Latter-day Levantinism, or <em>‘Polypolis’</em> in the Libretti of Bernard de Zoghebстатья из журнала
Аннотация: Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: "I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase.I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines." 1 (see fig. 1) The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion.Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist -that and his city, Alexandria.Whereas identification with one's city, especially one as freighted with mythological and literary associations as Alexandria, is not uncommon, identification with Levantinism would seem to be less obvious.Geographically speaking, Alexandria is not located in the Levant, a term associated with the East Mediterranean.Warranted, perhaps, by de Zogheb's descent from a family, long resident in Alexandria, of predominantly Syro-Lebanese origin?But would that not make him shami, the Egyptian Arabic term for one who hails from the Arab East Mediterranean?And what if one recalls the colonial genealogy of the adjective "Levantine," and the fact that the borrowing "lifantini" 2 barely exists in Arabic, unlike the loan word from cosmopolitan, "kuzmubulitani"?What would be the connection between identifying as Levantine and Alexandria's enduring association with cosmopolitanism?How do such issues play out in de Zogheb's libretti, most of which remain unpublished, written in pidginized Italian?The surviving corpus of ten libretti was written between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postcolonial period.The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism of de Zogheb's immediate formation, I argue, was the product of a Eurocentric discourse that precariously perched it between "quasi" and "pseudo," multiply Europeanizing the city's heterogeneity while ambivalently placing it under the sign of "Levantine" to impute a shifty derivativeness.Born to the manner of an Alexandrian-Levantine elite that would lose ground, the librettist's grappling with that formation gained complexity from his queer orientation.The performativity of the libretti, as the discussion demonstrates, is instantiated in a parodic Camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores.In this sense, the libretti undertake a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian-Levantine cosmopolitanism.But a reading of four libretti that represent signal points in de Zogheb's operatic output reveals the limitations of this aesthetic project.The anti-essentialism that valorizes the hybridity of the Levantines to bring it in line with a queer sensibility falls short of including other ethnicities and less privileged classes.The libretti's extraordinary exploits of pastiche and macaronics ultimately betray an undertow of interpellation that prevents them from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South.1 Bernard de Zogheb, diary, entry of November 3, 1957, in English.De Zogheb papers, Centre d'Études Alexandrines; all material in this center will be hereafter cited as CEAlex. 2 The only example of that usage in Arabic I know of is by Yusuf Idris in which he associates it with fraudulence; see his "Nahwa Masrah Misri," a set of articles first published in 1964, reprinted in Yusuf Idris, al-Farafir (Cairo: Maktabat Gharib, 1977), 23.The same text, 24, contains one of the earlier instances in Arabic of the loan word kuzmubulitaniyya (cosmopolitanism), which has gained currency in recent years; on this see Hala Halim, "The Alexandria
Год издания: 2010
Авторы: Hala Halim
Издательство: eScholarship Publishing, University of California
Источник: California Italian Studies
Ключевые слова: Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Politics and Society, Islamic Studies and History
Открытый доступ: diamond
Том: 1
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