Dealing with race in post 2000s Gulf and Sudanese novels

Dealing with race in post 2000s Gulf and Sudanese novels

Date: Wednesday January 15th, 2025
Time: 12pm
Speakers: Marcella Rubino (INALCO)

The expansion of freedom of speech and expression in the Gulf States has led to the growth of the novel genre. Recently, there seems to be a trend regarding the rediscovery of pre-tafra period identity while simultaneously tackling taboo societal issues. Those include the infringement on personal rights and freedoms, particularly of women, foreigners, homosexuals and the lower classes of society. This has resulted in a large number of novelists using the novel as a bold and incisive arena for challenging authoritarian mechanisms used to subjugate minorities. This novelistic production explores, amongst others, the theme of skin-colour based racism. This conference examines the treatment of race in post-2000s Gulf novels. It demonstrates how this issue is part of a broader discussion on exclusion and compares its treatment to those of Sudanese authors. When dealing with the African diasporas in the Gulf, the latter describe the daily reality of racial discrimination, while adressing the contradictions that reproduce the identity-based divisions at work in their countries of origin. With regard to the issue of slavery, differences appear regarding the subject’s treatment by Gulf or Sudanese authors; however, they all highlight an intersectionality of discriminations occurring in Gulf States.

About the Speaker

Marcella Rubino teaches Arabic Language, Literature and Translation at Inalco, Paris. Her research focuses on contemporary prose, particularly in Egypt, Sudan, Irak and Gulf countries. She published « Religion and Violence in the work of Youssef Ziedan » (Diacritiques, 2022) and she translated in french and italian the Sudanese writers Hammour Ziada and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin.