NPF Cycle Two Fellows and Projects

Nadia Bou Ali: The Arab Nahda and the Nation Form: Debt, Morality, and Universalism

 

Abstract: The article engages with the Nahda as an ideological construct that has succeeded in reproducing a modern Arab subjectivity over the past century. The continuous declaration of the Nahda as a failure by Arab intellectuals in the twentieth century is an act of disavowal: the denial of its success is premised on the need to deny the implications of the cost of modernity’s successes in Arab societies. I propose that the Nahda is premised on the reproduction of crisis and the formation of a particular unconscious or subjectivity that are characteristic of the universal thrust of modernity.

 

Nadia Bou Ali is currently Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Mellon Initiative at the American University of Beirut. She has a Doctoral degree from the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies. She has spent the last year as Post-Doctoral Research Affiliate at the Orient Institut Beirut. Her research focuses on the relationship between modernity, nationalism, and language in the Arab intellectual history. She has written on the subjects of lexicography and nationalism, translation and ideology, the Arab Nahda, and sectarianism.