Reconsidering Cultural Identity in Zeinab Alkordy’s "Zahrat al-Janūb"

Research on Nubia has repeatedly referred to the issue of identity, especially the tendency of some Nubian writers to essentialize Nubian identity. Recent interest in minority studies contests postmodernist rejection of identity politics but warns against the reductionism of the essentialists who emphasize an intrinsic value to ethnic identity. Hence, the need to provide alternatives to the conflicting definitions of identity provided by both the post-modernists and the essentialists alike, which in turn resulted in the rise of a post-positivist realist theory of identity, which recognizes that identities are socially significant and context specific ideological constructs that have referential relationships to the world. This theory reconsiders the links between identity and experience offering a more theoretically productive position away from the two extremes proposed by the aforementioned approaches.

This study analyzes Zeinab Alkordy’s collection of short stories entitled Zahrat Al-Janūb (Flower of the south, 1988) from the perspective of a post-positivist realist theory of identity with special reference to Satya Mohanty’s epistemic status of cultural identity. This theory enables a reading of the categories of ethnicity, sex, and socio-economic status in Alkordy’s text while taking into consideration how her characters adapt to changing circumstances. Examining Alkordy’s text from the perspective of Satya Mohanty’s “epistemic status” of cultural identity reveals that Alkordy focuses on her Nubian characters’ lives in the “real” world stressing the relations among “personal experiences, social meanings and cultural identities” (Mohanty 2000). Informed by Mohanty’s argument that personal experience is constructed but still yields knowledge, this chapter foregrounds how Zeinab Alkordy weaves the epistemic status of Nubian cultural identities, showing the closely interwoven mediation of the personal and the political/public. Indeed, Alkordy’s characters are all individuals who struggle with the challenges they face in their everyday lives. In a post-positivist context, the oppressed articulate their raced, gendered, classed, and nationalized experiences, mediating their identities as both constructed and real in a way that communicates epistemic privilege. Hence, a revised reading of Nubian experiences as depicted in Alkordy’s text allows an understanding of Nubian cultural identities beyond ahistorocial essentialism or radical skepticism.