Sight, Sound, and Surveillance in Bathist Syria: The Fiction of Politics in Rūzā Yāsīn asan's Rough Draft and Samar Yazbik's in Her Mirrors

Abstract

Contemporary Syrian literature bears unmistakable traces of more than four decades of authoritarian rule. This article identifies connections among aesthetics, politics, and affect in two Syrian novels, Rūzā Yāsīn asan's Brūfā (Rough Draft) (2011) and Samar Yazbik's Lahā marāyā (In Her Mirrors) (2010). Through literary representations of state security (the mukhābarāt), surveillance - including the structure and function of mirrors and screens, eavesdropping, and security stations - and new conceptions of the political, state power influences cultural production, even as the contemporary Syrian novel offers a critique of authoritarian dictatorship's immanent relationship to the practice of narration itself.