Navigating Dystopia: Necropolitical Temporality and Resistance in Mohammed Rabie’s Otared

Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary authoritarian regimes dominate not only by controlling life and death but also by colonising temporal experience itself. While Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics elucidates sovereign power through death-worlds, this study demonstrates that such sovereignty operates fundamentally through the manipulation of memory, agency, and futurity. Focusing on key scenes and motifs in Mohammed Rabie’s dystopian novel Otared—including the erasure of Tahrir Square, the sniper’s immobilised present, the city’s childless future, and gestures such as rifle burial and embodied silence—the analysis identifies three interlocking mechanisms of temporal control: historical erasure (revolutionary narratives reframed, symbolic spaces removed from official discourse), present immobilisation (perpetual emergency, surveillance, normalised violence), and future foreclosure (hope pathologised as destabilising). These are then read comparatively alongside documented practices of post‑2011 Egyptian authoritarianism. Yet the novel also reveals fragile but ethically significant acts of temporal resistance: counter‑memory, embodied trauma, and material pledges of futurity that reopen relationships to time. The paper thus refines necropolitics by theorising “necropolitical temporality,” showing how temporal manipulation stabilises authoritarian rule while making resistance appear unthinkable. It concludes that in such contexts, reclaiming time—rather than space alone—emerges as a primary terrain of political struggle and a crucial lens for reading resistance in contemporary authoritarian regimes.