Orphanhood and allegoresis in Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s Granada Trilogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Challenging Fredric Jameson’s vision of Third-World literature as national allegory in the shadow of globalization, this article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s 1990s Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭah (Granada Trilogy) as a late capitalist allegory of the global South. In the Trilogy, ʿĀshūr places the plight of Castilian Granada’s occupied Arab-Muslim population in dialogue with the experiences of enslaved Andalusians and Native American victims of settler colonial violence across the Atlantic. ʿĀshūr marks the orphan as a messianic figure of human liberation, whose experience of dispossession and uprooting provides them with the critical perspective to re-narrate and connect disparate struggles against colonial violence. Reading the Trilogy intertextually, I will argue that ʿĀshūr’s dramatization of allegorical reading in times of grand political upheaval reflects her own attempt to transcode histories of dispossession across time and space in the present.