The Migrant in Arab Literature

Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia

Martina Censi, Maria Elena Paniconi

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English

Routledge
26 August 2024

Literature: history & criticism; Regional studies

Series: Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies

This edited book offers a collection of fresh and critical essays that explore the representation of the migrant subject in modern and contemporary Arabic literature and discuss its role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities. The selection of essays in this volume offers a set of new insights on a cluster of tropes: self-discovery, alienation, nostalgia, transmission and translation of knowledge, sense of exile, reconfiguration of the relationship with the past and the identity, and the building of transnational identity. A coherent yet multi-faceted narrative of micro-stories and of transcultural and transnational Arab identities will emerge from the essays: the volume aims at reversing the traditional perspective according to which a migrant subject is a non-political actor.

In contrast to many books about migration and literature, this one explores how the migrant subject becomes a specific literary trope, a catalyst of modern alienation, displacement, and uncertain identity, suggesting new forms of subjectification. Multiple representations of the migrant subject inform and perform the possibility of new post- national and transcultural individual and group identities and actively contribute to rewriting and decolonizing history.

Edited by: Martina Censi, Maria Elena Paniconi
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032303994
ISBN 10: 1032303999
Series: Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 26 August 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Martina Censi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy). She is a member of the Équipe de Recherche Interlangue (ERIMIT) at the University of Rennes 2 (France). In her research, she deals with literary representations of the body, processes of the construction of masculinity and femininity, and migration with a special focus on contemporary Arabic novel. She has published the book Le Corps dans le roman des écrivaines syriennes contemporaines: Dire, écrire, inscrire la différence (2016) and other articles about modern and contemporary Arabic literature. Maria Elena Paniconi is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Macerata. She is interested in the rise of the Arab novel and in the dialectics among literary genres during the Arab Nahḍa. She has written articles and essays in the Journal of Arabic Literature and Oriente Moderno on nahḍawī authors and co-edited with Jolanda Guardi the special issue of Oriente Moderno, “Nahḍa Narratives”. She wrote the entries on Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal for the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam. Her book Bildungsroman and the Arab Novel: Egyptian Intersections (Routledge 2023) explores a corpus of Egyptian canonical novels featuring young protagonists in their path toward adulthood, through the lens of international Bildungsroman.

Reviews for The Migrant in Arab Literature: Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia

The experience of migration, a key factor in the shaping of modern Arabic literature, has taken new, unprecedented dimensions in the last decades. Drawing on the finest scholarship in several fields, the contributions of this volume explore multiple representations of the migrant in both contemporary Arabic and Arab American literature, and discuss their role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities, thus providing the reader valuable insights into a most recent literary production as well as into the deep changes it reveals in the social and political contexts these literary works represent. Richard Jacquemond, Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, Aix-Marseille Université, France