Hegemony and Secular Criticism Between the Postmodern and the Postcolonial Discourses: Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation

Abstract

While the modern power attempted to liberate the individual from the shackles of religious persecution, it imposed on him a new mode of secular hegemony. One of the most powerful manifestations of hegemony is found in literature where writers adopt secular discourse to criticise and denigrate religion under the claim of freedom of expression. This research traces secular formations in postmodern and postcolonial literary works whose writers are originally from the Third World and shows how they enforce the power regulated by modern capitalist machineries. It is an analytical comparative study of both Salman Rushdie's Quichotte and Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation to highlight the di erent ways through which these novelists contributed in fostering the grip of hegemony through the secular criticism they display in their literary works. The analysis and comparison of the linguistic and narrative constructions of the two novels demonstrate the profound relationship between secular criticism and hegemony. The relationship is built upon postmodern and postcolonial discourses that employ secular structures in literature to a rm the presence of modern power by ensuring the absence of religion. The secular presence is often portrayed as a step towards freedom and as a counter-canonical step rather than identifying it as a new canonical mode of hegemony. Thus, this research joins a current conversation in the Humanities about the complicity of Secularism with power, and shows, through a close reading to Rushdie's and Daoud's novels, the contribution of secular structures in hegemonizing literary works