Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies: The Poetics and Ethics of Anglophone Arab Representations

Description

This book explores the formative correlations and inventive transmissions of Anglophone Arab representations ranging from early 20th century Mahjar writings to contemporary transnational Palestinian resistance art. Tracing multiple beginnings and seminal intertexts, the comparative study of dissonant truth-making presents critical readings in which the notion of cross-cultural translation gets displaced and strategic unreliability, representational opacity, or matters of act advance to essential qualities of the discussed works' aesthetic devices and ethical concerns. Questioning conventional interpretive approaches, Markus Schmitz shows what Anglophone Arab studies are and what they can become from a radically decentered relational point of view. Among the writers and artists discussed are such diverse figures as Rabih Alameddine, William Blatty, Kahlil Gibran, Ihab Hassan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Ameen Rihani, Edward Said, Larissa Sansour, and Raja Shehadeh. Cover Contents Acknowledgements 0. Setting in Motion: The Trans-Location of Anglophone Arab Cultures 1. Endings as Desert(ed) Starts 2. Beginnings as Cultural Novelties: Intertexts and Discursive Affinities 2.1 Pulling Apart or Pushing Together: Relations of Alterity and Critical Instrumentality 3. Khalid’s Book and How Not to Bow Down Before Rihani 3.1 An Arab (Drago)man in New York and the Cultural Imaginary of Confrontation 3.2 Post-Gibran Before The Prophet: Khalid’s Figurality and Performative Arabness 3.3 Transmigrations and Turnovers 3.4 Quixotic Entanglements and Disruptive Translations 3.4.1 Cervantes’s Fictional Flight, the Moorish Unconscious, and Reversed Plagiarism 4. Nocturnal Traces and Voyaging Critique: From Shahrazad to Said 4.1 Lies, Counter-Lies, and Self-Made Lies 4.2 Edward Said in Anglophone Arab Works and in this Study 5. Reading Anglophone Arab Enunciations Across Genres: Narrative Display, Performative Evidence, and the Parafiction of Theory 5.1 The Horrors of Assimilation, Uncanny Transferences, and the End of the Roots-Talk 5.1.1 The Laughter and Slaughter of Subjection 5.1.2 Being Non-Arab and the Anxiety of Re-Filiation 5.2 Blurred Archives and Queered (Hi-)Stories: Literary Writing and Art Work in Transmigration 5.3 Palestinian Parkours—Matters of (F)Act: Occupation, Deterritorialization, and Cultural Resistance 6. The Challenge of Anglophone Arab Studies: For a Post-Integrationist Critical Practice Works Cited Image Credits