Colonial Modernity and Modernist Aesthetics in the Arab World

This chapter takes up Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā’s first published novel, Ṣurākh fī layl ṭawīl ( Cry in a Long Night , 1955), arguing that it integrates modernist elements and themes into Arabic prose. Jabrā’s prose experiments derived from a literary-intellectual posture that he fully articulated in his 1958 essay al-Ḥurriyyah wa-l-ṭūfān (Freedom and the Flood). This posture, which Jabrā framed through the term al-qalaq (anxiety), was the basis of his adamant rejection of iltizām (political/social commitment) in literature. Jabrā’s experiences as a student in the UK and Harvard, his embrace of literary formalism modeled after New Criticism, and his investment in the project of cultural renewal ( tajdīd ) in Arabic art and literature, guided his approach to translating modernist form into Arabic. The chapter argues that Jabrā’s adaptation of the late modernist discourse of aesthetic autonomy into Arabic, which he articulated through the language of individual freedom, was positioned against discourses of commitment in an Arab intellectual tradition that viewed the relationship of aesthetics to politics as irrevocably tied to the questions of class and colonialism.