| Summary/Abstract |
This article offers an analysis of the prominent Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim’s literary critique of neoliberal Egypt in a selection of his novels: al-Lajna (The Committee, 1981), Dhāt (Self, 1992), and Sharaf (Honor, 1997). It argues that Sonallah Ibrahim makes strategic use of space in his novels as heterotopias of the neoliberal Egyptian state. Heterotopia, here, refers in the Foucauldian sense to a site of deviation, exclusion, and non-normativity that is capable of reflecting the totality of normative order. In Ibrahim’s novels, the heterotopias of the neoliberal state are both narrative and formal. They are spaces in which narrative action takes place as well as specific formal sites in the representational space of the text conveying non-narrative discourse. As such, this article explores the interplay between narrative and representational space in the construction of Sonallah Ibrahim’s critique of the neoliberal Egyptian state.
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