Postcolonial Feminism and Dissent: Interrogating Faith, Family, and Revolution in Rakha’s The Dissenters

Abstract

Through the lens of Amna/Mouna/Nimo, the protagonist of the novel The Dissenters (2025) by Youssef Rakha, this paper examines postcolonial feminism and dissent in an Egyptian context across the experience of Nasser-era arranged marriage, personal liberation, pious motherhood, and Arab Spring activism. It uses qualitative textual analysis based on Spivak's subaltern critique and Mohanty's anti-colonial feminism, to look at how Rakha's epistolary visionary narrative challenges monolithic depictions of Egyptian women and how dissent is manifested as resistance to multiple layers of patriarchy, colonialism and authoritarianism. In a postcolonial Egypt, the novel's attic visions and maternal legacy problematize the Western feminist gaze and surface the temporal fluidity and gendered agency. Results highlight literature's capacity to intervene on behalf of subaltern voices in failed revolutions, to insight on the nature of faith as constraint and subversion, family as place of intergenerational trauma/reconciliation, and revolution as personal/political continuum. This research is a contribution to the field of postcolonial literary criticism, which connects personal dissent with national historiography, foregrounds hybrid identities and the boundaries of Universalist feminisms.

Keywords:  Postcolonial Feminism, Egyptian Womanhood, Dissent, Arab Spring, Faith and Family, Subaltern Agency, Narrative Dissent