This book works on the interface between literature, culture, and discourse. It is entirely devoted to the reading of some of Zafzāf’s novels that came out in the early 1970s and in the late 1980s, and attempts to chart the trajectory of the aesthetic imaginary of an exceptional writing experience that marked out the literary and cultural landscape in Morocco and in the Arab world for long. Zafzāf and his writings are associated with aspects of the country's social contradictions, cultural transition, and political transformations, expressed through various aesthetic patterns that translate the crisis of the intellectual within a society weighed down by poverty, political instability, social conflict, and cultural disintegration. Given the relative scarcity of resources that are written in English about the Moroccan novel of Arabic expression, this work is an attempt to theorize and approach in an interdisciplinary manner a set of narratives that have not been previously explored in western academia. Using postcolonial discourse as approach and a metaphor of reading, it draws attention to the often-neglected texts in Moroccan literature of Arabic expression and explores their aesthetic, discursive, and cultural implications that rethink and disturb canonical formations of literary texts in Morocco. This book will be adopted in the now burgeoning fields of the Humanities, and will provide useful resources for courses about Moroccan Literature and culture.

This volume traces the interconnections between myth, environmentalism, narrative, poetry, comics, and innovative artistic practice, using this as a framework through which to examine strategies for repairing our unhealthy relationship with the planet. Challenging late capitalist modes encouraging mindless consumption and the degradation of human–nature relations, this collection advocates a re-evaluation of the ethical relation to "living with" and sharing the Earth. Myth and the environment have shared a rich common cultural history travelling as far back as the times of storytelling and legend, with the environment often the central theme. Following a robust introduction, the book is organized into three main sections—Myth, Disaster, and Present-Day Views on Ecological Damage; Indigenous and Afro-diasporic Myths and Ecological Knowledge; Art Practices, Myth, and Environmental Resilience—and concludes with a Coda from Jeanette Hart-Mann. The methodology draws from diverse perspectives, such as ecocriticism, new materialism, and Anthropocene studies, offering a truly interdisciplinary discussion that reflects on the dialogue among environment and myth, and a broad range of contributions are included from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, Ukraine, Japan, Morocco, and Brazil. The book joins a long line of approaches on the interrelations between ecological and mythical thinking and criticism that goes back to the early 20th century. This volume will be of interest to students, scholars, activists, and experts in environmental humanities, myth and myth criticism, literature and art on more-than human and nature interaction, ecocriticism, environmental activism, and climate change.

Writers and Nations:The Case of American and Saudi Literatures examines how the concept of the nation in nineteenth century American literature and twentieth century and contemporary Saudi Arabian literature is represented in an array of relevant works. Reading their works gives us a sense of their conceptions of nation as a political and/or a social community. Writers examined in this book often see the nation as a threat to marginalized groups, due to its cultural, religious and political constraints. Writers tend to represent the tension between individuals and communities as a significant key to understanding a particular nation. This tension carries in it a sense of the boundaries of the nation. It is a question of who is part of the nation and who is not. The constraints of a certain nation, be they political or social, include the dominant by excluding the repressed or the marginalized. In other words, by exposing the tension between disenfranchised and dominant groups, writers define, redefine and reform for us the national political and social scenes of a particular nation.

This book explores portrayals and predicaments of the disabled in Arab/Muslim post colonial North African and Middle Eastern societies in genres ranging from classical Arabic scripture to secular popular culture including Francophone Moroccan and Algerian fiction, Egyptian Middle Eastern film, as well as Tunisian song and television. In line with theorists Aijaz Ahmad and Ato Quayson’s objection to reading Third World literature as “national allegory,” The author argues that rather than being metaphors or allegories, disabled characters represent persons with disabilities in their culture and act as a mirror upon their changing societies. Contemporary Maghrebians and Muslims with disabilities find themselves at an intersection of conflicting and competing cultures, their native Islamic culture and Westernizing lifestyles. In the rush to import everything Western, despite humanitarian Islamic teachings regarding the disabled, are often abandoned. In situations of fundamentalist menace, the disabled, who tend to be the most vulnerable and abused fraction of Arab/Muslim society, suffer the worst, especially women.

Islam on the Street deals with the popular side of Islam, as described not only in tracts and manuals written by Sufi shaykhs and Islamist thinkers from among the more militant groups in Islam, but also in writings by other, more secular thinkers who have also influenced public opinion. A scholar of Arabic literature, Muhsin al-Musawi explains the growing rift that has occurred between the secular intellectual--the forerunner of Arab and Islamic modernity since the late nineteenth century--and the upsurge of Islamic fervor in the street, at the grassroots level, and what these secular intellectuals can do to reconnect with the masses. Using some of the most important Arabic and Islamic poetry, prose, and fiction to come out of the twentieth century, Al-Musawi provides context for the complex images of Arab and Islamic culture given by the various social, religious, and political groups, providing the motivations. Readers interested in the influence of religion and secularism within modern Islamic Arabic literature will find that the author addresses the presence of Islam and Sufism in ways that secular commentators have been incapable of doing.

Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return offers a new perspective of migration studies that views the concept of migration in Arabic as inherently embracing the notion of return. Starting the study with the significance of the Islamic hijra as the quintessential migrant narrative in Arabic culture, Elmeligi offers readings of Arabic narratives as early as Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and as recent asMiral Al-Tahawy’s 2010 Brooklyn Heights, and asvaried as Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s short story adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe and Yemeni novelist Mohammed Abdl Wali’s They Die Strangers, includingnovels that have not been translated in English before, such as Sonallah Ibrahim’s Amrikanli and Suhayl Idris’ The Latin Quarter. To contextualize these narratives, Elmeligi employs studies of cultural identity and their features that are most impacted by migration. In this study, Elmeligi analyzes the different manifestations of return, whether physical or psychological, commenting not only on the decisions that the characters take in the novels, but also the narrative choices that the writers make, thus viewing narrativity as a form of performativity of cultural identity as well. The book addresses fresh angles of migration studies, identity theory, and Arabic literary analysis that are of interest to scholars and students.

Considered one of Morocco’s most important contemporary writers, Muhammad Zafzaf created stories of alterity, compassionate tales inhabited by prostitutes, thieves, and addicts living in the margins of society. In The Elusive Fox, Zafzaf’s first novel to be translated into English, a young teacher visits the coastal city of Essaouira in the 1960s. There he meets a group of European bohemians and local Moroccans and is exposed to the grittier side of society. More than a novel, The Elusive Fox is a portrait of a city during a time of fluid cultural and political mores in Morocco.