Part of a larger roundtable series on Arab American histories for the Journal of American Ethnic History.

This article argues that, in reading comparatively the Arabic and English versions of Hanan al-Shaykh’s 1980 Hikayat Zahra, a pattern of omitting race and racial language emerges in the English version, published in 1986. I use a close reading of the translation’s selective appropriation of the original’s racial and political language to argue…[Read more]

This essay argues that spatial approaches to the teaching of the city in literary texts can elucidate the ways in which literature is a privileged form for thinking about and representing the concept of ‘cityness’, a term borrowed from urban studies. In the context of Arabic literature, a city-based approach can bring to light new, int…[Read more]

I argue that young Lebanese novelists like Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman mobilize the ordinary as a way to ‘write out’ of the literary legacy of war and trauma writing that have characterized Lebanese fiction, without denying or suppressing Lebanon’s violent past. I go on to argue that this discursive move of ‘making ordinary’ allows these wri…[Read more]

How does a generation without personal memory begin to grapple with its urban past in a nation that has silenced its memories? How are symbolic sites of memory recovered and represented by such a generation? Much recent scholarship on post-war Lebanon has studied the memory culture of the decades following the declared end of civil war. This…[Read more]