Arab nationalism and historicity in the 1980s novel: Haydar Haydar’s Walīma li-aʿshāb al-baḥr and Rachid Boudjedra’s Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq

Two 1980s novels from the Maghreb and Mashreq, respectively – Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra's Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq (Battle of the Strait, 1986) and Syrian writer Haydar Haydar's Walīma li-aʿshāb al-baḥr (Banquet for Seaweed, 1983) - offer formal and thematic critiques of a regime of historicity that they link to Arab nationalist states after decolonization. Using François Hartog's regimes of historicity, this essay reads these modernist novels as sites of delayed processing for the thwarted hopes of progressive, anti-colonial emancipation. The novels linger not only on the content of official history under postcolonial states, but also on a distinctive relationship to historical time enacted by state rule. In their engagements with interpretations of the past - as memory, text, and image - Boudjedra and Haydar enact a distinctive role for the 1980s Arabic novel: to hold open possibilities for alternative understandings and textures of historical time in the aftermath of revolutionary defeat.