The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture

513 Pages·2013·7.78 MB·English

by  Nouri Gana

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ISBN 978–0–7486–8553–0
Edited by Nouri Gana
i
The
Edinburgh
Companion
to the
Arab Novel
in English
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ii the edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english
To Adnan Husain
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iii
The
Edinburgh
Companion
to the
Arab Novel
in English
The Politics of Anglo Arab and
Arab American Literature and Culture
Edited by
Nouri Gana
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iv the edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english
© editorial matter and organization Nouri Gana, 2013
© the chapters their several authors, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 11 on 13 Ehrhardt by
Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 8553 0 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8555 4 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8557 8 (epub)
The right of the contributors to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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v
Contents
the edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Introduction: The Intellectual History and Contemporary Significance
of the Arab Novel in English 1
Nouri Gana
Part I: Constellations: Modernity, Empire and Postcoloniality
1. The Rise of the Arab American Novel: Ameen Rihani’s
The Book of Khalid 39
Waïl S. Hassan
2. Beyond Orientalism: Khalid, the Secular City and the
Transcultural Self 63
Geoffrey Nash
3. The Incestuous (Post)Colonial: Soueif’s Map of Love and the
Second Birth of the Egyptian Novel in English 82
Shaden M. Tageldin
4. Drinking, Gambling and Making Merry: Waguih Ghali’s Search for
Cosmopolitan Agency 106
Deborah A. Starr
5. Mobile Belonging? The Global “Given” in the Work of Etel Adnan 127
Mary N. Layoun
6. Burning, Memory and Postcolonial Agency in Laila Lalami’s Hope
and Other Dangerous Pursuits 149
Ahmed Idrissi Alami
7. Zenga Zenga and Bunga Bunga: The Novels of Hisham Matar and a
Critique of Gaddafi’s Libya 171
Christopher Micklethwait
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Part II: Force-fields: Ethnic Ties and Transnational Solidarities
8. In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana
Abu-Jaber’s Crescent 197
Nouri Gana
9. Europe and Its Others: The Novels of Jamal Mahjoub 217
Jopi Nyman
10. Space, Embodiment, Identity and Resistance in the Novels of
Fadia Faqir 246
Lindsey Moore
11. The Arab Canadian Novel and the Rise of Rawi Hage 269
F. Elizabeth Dahab
12. The Arab Australian Novel: Situating Diasporic and
Multicultural Literature 298
Saadi Nikro
13. Identity, Transformation and the Anglophone Arab Novel 321
Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward
14. Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine: A Druze Novel as
World Literature? 339
Michelle Hartman
Part III: Prospects/Challenges: Authority, Pedagogy and the
Market Industry
15. Invisible Ethnic: Mona Simpson and the Space of the Ethnic
Literature Market 363
Mara Naaman
16. The Challenges of Orientalism: Teaching about Islam and
Masculinity in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator 386
Brendan Smyth
17. Teaching from Cover to Cover: Arab Women’s Novels in the
Classroom 405
Heather M. Hoyt
18. Perils and Pitfalls of Marketing the Arab Novel in English 426
Samia Serageldin
Bibliography 447
Index 483
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vii
Acknowledgments
the edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english
The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English has been several years
in the making. It would be impossible to list all those who contributed—in
one way or another, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally—
to its conception, development and completion. First and foremost, I thank
all the authors for their excellent contributions and for their exemplary
patience throughout the publishing process. Initially, the idea for this pro-
ject started while I was a SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research
Council of Canada) Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University, Ontario,
Canada (2004–6). For my two-year tenure at Queen’s I remain indebted to
the mentorship, friendship and intellectual generosity of my colleagues in
the Department of English, particularly Patricia Rae, Asha Varadharajan,
Chris Bongie, Helen Tiffin, Ariel Salzmann and Margaret Pappano. This
book is dedicated to Adnan Husain for his support of this project at an early
formative stage.
When I moved to the University of Michigan, Dearborn, by mid-2006,
I de facto started collaborating with other colleagues interested in diasporic
Arab literature written in English. I organized a special session titled
The Rise of the Arab Novel in English, held at the MLA’s 122nd Annual
Convention, Philadelphia, PA (December 27–30, 2006). Special thanks go to
the panelists—Hamid Bahri, Shaden M. Tageldin and Waïl S. Hassan—for
presenting their work in that crucial panel. I would like to take this oppor-
tunity as well to thank all the members of the then MLA Discussion Group
(now Division) on Arabic Literature and Culture, especially Anouar Majid,
Amal Amireh, Mohja Kahf, and Nabil Matar. The enthused reception and
productive discussion that followed the panel, formally and then informally,
convinced me that the time was ripe for a volume of essays on the Arab novel
in English.
This conviction grew stronger after yet another panel I organized,
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viii the edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english
The Preoccupations of the Arab American Novel, for RAWI (the Radius of
Arab American Writers, Inc.) 2nd National Conference, held at the Arab
American National Museum, Dearborn, MI (May 17–20, 2007). I thank
Carol Fadda-Conrey, Mara Naaman, Heather M. Hoyt, and Maysa Abou-
Youssef Hayward for their thoughtful papers which helped to shape and
enrich the project. I also thank the audience in that panel for their insight-
ful comments and questions during the discussion that followed, especially
Fady Joudah, Gregory Orfalea and Khaled Mattawa.
In the meanwhile, the project developed over the years through the
many undergraduate lectures and graduates seminars taught around these
issues at Queen’s University, Ontario, University of Michigan, Dearborn,
and the University of California, Los Angeles. Such courses included
“Contemporary Literature: Multilingual Diasporic Arab Literature and
Culture,” “Anglophone Arab Women Writers,” “The Political Turn: Arab
and Arab American Literature and Culture 1967–9/11” and “Between
Modernity and Empire: The Multilingual Arab Novel.” Warm thanks go to
all the students who took these courses.
I have been in conversation with several friends and colleagues about the
project and I would like to acknowledge their work and support. They include
Dima Ayoub, Carol Bardenstein, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Fadia Faqir, Salah
Hassan, Laila Lalami, Atef Laouyene, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Hisham Matar,
Khaled Mattawa, Deborah Julia Al-Najjar, Firat Oruc, Steven Salaita and
Pauline Homsi Vinson. I am immensely thankful to the anonymous review-
ers for their helpful feedback and to Nicola Ramsey for her continuing
support of this project through the years. Thanks also to the EUP staff with
whom I have been in contact, including Michelle Houston, Jenny Peebles
and Rebecca Mackenzie.
My deepest thanks go to Reem for her help and support, especially in the
final and crucial editorial stages of the book manuscript. I am grateful to Nja
Mahdaoui for his superb “Graphemes,” which is featured as the book cover.
Molka Mahdaoui has been remarkably helpful in facilitating the transmis-
sion of the piece in the right format.
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notes on the contributors ix
Notes on the Contributors
the edinburgh companion to the arab novel in english
notes on the contributors
F. Elizabeth Dahab is Professor of Comparative Literature in the
Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California
State University, Long Beach. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from McGill
University and her Master’s from the University of Alberta (Canada). She
received her doctorat de littérature comparée in Comparative Literature from
the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. Dahab published extensively on the
topic of Arab Canadian literature, including a monograph entitled Voices of
Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature (2009/2011). Voices
in the Desert: An Anthology of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers, her edited
anthology, appeared in Toronto in 2002.
Nouri Gana is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near
Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He published numerous articles and chapters on modernist and
postcolonial studies as well as on the literatures and cultures of the Arab
world and its diasporas in such scholarly venues as Comparative Literature
Studies, PMLA, Public Culture and Social Text. He also contributed op-eds to
such magazines and international newspapers as The Guardian, El País, The
Electronic Intifada, Jadaliyya and CounterPunch. Author of Signifying Loss:
Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (2011), he is currently completing
a book manuscript on the politics of melancholia in the Arab world and
another on the history of cultural dissent in Tunisia prior to the revolution.
Michelle Hartman is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the
Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her research has focused
on the politics of language use in literatures written in Arabic, French and
English, the construction of race in Arab American and African American
poetry, and more recently on the politics of translating Arabic women’s
literature into English. Her work has appeared in journals such as the
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