Politicizing literature : a study of Noaman Ashour's An-Nas illi That

Abstract EN

The present paper offers a cultural materialist reading of An-Nas illi Taht ([People Downstairs] 1956) by the Arabic dramatist Noaman Ashour (1918 - 1987).

It argues that Ashour has adopted the assumptions and the tools of cultural materialism even though such a school was not in the mainstream of criticism in his time.

Thus, the paper attempts to show that the play is the material product of specific historical and political conditions.

In it, Ashour dramatizes the story of middle and lower class people who live in separate unfurnished rooms in one basement flat owned by Bahigah Hanem (lady).

This dramatic vision helps Ashour theatricalize the struggle between different social classes during the 1950s.

In depicting such struggle, Ashour attracts our attention to the "historical context" responsible for creating his piece.

To illustrate such a context, he adopts "a theoretical method" that leads him to register historical and social facts as they are.

This theoretical method lends him a hand to provide his audience/reader with a dramatic discourse beyond textual analysis coloured with a "political commitment," derived from his cult of the social agenda of the 1952 revolution.