Literary Disinheritance: The Writing of Home in the Work of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar

Literary Disinheritance examines the shifts in the articulations of home in the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Algerian writer Assia Djebar, considering their writing as an instance of a larger cultural expression in the Arab world. Darwish’s and Djebar’s notions of home respond to textual delineations of heritage that have become historical. They identify a long literary heritage that not only speaks of dispossession and effacement but also suggests that those very predicaments are historically enacted through nationalist and religious readings of inherited stories. The patriarchal narratives that forge collective identity are revisited and reopened; in order to reconstitute the trope of home, they call attention to different facets of discontinuity in their heritage. Author Najat Rahman locates and explores the treatment of these discontinuous moments as the emanate from a rigorous reflection on writing.