The Migrant in Arab Literature

Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-367-13588-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 206 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 482 g

Reihe: 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.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Censi, Martina

Paniconi, Maria Elena

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Literatur des Nahen Ostens & Nordafrikas
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie

Über Autor(innen)

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 Nahda. She has written articles and essays in the Journal of Arabic Literature and Oriente Moderno on nahdawi authors and co-edited with Jolanda Guardi the special issue of Oriente Moderno, “Nahda Narratives”. She wrote the entries on Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn 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.