Even though postcolonial theory has helped in the critique of non-western texts, it has for the most part failed to engage with the Arab region and its literatures in spite of Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism. Robert Young argues that postcolonial theory since its inception has been concerned with the politics of invisibility, striving to m…[Read more]

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]

In this essay I argue that paying attention to the ephemeral genre of female sensation stories sheds insight on, and expands current understandings of, the many ways in which cultural production operated in the Arabic-speaking world during the nahḍa. Paying particular attention to two short stories in the genre, Adelaide Bustānī’s ‘Henry wa Ameli…[Read more]

In this essay, I explore the ways in which the bodies of migrants, specifically of Lebanese men who have returned from Africa, are represented in Lebanese fiction. By focusing on the ways in which these figures are embodied textually, I seek to begin to shed light on the ways in which Lebanese authors have engaged with certain diaspora spaces, in…[Read more]

Survey of literature about Beirut, 1860s-present