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Esse ensaio tenciona analisar romances contemporâneos que lidam com a memória fora do referencial teórico do denominado realismo traumático. Inicio tratando de uma das versões mais destacáveis do trauma dentro da produção contemporânea em artes, a relação entre realismo traumático e arquivo. Depois, lido com o tema da nostalgia em dois romances: o Nostalgia de Mircea Cărtărescu e o The Return de Hisham Matar. Por fim, enfatizo a questão da temporalidade e da relação com a literatura contemporânea.

This article discusses Hisham Matar's second work of memoir, A Month in Siena in terms of its complex, longer engagement with the disappearance of Matar's dissident father, its aftermath, and the son's own relation to his father's ultimate fate. Attempting to articulate what may be an unrealisable form of grief, Matar seeks to elicit from the spaces of the medieval Sienese Republic an aesthetic grammar by means of which the process of surviving with(in) a forcibly suspended relation with his absent forebear may be spelt out. Matar's memoir mobilises the ability of memory to interpellate the act of self-narrative in the service of achieving a mourning-in-progress. Referencing the work of Massimo Cacciari, T.J. Clark, Mark Dooley, John Baldacchino and Philippe D'Averio, the author discusses Matar's contemplations of works from the Sienese School, including those of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Duccio di Buoninsegna. The article opens up Matar's ekphrastic journey, suggesting that through it, art holds forth a configuration of power that is expansive in character: one whose semantic vista is as affirmative in its potential for articulating a complex, often damaged political world as the Libyan regime's own silence about his father is negatingly labyrinthine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trata-se da tradução de uma palestra dada pro Hisham Matar acerca de biografia e ficção em Conrad e Said em Nova York em Outubro de 2018.

Representations of the Qur'an in English fiction conventionally focus on the text as having problematic agency; when read, it inhibits the passive reader through commandments that prompt violence and interfere with personal freedoms and human rights. Recuperative texts focus instead on the Qur'an's affirmative spiritual aspects. Rather than flipping the dichotomy of the active agent/passive object, what if the relationship between narrative and reader subjectivity is seriously reconsidered? Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men explores the situations in which narratives - including those in the Qur'an - are made to be authoritative and effective. The Qur'anic story of Solomon and the ants resonates throughout a novel in which the narrator, Suleiman, learns to differentiate between the legitimate uses of narrative and the discourse of power abused by a corrupt Libyan government and a patriarchal society. It explores the slippages between networks of agencies that are prefigured in Suleiman's childhood narratives, narratives which later limit his ability to have a constructive bodily experience. How does this approach complicate the anthropocentric privileging of singular agency? What are the situations in which texts are authorised to be determinate and infectious while the reader is rendered passive, and which are those situations in which the individual asserts an interpretive agency over the text? How does this illustrate, in Talal Asad's terms, the 'phenomenal and conceptual' spaces 'whose limits are variously imposed, transgressed, and reset'? What role do these narratives play on the material body - as Saba Mahmood asks, what are 'the affective and embodied practices' prompted by 'attachment and cohabitation' to these narratives? Finally, what insight does this approach to Qur'anic narratives map out for the reading of non-religious texts? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article examines the complex and contested situation of Qadaffi's Libya within a changing international order, from the 1969 revolution as narrated by South African historian and anti-apartheid activist Ruth First in Libya: The Elusive Revolution (1974) to its narrative reconstruction by exiled Libyan writer Hisham Matar in the semi-autobiographical novels In the Country of Men (2006) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011). Special attention is paid to contextualizing this historiography within the current debates emanating from international law-including international humanitarian and human rights law-regarding the disposition of multilateral forces, regional commitments, and the 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) in responding to this latest of Libya's 'elusive revolutions.' Should Libya, that is, have been suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council? Referred by the Security Council to the International Criminal Court for investigation? What are the stakes? And what to make of the eventual historical and precedent-setting outcomes, the global implications-and yes, even the inevitable 'unintended consequences'. . . .? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following 9/11, public rhetoric in the United States equated Islam with terror. This equation permitted the internment and deportation of Muslim immigrants and lent inevitability to the invasion not only of Afghanistan but also of Iraq. When even liberal newspapers and Democratic politicians supported the war on terror, one looked to literature for an alternative. Yet several novels published in the aftermath of 9/11 - John Updike's The Terrorist, Don DeLillo's Falling Man, and Alexie Sherman's Flight - inadvertently reinforced the dominant rhetoric. Set in a United States where virtually every Muslim in sight was a terrorist, they could at best hope to make the violence understandable. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men (2007) offer a postcolonial perspective on revolutionary violence. Where the war on terror opposes East and West, these novels internalize a conflict in ordinary people between their cultural and religious heritage and western values and amenities. These novels tease apart identities the war on terror fuses: Muslim and terrorist, say, or American and right-wing neocolonialist. The hesitations, qualifications, and complexities of lived experience become alternatives to the lethal polarities of public rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]