The Shabaḥ of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace

Abstract

This chapter provides a new reading of Abdelrahman Munif’s five-volume epic of Gulf petro-modernity, Cities of Salt, in the context of the world literature debate. Considering how this novel has been framed for international audiences since its translation into English, I start with John Updike’s response to Munif as “insufficiently Westernized” to have produced a novel. This response, I argue, is symptomatic of a world literature that conceives of “the literary” only according to “Western” norms and models. I then offer a corrective based on what I show to be Munif’s spectral characterization of Bedouin resistance leader Miteb al-Hathal. A “shabaḥ” (specter), this figure hovers at the interstices of modern oil state that had overwritten or incorporated his world, and, unassimilable, haunts it – indeed, the novel – with the revolutionary memory of its own abuses. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, I trace Munif’s spectral inf(l)ection of novelistic form through a discussion of questions of indigeneity; Bedouin oral poetic tradition; and the dialectics of Gulf “petro-modernity” in relation to Bedouin history, politics, and culture. In sum, this chapter articulates the linkage between world literature, Orientalism, modernity, the novel, and spectrality at the heart of this book.