Immigrant Narratives Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature

by Hassan, Wail S.

• ISBN13: 9780199792061
• ISBN10: 0199792062
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Arab immigrants began to arrive in the United States in the late-nineteenth century and in Britain after World War Two. Those immigrants have produced a vast literature that remains relatively unknown outside of specialist circles. Like other ethnic literatures, Arab-American and Arab-British writing treats a variety of themes such as the immigrant experience, the lives of minorities, cultural misconceptions, and stereotypes. In addition to that, Arab immigrant writing also reveals unique perspectives on complex issues that continue to shape our world today, such as inter-faith relations, the tangled politics of the Middle East, the role played first by the British empire then by the United States in the region, the representations of Arabs and Arab culture in British and American societies, and the status of Muslim minorities there. Although those issues have acquired an unprecedented urgency in the post-9/11 period, they have preoccupied Arab-American and Arab-British writers since the early days of the twentieth century. Immigrant Narrativesoffers a critical reading of that tradition from its inception to the present. Drawing upon postcolonial, translation, and minority discourse theory, it investigates how key novelists and autobiographers have described their immigrant experiences, and in so doing acted as mediators and interpreters between cultures, and how they have forged new identities in their adopted countries.

Author Biography

Waïl S. Hassan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction, co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, and translator of Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 3
The Rise of Arab American Literature	p. 38
The Gibran Phenomenon	p. 59
The Emergence of Autobiography	p. 78
The Retreat of Cultural Translation	p. 100
Exilic Memoirs	p. 112
Academic Itineraries	p. 141
Postcolonlal Translation	p. 157
Muslim Immigrant Fiction	p. 180
Queering Orientalism	p. 199
Conclusion	p. 220
Notes	p. 225
Works Cited	p. 237
Index	p. 253
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