Arab Writers in Diaspora

The instance postcolonialism becomes hinged on liberalism, the liberating promise which postcolonialism propels considerably shrinks. This essay explains that in predicating the liberal ideology as a tool for self-determination, a crippling standstill awaits a given cause. The Palestinian question as recently imagined by the American Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in Mornings in Jenin (2010) stands a glaring example for such a predicament. The predicament is characterized by a predilection towards ontology instead of epistemology, the personal rather than the collective, character over theme, irony and excess instead of explicit and balanced approaches and finally, discussions favoring culture and identity in lieu of class and resistance. Masking that same postcolonial predicament is the narrative obsession with the existential-ontological, turning the struggle into a textual one. All in all, the predicament expands on postcolonial experiences by raising awareness to the dialectics of emancipation discourses. Introduction:

This article explores how the notion of double consciousness peculiar to the African dispersion is not distant from the condition of most Arabs in diaspora. Arguably, it is similarly creolized as a syncretic product of continuous historical, cultural and linguistic processes, and is correspondingly an immediate consequence of the advent of the colonized world. Although connections with the Arab ties, whether emotional or cultural, vary largely, the politicized aspect of double consciousness remains salient. This article examines internalized personality formation and the process of forming ethno-cultural identity within the Arab diasporic community through the Duboisian narrative of double consciousness.

This research paper explores the issue of slavery in Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved. In her novel, Morrison depicts the African-American experience chiefly by shedding light on slavery within a historical context. Meantime, Morrison illuminates many dark aspects of this issue and how it leads to horrible impacts on enslaved individuals through the embodiment of the hardships and suffering in the experience lived. In Beloved, Morrison demonstrates that slavery is responsible for destroying familial ties and the whole maternal system, precisely as it results in a distorted mother, Sethe, who is haunted between her own guilt and the harsh past of slavery she has experienced. Slavery also distorts the male identity of men and makes them victims who are degraded by slave masters. Such negative, humiliating environment within slavery ultimately leads to the traumatic experience that neither can be forgotten nor forgiven by the individuals who lived it during and after being enslaved. Accordingly, the current research paper examines how Morrison represents in this literary text such multiple dimensions tied historically to slavery in order to prove the appalling features of slavery and its dark historical reality within the African-American Experience.

This paper examines foreignness in Mohja Kahf’s poetry volume, E-mails from
Scheherazad (2003), as a celebratory commodity rather than a literary trope to resist Arab women representations or to accentuate exilic voices. Drawing on Julie Kristeva’s conceptualization of foreignness as internal personae and not a projection of an external locus of identity, this paper explores how the speakers in some of Kahf’s poems view foreignness as festive rather than negative. In sharp contrast to the traditional conception of difference as publicly alienating, foreignness to the Arab-American speakers becomes a distinctive mark that they uphold and celebrate. Examining foreignness in Kahf’s poems through Kristeva’s lens provides a sense of uniqueness to the immigrant’s experience. The notion of recognizing the foreigner in ourselves, that Kristeva provides, subverts the general perception of foreignness as external and intruding. Kahf’s poetry can be perceived as a negotiation of foreignness, which is not an estranging element that incurs resistance but rather as a celebratory part of the human consciousness that should be jubilantly defined rather than politically defended.

The Mahjari movement played a vital role in the modernisation of Arabic literature. Still beholden to near 'sacrosanct' literary conventions , this process was slower and less direct than that of its English counterpart. Pioneered by an Arab immigrant community in New York, their writings remain largely inaccessible to non-Arabic speakers, except for a handful of prose works. Among these pioneers was Iliya Abu Madi, whose poems are renowned in the Arabic literary world. Mahjari poems thus constitute a transitory body of work: one that triggered the break away from classic conventions , paving the way for the eventual emergence of Arabic free verse (Al-Shi'r Al-Hurr). This paper is interested in a particular poem titled 'Tholasim', variously translated as 'The Enigmas' or 'The Riddles'. This paper aims to discuss the challenges and losses of meaning that occurs in developing an English translation of Tholasim that appropriately reflects the forms that emerge in this transitory phase.

Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives introduces the work of twenty-nine pivotal authors from the Arab world writing in Arabic, English, French and Hebrew.
Organised around the central themes of memory, place and gender, each of which is discussed in an introductory essay, this volume provides a critical framework for Arab literature, locating it alongside other contemporary world literature.
The contributors maintain that Arabic literature reflects the Western postmodern condition without denying its own traditions. As such, Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives paves the way for an important cultural dialogue between East and West.
This collection is ideal for students of Arabic and comparative literature and equally of interest to general readers.


"An immensely valuable book, extraordinarily intelligent in its conception and design and its rigor, vigour and scholarship." Sabry Hafez

"Each essay offers a critically insightful examination of a particular author of work, and the coverage of the region is admirable in terms of both geographical spread and literary genre … An important contribution to the study of modern Arabic literature." Roger Allen

"Providing illuminating scholarly references and critical insights, the essays ... are at once academic and accessible – and especially interesting for their attention both to well-known and less familiar Arab authors." Barbara Harlow

The German philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche is one of the most significant thinkers whose work immensely impacted modern intellectual history. Likewise, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky is an influential figure whose philosophy and contribution to literature is also huge. However, there are common grounds that these two prominent figures share, especially with the fact that they were contemporaries and influenced each other. The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in terms of the concept of truth. Nietzsche's concept of 'perspectivism', which he proposes in some of his works, will be linked to Dostoevsky's novel Notes from Underground to show how these two prominent figures share a common ground in this respect.

To ask about a double negative, as in not, not Arab, one is stirred by not one, not two, but three negations. For an Arab artist is not really an Arab - or an artist for that matter - unless one is able to imagine both these personas inhabiting a third space that one would call the `text'. This essay proposes that if writing one's autobiography is a way of identifying, responding to and constructing meaning, of establishing specificity through the self, and of creating interstitial points and lines in the reader, then writing one's text inherently sits on a plane outside the immediate experience of the narrator and the narrated.

This article argues that the protagonist in Hage’s Cockroach (2008) introjects the vermin as a representation of internalized antagonism. As the unnamed narrator struggles in an inhospitable city, he internalizes this unflinching feeling of estrangement through introjection. This process reveals how the loss of home entails the state of a vagabond who resists normalization and seeks the unruly life of the underground. The way the city of Montréal is portrayed as notorious for its indifference towards newcomers aggravates the condition of the divided self in exile, which necessitates the intrusion of the monstrous. In effect, not only does introjecting the cockroach signify a menacing presence but also suggests a decolonizing act of insubordination against a city whose hegemonic order, like its freezing weather, looms large.

This study focuses on the deconstruction of dominant perceptions of Arab masculinity, particularly with respect to Hans, the exiled Iraqi protagonist of Diana Abu-Jaber’s 2003 novel Crescent. Employing the concept of the unheimlich as it intersects with the Iraqi Al-Futuwwa movement, this article explores the ways in which the condition of being exiled strips the protagonist of his masculine ideals that are often associated with nationalism and chivalry, and exposes his internalized vulnerabilities to “unhomeliness,” since he has been disconnected from country and family. In effect, the study subverts hegemonic conceptualizations of Arab masculinity by examining the unsettling repercussions of forced migration.

Drawing on Derrida’s double conceptualization of the ‘la question de l’e´tranger’, which he utilizes to unpack the notion of hospitality, this paper explores the question of foreignness in Ahdaf Soueif’s short story ‘Knowing’, from her collection I Think of You: Stories (2007). Jacques Derrida uses the interrogative mode to examine the diasporic situation by looking at ‘the question of the foreigner’, which ‘is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner’. To Derrida, the diasporic condition is determined by the type of hospitality offered or withheld by visiting and hosting countries. Likewise, Soueif questions the notion of hospitality as she introduces homes and locales that seem uncongenial to foreign dwellers. In ‘Knowing’, Soueif portrays the foreigner’s position as being marked by the presence or absence of hospitality. In this context, the Derridean conditioned hospitality could become invasive as it colours diaspora with its own peculiar brush. As she fictionalizes hospitality, Soueif blurs the line between home and host as well as that between guest and stranger. In the short story, she introduces the insidious effects of the new receiving culture as her fictional girl is not a guest since the host country withholds the Derridean unconditional hospitality; neither is she a stranger as foreignness dictates a sense of cultural dislocation, which is that of not ‘knowing’.

Rabih Alameddine, 57, was born in Amman, Jordan to Lebanese Druze parents, was raised in Beirut, and, before immigrating to the United States, studied in England and Kuwait. He's drawn on his wide-ranging experiences for his novels; Osama al-Kharrat in The Hakawati leaves his family in Beirut to study engineering in Los Angeles; Mohammed, in Koolaids, is a gay Lebanese painter who exhibits his work abroad; and Jacob (born Ya'qub), the protagonist of The Angel of History, is a gay Arab immigrant living in San Francisco, Alameddine's adopted city.

This paper examines Arab literature within cultural, historical and intellectual contexts. It presents Arab literature as an intriguing but rather overlooked branch of World Literature. It defines the Arab world (aka 'Arab Street') as well as such terms as 'Arab', ‘Middle East’, 'Pan-Arabism' and the 'Arab League'. The topics covered in this objective document include Ancient Literature, Modern Times, Awards and Recognitions, Female Scribes, Book Fairs, Intellectuals, Royals, Moors, Book Industry Facts and Figures, Controversies, and Translation. Individual literati mentioned in the research include Naguib Mahfouz, Khalil Gibran, Sara al-Jarwan, Nizar Qabbani, Nawal El Saadawi, Yusuf Idris, Bushra al-Fadil, Dareen Tatour  and Edward W. Said. The research also ponders the possible future of Arab literature.