Queering Migration: Fragmented (Post)colonial Subjectivities in 21st-Century Middle Eastern and North African Literature

As a space of encounter and exchange, the Mediterranean is a complex region due to its diverse histories, peoples, and cultures. As a decolonial period that brought forth the autonomy of North African and Levantine nations from French colonial rule, the second half of the 20th-century produced fragmented subjects, who, in the 21st-century, must navigate (post)colonial spaces that complicate subjectivities, including race, gender, and sexuality. This dissertation is a critical study of 21st-century Francophone Mediterranean literature that argues for an assemblage process that allows for the recognition of migration amongst subjectivities, leaving space for the construction of subjecthood through the process of movement – a form of resistance against Western normativity. Queer, as embodiment and a field of study, is used differently in this dissertation than conventional queer studies approaches. I demonstrate how one can queer queer studies and the term itself to consider how it is situated outside and inhabited by queer Arab and Maghrebi subjects who are not white Euro-Americans. Furthermore, my engagement with literary texts opens avenues for the continued development of queer theory – discourses marginalized within larger national rhetorics. This engagement with pre- and postcolonial history reshapes, epistemologically, distinct subjectivities and national cultures as one encounters their memory and their predecessors – a synthesis of both the past and the present. The dissertation’s corpus includes Bahaa Trabelsi’s Une vie à trois (2000), Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000) and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005), Rachid O.’s Ce qui reste (2003), Abdellah Taïa’s Le rouge du tarbouche (2004) and Une mélancolie arabe (2008), Tahir Ben Jelloun’s Au pays (2009), Amin Maalouf’s Les désorientés (2012) and Hicham Tahir’s Les ruelles des pieds nus (2015), Riad Sattouf’s graphic novel L’Arabe du futur (2014) and Nabil Wakim’s essay, “L’Arabe pour tous” (2020). I expand upon the study of migration-related subjectivity and propose a framework that considers displacement and movement as contributing to developing subjectivities. These texts depict geographical and (meta)physical movement such as (im)migration, self-exile and intra-city travel. I examine the relationship between France and its former colonies, protectorates, and mandates to understand how queer subjects navigate their complex subjectivities and identities in motion.

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