1st Edition
The Migrant in Arab Literature Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia
This edited book offers a collection of fresh and critical essays that explore the representation of the migrant subject in modern and contemporary Arabic literature and discuss its role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities. The selection of essays in this volume offers a set of new insights on a cluster of tropes: self-discovery, alienation, nostalgia, transmission and translation of knowledge, sense of exile, reconfiguration of the relationship with the past and the identity, and the building of transnational identity. A coherent yet multi-faceted narrative of micro-stories and of transcultural and transnational Arab identities will emerge from the essays: the volume aims at reversing the traditional perspective according to which a migrant subject is a non-political actor.
In contrast to many books about migration and literature, this one explores how the migrant subject becomes a specific literary trope, a catalyst of modern alienation, displacement, and uncertain identity, suggesting new forms of subjectification. Multiple representations of the migrant subject inform and perform the possibility of new post- national and transcultural individual and group identities and actively contribute to rewriting and decolonizing history.
List of Contributors
Introduction (Martina Censi)
Chapter 1: Migrating to and in Europe beyond the Nahḍawī and Modernist Paradigm: Mudun bi-lā nakhīl by Ṭāriq al-Ṭayyib and Taytanikāt Ifriqiyya by Abū Bakr Khāl as Novels of Forced Migration (Maria Elena Paniconi)
Chapter 2: Transcultural Identities in two Novels by Ḥanān al-Shaykh (Martina Censi)
Chapter 3: The Body and the Migrating Subject in the Gulf: Daqq al-ṭabūl by Muḥammad al-Bisāṭī (Cristina Dozio)
Chapter 4: Writing Arabic in the Land of Migration: Waciny Laredj from Ḥārisat al-ẓilāl: Dūn Kīshūt fī al-Ǧazā’ir to Shurafāt baḥr al-shamāl: Amṭār Amstirdām (Jolanda Guardi)
Chapter 5: Resistant Assimilation and Hometactics as Decolonial Practices: The Stories of Leilah and Ibrahim in The Orange Trees of Baghdad (Shima Shahbazi)
Chapter 6: The Negotiation of Identity in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land and West of Jordan (Sara Arami)
Chapter 7: “Smotherland” Speaks: Syrian Refugee Identity in the Spaces between Media and Literature (Roula Salam)
Chapter 8: The Global Migration Context and the Contemporary Iraqi Novel (Ikram Masmoudi)
Epilogue (Maria Elena Paniconi)
Index
Biography
Martina Censi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy). She is a member of the Équipe de Recherche Interlangue (ERIMIT) at the University of Rennes 2 (France). In her research, she deals with literary representations of the body, processes of the construction of masculinity and femininity, and migration with a special focus on contemporary Arabic novel. She has published the book Le Corps dans le roman des écrivaines syriennes contemporaines: Dire, écrire, inscrire la différence (2016) and other articles about modern and contemporary Arabic literature.
Maria Elena Paniconi is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Macerata. She is interested in the rise of the Arab novel and in the dialectics among literary genres during the Arab Nahḍa. She has written articles and essays in the Journal of Arabic Literature and Oriente Moderno on nahḍawī authors and co-edited with Jolanda Guardi the special issue of Oriente Moderno, “Nahḍa Narratives”. She wrote the entries on Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal for the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam. Her book Bildungsroman and the Arab Novel: Egyptian Intersections (Routledge 2023) explores a corpus of Egyptian canonical novels featuring young protagonists in their path toward adulthood, through the lens of international Bildungsroman.
The experience of migration, a key factor in the shaping of modern Arabic literature, has taken new, unprecedented dimensions in the last decades. Drawing on the finest scholarship in several fields, the contributions of this volume explore multiple representations of the migrant in both contemporary Arabic and Arab American literature, and discuss their role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities, thus providing the reader valuable insights into a most recent literary production as well as into the deep changes it reveals in the social and political contexts these literary works represent.
Richard Jacquemond, Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, Aix-Marseille Université, France
