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A contribution to: Reframing Exoticism in European Literature

Edited by Claudia Dellacasa and Hannah McIntyre

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 14

Modern Humanities Research Association

Abstract.  Jean Genet’s political and personal allegiance to the Palestinians has often been interpreted as a putative exoticism, born out of a homoerotic fetishization of Arab alterity. This essay probes such criticisms to suggest instead that Genet’s Palestinian poetics deconstruct orientalist tropes by subversively over-exaggerating them. In bearing witness to the Palestinian revolution, or in trying to pay homage to the massacres at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, Genet can never adopt an authorial position of confederation. His voice is mired in the privileges of resource, readership, and mobility facilitated by Western hegemony, which stands anathema to the democracy of his political project. In order to gesture to the reality of the Palestinians, without reification or evangelization, I argue that Genet subversively borrows the language of fairy-tale, folklore, epic, and mythology long associated with nineteenth-century French exoticism, to draw attention to the ultimate artifice of his portrayal. He invites us to glean the authenticity of an Arab world beyond the clutches of the European author, repurposing exoticist legends and formerly lurid colonial representations to transform them into revolutionary fable. In his overly aestheticized portrayals, I argue that Genet does not immobilize the fedayeen in the flat planes of a one-sided image, but disguises them in the layers of such folkloric make-believe that he makes a spectacle of the orientalist fantasy itself.

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