Socio-Cultural Representation and Politics of Exclusion: A Cultural Critique of Human Rights in Saadawi’s Zeina

Abstract

Cultural Studies is conceived as an interdisciplinary field of study which analyses how various ideological experiences in society are constructed, lived, and interpreted on the basis of economic, religious, and gender-based differences among human beings resulting in the dominance of one group over the other which is tagged as the politics of exclusion. The current study aims to explore how does the hegemonic order in Egyptian culture as represented in the literary fiction of Nawal El Saadawi’s Zeina deprive the people of low stratum, women and children of their human rights and exclude them from the mainstream power structures which is the violation of their birthrights. These marginalized groups sometimes indulge in the battle for signification and their rights from the powerful and the dominant groups. These culturally constructed modes of dominance and resistance ensure cultural mobility and flexibility which bring about some changes in the society. The theoretical framework of the study is Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies and Pramod K Nayar’s Human Rights and Literature to analyse cultural mobility through the politics of exclusion, resistance, and human rights in Egyptian society depicted in Saadawi’s Zeina whose protagonist is an illegitimate daughter of a now-renowned literary critic Bodour who abandoned her on a street for the fear of society when she was a university student. Zeina, her daughter, survives after fighting against all the odds and human rights violations to be a heartthrob in the field of music but is murdered in the end because of her blasphemous profession according to the religious bigots. Overall, it is a significant study to ponder over the Egyptian culture to know about its socio-political structure and resistance against deprivation of human rights.