Settling the Desert, Unsettling the Mirage: Urban Ecologies of Arab and Gulf Futurisms in Ahmed Naji’s Using Life

Abstract

Contemporary Arabic speculative fiction, particularly following the Arab Spring uprisings, is often interpreted as part of an emerging trend of Arab dystopias responding to political upheaval. These texts’ ecological concerns, which produce diverse conceptions of futurity, are understudied. This article examines how urban futures are envisioned in an Egyptian speculative fiction text, Ahmed Naji’s Istikhdām al-ḥayāh (2014; Using Life, 2017). Putting Using Life in dialogue with discussions on Gulf futurism and Arabfuturisms, the article first examines the text’s depiction of hegemonic techno-futurist visions, aimed at manifesting a global utopian future through urban design and development projects. The author argues that this futurist discourse, which has affinities with Gulf futurism, operates through the dual enframing of nature and history, and then demonstrates how the text resists this techno-futurist vision through an assemblage aesthetics that echoes Sulaiman Majali’s Arabfuturism(s) manifesto. The novel’s assemblage aesthetics, which is central to its conception of counter-futures, redefines the human relationship to urban ecologies and to literature through an emphasis on embodiment.

Merve Tabur

Lecturer/Researcher

I am a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities, focusing on how environmental destruction is depicted in speculative fiction, film, and visual arts from the Middle East and its Anglophone diasporas.