DECONSTRUCTING ‘POVERTY’ IN ALWĀN MIN AL-FAQR BY ISLĀM ṢĀDIQ: JACQUES DERRIDA’S PERSPECTIVE
Abstract
This study analyzes the construction and deconstruction of the meaning of poverty in the short story collection Alwān min al-Faqr by Islām Ṣādiq through hierarchical binary oppositions and how these structures can be destabilized through Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. This research employs a qualitative descriptive approach using close reading and textual note-taking techniques. The main textual source of this study is the short story collection Alwān min al-Faqr, which serves as the corpus of analysis, while secondary sources include scholarly works on deconstruction theory and studies on the representation of poverty in literary discourse. The findings reveal four patterns of binary opposition: physical versus economic poverty, social versus economic poverty, poverty without shelter versus poverty with shelter, and health versus economic poverty. A deconstructive reading shows that these hierarchies are unstable because the text contains internal contradictions that undermine the assumed superiority of one meaning over another. Consequently, poverty in the text emerges as a relational discursive construct open to multiple interpretations and contributes to expanding the application of deconstruction in contemporary Arabic literary studies.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.20961/cmes.19.1.109970
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CMES Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | CMES (Center of Middle Eastern Studies) Print ISSN: 2085-563X Online ISSN: 2502-1044 Website: https://jurnal.uns.ac.id/cmes/index Email: cmes@mail.uns.ac.id Published by: Arabic Literature Department, Faculty of Cultural Science, Sebelas Maret University Ir. Sutami Street, No. 36A, Surakarta, Jawa Tengah 57126 Phone: +62 822-4000-2313 |
