A Postcolonial Reading of Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley

Abstract

   The present paper draws on theoretical insights from postcolonial criticism to propose a postcolonial reading of Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (1947), a novel that depicts life in a traditional Cairo alley in the closing years of World War II. Western accounts have tended to ignore the effects of that war, and of colonialism, on colonial subjects whose regions became battlefields for rival Western powers. The novel explores these events from the colonized perspective. By weaving in the traumatic history of colonialism and of war on the one hand, and by foregrounding alternative voices, experiences, and geographies on the other, the novel sets up a counter-hegemonic dynamic that works to unsettle the grand narratives of colonial history and their underlying assumptions. A fuller understanding of this dynamic is essential for a broader appreciation of Mahfouz’s work and of the narrative tradition of which this work is an important part.