The Narrative Space of Childhood traces the representations of childhood in 21st century Anglophone Arab literature in the diaspora. Concerned with the contemporary moment, this study focuses exclusively on Anglophone Arab coming-of-age narratives published post 2000 including Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati, Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust, Alicia Erian’s Towelhead, and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home. Anglophone Arab writers frequently place children at the center of their literary production, most notably in the midst of conflict-ridden zones besieged by threats of violence, daily terror, and political unrest. Child narrators in Anglophone Arab literature function as reluctant witnesses, innocent bystanders, and unwitting collaborators. In many cases, they become active participants, exercising agency, sometimes finding themselves culpable in the violence. Children frequently offer testimonials, inscribe the battlefield as a playground enacting multiple states of play, become collateral damage dispossessed of home and family, and serve as a repository for collective memory in terms of families, communities, cultures, and generations. Children’s perspectives are limited in understanding the confluence of events unfolding within a conflict zone. Their naivety, however, is relatively short-lived. The child’s vision provides a piercing, unflinching depiction of history from a vantage point that explodes conventional sentiment in favor of a more penetrating, debilitating, and raw vision of crisis. The figure of the child in 21st century Anglophone Arab diasporic literature interrogates, challenges, and resists facile tropes of sentimentality, nostalgia, and authenticity. Most evident in these works is the child’s capacity to instruct, rehabilitate, and complicate adults’ beliefs about gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, memory, trauma, and play. The post 9/11 Era as it relates to youth and identity formation both in the diaspora and the Arab world has been tainted by the war on terror. 9/11 and the Arab Spring are seemingly convenient bookends for what many have dubbed the terror decade. Charting the use of child narrators and the privileging of the child’s voice at this particular moment is an important intervention in coming to terms with how we understand the post 9/11 era. The designation of the “terror decade” rings a little hollow in the face of other traumas highlighted throughout this body of work. While 9/11 and the Arab Spring are not exact markers for this study, they both serve as useful counterweights to a discussion of youth, narrative agency, and the work that the child’s voice can do.

This book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity. Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others. Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Eurocentric frameworks, the book demonstrates how Arab novelists writing in English draw on nostalgia as a touchstone of Arabic literary tradition from pre-Islamic poetry to the present. Qutait situates Anglophone Arab fiction within contentious debates about the place of the past in the Arab world, tracing how writers have deployed nostalgia as an aesthetic strategy to deal with subject matter ranging from the Islamic golden age, the era of anti-colonial struggle, the failures of the postcolonial state and of pan-Arabism, and the perennial issue of the diaspora's relationship to the homeland. Making a contribution to the transnational turn in memory studies while focusing on a region underrepresented in this field, this book will be of interest for researchers interested in cultural memory, postcolonial studies and the literatures of the Middle East.

This dissertation examines a new form of belonging I call "diasporic consciousness" by juxtaposing the views of immigrant Arab writers in the U.K. and the U.S. with the transnational visions of Arab authors writing diasporic narratives in their Middle Eastern homeland. I argue that contemporary Anglophone-Arab and modern Arab literature presents a diasporic experience that is no longer defined by territorial displacement and migration across national boundaries. The views of Arabs enduring conditions of diaspora in their homelands (Yemen and Tunisia) parallel the diasporic visions of first-generation and second-generation Arab immigrants in the United States and Britain. By exploring diasporic narratives written inside and outside the Middle-Eastern homeland, I claim that contemporary Arab writers redefine postcolonial subjectivity and present us with a new vocabulary for the study of diasporic writing in the 21st century. The new generations of immigrant and diasporic writers I examine in this project destabilize national boundaries by forging a deterritorialized conception of home that is different from the nation-state homeland. Drawing on postcolonial criticism and diaspora studies, I trace this form of diasporic consciousness in four novels: two written by Anglophone-Arab writers from the United States and Britain (Arab American, Randa Jarrar and British Sudanese, Jamal Mahjoub), and two by contemporary Arab novelists writing in Arabic, Alī al-Muqrī from Yemen and Kamāl al- Riyāḥī from Tunisia. Throughout At Home in the Diaspora, I demonstrate how "diasporic consciousness" subverts the authenticity of the nation-state and the designation of one place or one culture as roots and origins. This neglected diasporic sentiment contributes to an understanding of the recent upheavals in the Arab world and the politics of dislocation in the region. This project advances the conceptual and textual boundaries of postcolonial criticism and diaspora studies by showing how contemporary Anglophone-Arab and Arabic literature enunciates a new trajectory of diaspora that develops inside the homeland and generates transnational links between Arab immigrants in the United States and Britain, and diasporic communities inside the homeland.

This book examines the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative.

This concise study argues there is a qualitative difference between Arabic literature, Arabic literature translated into English, and a literature conceived and executed in English by writers of an Arab background. It examines the corpus of a group of contemporary Arab writers who incorporate Arab subjects and themes into the English language.

Arab women's writing in the modern age began with 'A'isha al-Taymuriya, Warda al-Yaziji, Zaynab Fawwaz, and other nineteenth-century pioneers in Egypt and the Levant. This unique study-first published in Arabic in 2004-looks at the work of those pioneers and then traces the development of Arab women's literature through the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a meticulously researched, comprehensive bibliography of writing by Arab women. In the first section, in nine essays that cover the Arab Middle East from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Yemen, critics and writers from the Arab world examine the origin and evolution of women's writing in each country in the region, addressing fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiographical writing. The second part of the volume contains bibliographical entries for over 1,200 Arab women writers from the last third of the nineteenth century through 1999. Each entry contains a short biography and a bibliography of each author's published works. This section also includes Arab women's writing in French and English, as well as a bibliography of works translated into English. With its broad scope and extensive research, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Arabic literature, women's studies, or comparative literature. Contributors: Emad Abu Ghazi, Radwa Ashour, Mohammed Berrada, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Subhi Hadidi, Haydar Ibrahim, Yumna al-'Id, Su'ad al-Mani', Iman al-Qadi, Amina Rachid, Huda al-Sadda, Hatim al-Sakr.

Arab Voices in Diaspora offers a wide-ranging overview and an insightful study of the field of anglophone Arab literature produced across the world. The first of its kind, it chronicles the development of this literature from its inception at the turn of the past century until the post 9/11 era. The book sheds light not only on the historical but also on the cultural and aesthetic value of this literary production, which has so far received little scholarly attention. It also seeks to place anglophone Arab literary works within the larger nomenclature of postcolonial, emerging, and ethnic literature, as it finds that the authors are haunted by the same ‘hybrid’, ‘exilic’, and ‘diasporic’ questions that have dogged their fellow postcolonialists. Issues of belonging, loyalty, and affinity are recognized and dealt with in the various essays, as are the various concerns involved in cultural and relational identification. The contributors to this volume come from different national backgrounds and share in examining the nuances of this emerging literature. Authors discussed include Elmaz Abinader, Diana Abu-Jaber, Leila Aboulela, Leila Ahmed, Rabih Alameddine, Edward Atiyah, Shaw Dallal, Ibrahim Fawal, Fadia Faqir, Khalil Gibran, Suheir Hammad, Loubna Haikal, Nada Awar Jarrar, Jad El Hage, Lawrence Joseph, Mohja Kahf, Jamal Mahjoub, Hisham Matar, Dunya Mikhail, Samia Serageldine, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ameen Rihani, Mona Simpson, Ahdaf Soueif, and Cecile Yazbak. Contributors: Victoria M. Abboud, Diya M. Abdo, Samaa Abdurraqib, Marta Cariello, Carol Fadda–Conrey, Cristina Garrigós, Lamia Hammad, Yasmeen Hanoosh, Waïl S. Hassan, Richard E. Hishmeh, Syrine Hout, Layla Al Maleh, Brinda J. Mehta, Dawn Mirapuri, Geoffrey P. Nash, Boulus Sarru, Fadia Fayez Suyoufie