Decolonial Narratives of Knowledge and Defiance in Brian Friel’s Translations and Muin Bseiso’s Shimshūn wa Dalīlah

Document Type : Original Article

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Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University

Abstract

Being an effective tool for knowledge production and epistemic disobedience, literature can conjure up decolonial subversive alternatives that engage in the decolonization of knowledge and the disentanglement from the colonial matrix of power. Working within the paradigms of cultural, memory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, the paper aims to conduct a study of selected Irish and Palestinian plays. Ireland and Palestine have been affected by a long painful history of settler colonialism under the British and Israeli colonial enterprise. Irish and Palestinian authors have produced subversive literature that defies British and Israeli colonial repressive matrix of power. For Edward Said, narrative is a method colonized people can use to “assert their own identity and the existence of their own history”. Literature hence is a source of epistemic disobedience and resistance; it offers an alternative disruptive version for the hegemonic colonial knowledge. The selected works are Brian Friel’s paly Translations (1980) and Mo‘ein Bseiso’s play Samson and Delilah (1971). These works will be analyzed to investigate how they produce decolonial knowledge that conjures up and evokes an archival narrative that represents and reclaims the homeland, the history and the cultural and national identity of Ireland and Palestine. Studying the two experiences in relation to each other will add more clarification and understanding especially for the urgent persistent Palestinian anti-colonial issue; with the aim of shedding more light on it as a decolonial one and to participate in the cultural fight for Palestine these days.

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