Abstract
This article examines how the Moroccan Francophone writer Mohamed Leftah negotiates a decolonized modernity in his novel Le dernier combat du Captain Niʿmat (2011). This understanding of decolonization is based on Abdelkebir Khatibi’s pensée-autre, a mode of thinking that simultaneously embraces and disavows its constitutive traditions and attempts to formulate its own episteme. Living in Egypt, a queer diaspora for a Moroccan, Leftah employs queer male sexuality in a Sufialist text that tells the story of Niʿmat, an Egyptian retired army officer who pursues a love affair with his young Nubian servant, Islam. Transgressive sexuality, anachronistic gender typology, narrative modes, and historicizing onomastics decenter the metropole of France and articulate a decolonized modernity. Even as it centers male sexual unruliness and invites a queer reading, the text stabilizes other sexual and gender hierarchies, pointing to the need for texts revolving around queer feminist discourse in the Arab world.
