacement as paradigmatic of what he labels écriture métissée.

In his discussion of Djebar and Ben Jelloun, Erickson uses the concept of veiling to exemplify the position of the woman writer in Islamic societies. He represents the act of writing as a form of vocalization that counters the silencing of Algerian women through the cultural tradition of veiling. Djebar, he argues, sees herself as...