This article discusses the confluence of the war on drugs and the war on terror with an analysis of the novels of Elmer Mendoza, (Balas de plata, Prueba de ácido, Nombre de perro, Besar al detective) Don Winslow (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel) and Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)

Three faculty members from UMass Boston’s English Department—a team responsible for the department’s M.A. course on the Teaching of Literature and for the training of novice teachers of literature—examine the complex process of reading texts that they teach as if they are encountering them as their students do, for the first time. Accepting the p…[Read more]

Attentive to the disjunctures of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Patricia Powell’s “The Pagoda” intertextually re-territorializes the tropes of Asian American literature and cultural criticism in a Jamaican context in order to fashion a queer utopian historical romance. The novel portrays a simultaneously pluralist and creolizing…[Read more]

This essay argues that narco-narratives–in film, television, literature, and music–depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

The media reception of Drown frames Junot Díaz as a voice of the street that denounces the subjugating violence of internal US colonialism. However, Drown itself suggests that this extra-textual critique displaces the reader’s analytic gaze. The stories in the collection intimate that it is not oppressive socio-economic conditions that co…[Read more]

Late 19th-century Beirut and Cairo were capitals of Arabic literary production and press
activity. A period, oft deemed a nahḍah, that witnessed the advent of the novel form or
riwāyah in Arabic, this was also the moment of intensified French and British imperial
involvement in the region, and the concomitant industrialization of Beirut’s silk…[Read more]

Abstract.
In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFren…[Read more]

Abstract
This paper argues that Ahlām Mustaghānamī’s novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair , is p…[Read more]

Published in Cairo in 1892, the first issue of Jurji Zaydan’s Arabic journal al-Hilal contained a history of the Arabic press, including a list of the journals published in Beirut in the 1870s and 1880s, when Zaydan was a young waiter and finally a Syrian Protestant College medical student and leader of the 1882 protest. Listed too are the Arabi…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Theorizations of the female subject in Arabic literary criticism have long charted debates within Western feminism. This chapter invites a reading of Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra that would attend rather to the quiet narrative aporia surrounding a reticent Zahra, the challenge her will to be “look[ed] at [as] a woman in…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Serialized over the course of 1905 in the Arabic journal al-Muqtaṭaf, Ya‘qūb Ṣarrūf’s novel Fatāt Mişr [The Girl of Egypt] was avidly read by contemporary subscribers and then soon forgotten by Arabic’s reading public. Ṣarrūf came to despise Fatāt Mişr and all of his novels, finding that the market for the genre in Arabic fell far sh…[Read more]

ABSTRACT This paper reads narrative published in the journals of 1870s Beirut in the context of an emerging bourgeois readership and argues that the significance of this archive to modern Arabic fiction has been neglected by critics. Taking the intensification of the silk trade with France following the civil war of 1860 as a point of historical…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Cultural cold war played out in Arabic from the late 1950s into the early 1970s in the
conference halls, hotel lobbies, cafes, bars, magazine offices, publishing houses, kiosks,
and streets of Beirut and Cairo. Berlin, Paris, Tashkent, Khartoum, London, Baghdad1,
and Tunis all have their place in this built landscape of cultural cold…[Read more]

Abstract
In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in
response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and fiinded a worldwide network of literary
journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits…[Read more]