A Postcolonial Constructivist Criticism of the Politically Redrawn Syrian Boundaries of Space and Time in the Diasporic Micro-narratives of Alia Malek and Samar Yazbek

This paper adopts a contemporary post-colonial constructivist approach to the failure of national identity in the micro-narratives of the diasporic Syrian American writer and journalist, Alia Malek’s The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoire of Syria (2017) and the exiled Syrian writer and journalist Samar Yazbek’s, The Crossings: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015). The paper starts by underlining Alexander Wendt’s and Kenneth J. Gergen’s constructivist approach to the discursive construction of the dominant power structures of states in the international system. It then investigates, with reference to the post-colonial world of the Middle East, how Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial concepts of hybridity, cultural difference, mimicry and the uncanny and the politics of cultural displacement shape the ideational structure of Syria under Hafez al-Assad and his successor son, Bashar al-Assad, with particular emphasis on the sectarian and political divisions within the micro-structure of the Syrian society. The paper finally examines the interplay between the pedagogical macro-structure of the Syrian state and the performative agency of its individual subjects through which the power of story-telling as a performative act is emphasized with reference to the micro narratives of Alia Malek and Samar Yazbek where represented are identity and its political appropriation ever since the identity construction of Greater Syria until the early years following the outbreak of the civil war under Bashar al-Assad.