English Art/Literary Poetry & Literature

But there is more to the story than media accounts of wars and aggression, carried out at times under the banner of the coerced United Nations, and we find it in literature. For instance, in his ironic narrative The Sultan of Sleep (Sult.a¯n al-nawm, 1994), the Jordanian nov-elist Mu’nis al-Razza¯z gives Desert Storm the trope of encompassing sands that leave no space untouched, including his own room. Much more than any discipline, or even the enormous effort of social scien-tists, literature propagates the markers and trademarks of globaliza-tion, but it also creates a counterdiscourse that enriches old registers and broadens the prospects for new ones. In the following pages I use Ibrahim’s Committee as the primary text around which other texts clus-ter. The Committee, especially in its emphasis on “Coca-Colonization” and “world-wide cultural standardization,” has significance for cultural studies, too.6 Like many works in Arabic, The Committee should be cen-tral not only to any study of old colonialism, neocolonial globalism, nation-states, nationalism, identity, social and economic patterns, and predictions and expectations but also to any reading of the national and transnational imaginary and of the proliferation of certain images and terms.