Paradigms and Plurality: Rddad’s Dis-Orienting the Maghreb as a Critical Refinement of Said’s Orientalism

Saboun Brahim — 2026-10-15

This paper argues that Sadik Rddad’s Dis-orienting the Maghreb (2025) provides a critical refinement of Edward Said’ seminal work, Orientalism (1978) for somehow neglecting the Maghreb (Morocco) in his work, and excluding it form the world orient. Henceforth, with regard to Said’s rudimentary thesis on the Western powerful discourse and its widespread seam. Rddad reshapes the classical model of homogenous Orientalism through highlighting two crucial hypothetical step forwards. First, the identification of certain paradigms. Such as, Nationalist, secular, imperial, geographical and transnational. In the sphere of travel writings and uncovering the inherent plurality and juxtapositions within colonial discourse via a close study of the Anglo-American travel accounts and writings on Morocco in the era of 1880s to 1920s. Second. Rddad’s in his recent work ‘Dis-orienting the Maghreb’ offers a foregrounded insight on how Orientalism functioned not as monolith, but an arguable battle of ideologies, as it did not give a credit to the elements of geography and history to grasp a comprehensible and holistic view of the world orient.

The Aesthetics of Decay in Elif Shafak’s ‘The Flea Palace’

Marziyeh Farivar — 2026-10-26

This study is an attempt to investigate the aesthetic of decay as a seminal feature in Elif Shafak’s ‘The Flea Palace’. It is to argue that decay operates not merely as an atmospheric backdrop but as a substantial critical lens through which memory, history, and sociocultural elements are apprehended. In ‘The Flea Palace’, Elif Shafak portrays physical elements which are metaphorically and symbolically in line with social, psychological and moral decay and decline. The study that foregrounds decay as a motif intends to trace how deteriorating environments, eroding memories, and crumbling institutions yield narrative contact zones and how voices reflect belonging, memory, and identity. Through close readings of symbolic and metaphorical decay, this interdisciplinary analysis reveals the writer’s revalorization of decay as a productive archive rather than a mere sign of physical decline. The aesthetic of decay thus facilitates an ethical reflection, a social perspective and a psychological scrutiny on the notions of intergenerational responsibility, migration, and the destabilization of grand narratives of modernity. The findings which highlight Shafak’s distinctive method of turning loss into an instrument of meaningful imagination, would contribute to contemporary debates on the aesthetics of ruin, narrative time, and the politics of place in world literature.

Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature

Paradigms and Plurality: Rddad’s Dis-Orienting the Maghreb as a Critical Refinement of Said’s Orientalism

The Aesthetics of Decay in Elif Shafak’s ‘The Flea Palace’