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Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is a colonial one that elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace articulations of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents an interdisciplinary comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—whom she maintains have been cast as the canon of the city in a belated “Alexandrianism.” Attending to genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers’ representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anti-colonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas one of which centres on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

The subject of this book is a new “Islam.” This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained—indeed, it is a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out. At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or “pious” Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question “How do we free ourselves from freedom?” Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial—a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom’s other. This book is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam, and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters. The book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; and responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies.

This study attempts to understand, through both a careful reading of Milan Kundera’s oeuvre as well as a consideration of the Continental philosophical tradition, the place that Kundera calls “the universe of the novel.” It argues that Kundera transforms—not applies—philosophical reflection within the art form of the novel. As Kundera argued in The Art of the Novel: “The moment it becomes part of a novel, reflection changes its essence. Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge. Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and of hypotheses. In the novel, then, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical.” This work is not a philosophical consideration of Kundera’s work, but rather a reflection on the relationship between philosophy and the universe of the novel as it opens up in Kundera’s writing (as well as that of his self-identified progenitors). It does not seek to give philosophy the last word, but rather to open a space between these two universes and then to speak both to and from it.

This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? Insofar as it responds to these questions, the book is a history of the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that have shaped the aesthetics of globalization from the late–Cold War period to today. But the book is also a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular. It explores what it is possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual. Instead of dichotomies, it offers a triangulated, multilingual, comparative approach to literary studies. Moving among avant-garde poetic examples from China, Russia, and the United States, it traces a series of cross-cultural encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, A Common Strangeness tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.

This book explores the confluence of decadence and Orientalism since the mid-nineteenth century in French and Arabic writing. It demonstrates how French Orientalism set the terms of modernity for Arab and Muslim thinkers and writers, but also how the latter responded to and transformed these terms. The book argues that Orientalism is doubly decadent: it describes the supposedly inherent degeneration of the Semitic and the “Oriental,” and in so doing Orientalism attempts to contribute to the decay of these societies. Through comparative close readings of French, Francophone, and Arabic texts, the author outlines how notions and representations of decadence and decay during the colonial and postcolonial periods have in fact produced symbolic and social disintegration in parts of the Arab world. Part 1 of the book examines the role of philology, secularism, Islamic reformism, and colonial policy in the configurations of colonial modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the Arab East (or Mashreq) and Algeria. Part 2 turns to Maghreb to explore the ways that loss becomes nationalized and gendered in the postcolonial era and how Maghrebi writers engage with the legacy of Orientalist decadence to find ways beyond it. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of work by a wide range of writers, including Ernest Renan, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq, Farah Antun, Céline, Tahar Wattar, Tahir Djaout, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Yamina Méchakra, Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Abdelkebir Khatibi.

What role have literature and other cultural imagining played in shaping understandings of the world and the planet, for better and for worse? How might the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrication of world literature help confront unevenly distributed environmental challenges, including global warming? This book examines the rivalry between world literature and postcolonial theory from the perspective of environmental humanities, Anthropocene anxiety, and the material turn. Drawing its examples primarily from Africa and South Asia, it takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed in time and space. Reading for the planet means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Recurrent concerns across the chapters are the multinational corporation (and the colonial charter company) as a vector of globalization and source of cultural imaginings and environmental harm; who (or what) can be regarded as a person; scenes of world-imagining from below in which characters or documentary subjects situate their experience within a transnational context; and formal strategies that invite reflexivity from the audience, in order to register, at the level of literary form, the uneven universality of vulnerability to environmental harm. The book argues for the relevance of the literary to environmental thought and practice. An understanding of cultural imagining and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality, to energize movements for justice and livable futures.

The ups and downs of silk, cotton and stocks synchopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press; time itself was changing. Khalīl al-Khūrī, Salīm al-Bustānī, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn, Jurjī Zaydān and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk, increasingly legible as tools of French and British empire unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo and beyond. As silk dominated Beirut’s markets and the hopes of its reading public, Cairo speculated in cotton shares, real estate and the stock market, which crashed in 1907. Hoping against fear, at the turn of the century, serialized Arabic fiction negotiated a struggle with its historical moment of finance. While scholars of Arabic prose in this period often write of a Nahḍah, a sense of Renaissance, Fictitious Capital argues instead that we read the trope of Nahḍah as Walter Benjamin might have, as “one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins.” Gardens appear and reappear in these novels, citations of a botanical dream of the Arabic press that for a moment tried to manage the endless sense of uncertainty on which capital preys. Novel Migration charts the migration from Beirut to Cairo of Fāris Nimr and Ṣarrūf, their journal Al-Muqtaṭaf, and their student Jurjī Zaydān, who would soon publish Al-Hilāl. Leaving behind Salīm al-Bustānī and Beirut’s Al-Jinān years, al-Bustānī’s fiction would continue to profoundly shape the novels Ṣarrūf and Zaydān would go on to write.

Despite the rise in transatlantic, oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies that followed postcolonial and Third World studies in pursuing new frameworks and methods for examining South-South connections, the South Atlantic has not yet emerged as a “site” that captures the general imagination or the scholarly attention it deserves—particularly in literature and cultural studies. The Global South Atlantic traces literary exchanges, socio-historical linkages, networks of communication and exchange, and overlapping investments (financial, political, social, cultural, and libidinal) among Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean that remain largely invisible to an Atlantic Studies still primarily inclined toward the North. Bringing together scholars working in Lusophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone contexts, as well as researchers working across other languages (such as Arabic) that are important components of a Global South Atlantic, the chapters in this volume demonstrate many important ways in which people, governments, political movements, social imaginaries, cultural artefacts, goods, and markets do (and sometimes do not) cross the South Atlantic. Combined, they help to reveal complex and intermeshed webs of cultural, material, and social relations that begin to make visible a multi-textured version of a South Atlantic system that is neither singular nor stable. As a region made up of multiple intersecting regions, as a vision made up of complementary and competing visions, the South Atlantic can only be understood comparatively. Exploring the Atlantic as an effect of structures of power and knowledge that issue from the Global South (as much as from Europe and North America), The Global South Atlantic seeks to rebalance global literary studies by shifting perspectives on transatlantic flows and charting overlooked routes of comparison.

Hating Empire Properly produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century European and American self-conceptions evolved. By focusing on colonial spaces of the Enlightenment, especially India and Haiti, this book demonstrates how Burke's fearful view of the French Revolution—for many the defining event of modernity—was shaped by prior reflection on these other domains. Exploring with sympathy the angry outbursts against injustice in the writings of Diderot, it nonetheless challenges recent understandings of him as a univocal critic of empire by showing the persistence of a fantasy of consensual colonialism in his thought. By looking at the impasses and limits in the thought of both radical and conservative writers, this work asks what it means to critique empire “properly.” Drawing out a method from Theodor Adorno's quip that “one must have tradition in oneself, in order to hate it properly,” it proposes a critical inhabiting of dominant forms of reason as a way forward for the critique of both empire and Enlightenment.

This study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literature and international human rights law are related phenomena. The author argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality. Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, the author suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the author focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neo-imperialism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.

In a series of close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, the author considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, the author demonstrates the reiterated incursion of loss into the time of life-losses that language declines to mourn. Language occurs as the iteration of loss, confounding its domestication in the form of the monolingual state in the Arabic nineteenth century's fallout. Reading the late lyric poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, the author reconsiders the nineteenth-century Arabic nahda and its relation to colonialism, philology, and the European Enlightenment. He argues that this event is one of catastrophic loss, wherein the past suddenly appears as if it belonged to another time. Reading al-Shidyaq's al-Saq 'ala al-saq (1855) and the legacies to which it points in post-1948 writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, the author underlines a displacement and relocation of the Arabic word adab and its practice. The book shows that language interrupts its pacification as an event of aesthetic coherency, to suggest that literary comparison does not privilege a renewed giving of sense but gives place to a new sense of relation.

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category—Latinx—under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question a host of others spin out: What does that grouping allow us to see, predispose us to see, and preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people and groups under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound seeks to unbind Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Following a neo-formalist interpretive model that privileges reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, the book argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature. Finally, Latinx Literature Unbound suggests some ways in which we might want to proceed as we move forward with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.

The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside its attendant embodied practices and hermeneutical strategies, to theorize Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site in which the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. To that end, the book engages the classical Arab-Islamic tradition of adab—a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as the moral dimensions of personal and social conduct. Reading Islam through its intersecting ethical and epistemological dimensions, it argues that the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Foregrounding questions of form and praxis, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. Reflecting both critical methodology and argument, it places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Muḥammad Barrāda). Blending literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices, the study builds upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship across literary theory, Islamic and Qurʾanic studies, philosophy, anthropology, and history.

Mourning Philology proposes a history of the 19th century national imagination as a reaction to the two main philological inventions of that century: “mythological religion” and the “native.” This history is illustrated with the case of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The book offers an account of the successive stages (archeological, self-ethnographic, and aesthetical) of the implementation of orientalist philology, through which the nation came to existence. The last episode takes place in 1914 (a year before the general deportation and extermination of the Armenians of the Ottoman empire), in Constantinople, around Daniel Varuzhan, the proponent of “paganism” in Armenian poetry, who had devoted a large part of his work to the “mourning” for the dead gods, i.e. for the same mythological gods that had been given a new meaning by the philologists of the 19th century. The thesis behind this description is that the emergence of the nation is not primarily a political phenomenon. What is called here “aesthetic nationalism” has not been sufficiently taken into consideration by recent theories of nationalism. Mourning Philology is also part of a general reflection on the nature of the Catastrophe and the way it destroys the possibility of mourning. From the German philosopher Schelling to the Armenian poet Varuzhan, art was understood as a power of mourning for the death of mythological religion. Is this “art as mourning” capable of measuring up to the catastrophic event? This is the guiding question of the book. An appendix offers an English translation of all the Armenian texts mentioned or analyzed in the main text.

This study examines the war novel in Africa as a case study of the genre, delineating the genre’s features across literary traditions. By examining the war novel in depth, it also complicates our understanding of the novel in African literature more specifically, especially since the war novel remains understudied when compared to the more widely read genre of the African Bildungsroman. Looking beyond the cliché depiction of child soldiers, the book argues that war fiction provides an opportunity to address collective rights and tell the history of the dispossessed. The narration of war reveals the convergence of naturalism and humanitarianism, an ethos which takes up the responsibility for the suffering of others. Both these sensibilities are present in culturally hybrid forms in the African war novel, reflecting its syncretism as a narrative practice engaged with the colonial and postcolonial history of the continent. The book argues that the war novel is a form of people’s history that participates in a political struggle for the human rights of the dispossessed and subverts the politics of pity set in motion by the humanitarian discourse of war. Analyses of works by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Nuruddin Farah, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o among others figure prominently as do extended discussions of key conflicts such as the Mau Mau war, the Nigerian Civil War, and Zimbabwe’s wars of liberation. Issues of gender are also foregrounded through the close attention paid to women and war.

Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam redefines global modernism in terms of realism. The monograph challenges some of the central assumptions about the literary aesthetics of colonial modernity. The book has two interlocking arguments. First, it underscores the radical transformation of Vietnam’s literary field from a 1000-year-old Chinese-influenced mandarin system to the supply-and-demand market of 20th-century print culture—linguistically, from Examination Chinese to the Vietnamese romanized alphabet of quốc ngữ. Second, it shows that as much as this transformation was an intellectual disruption, it was equally a gendered historical upheaval. The book demonstrates how the dissolution of the all-male mandarinate and the simultaneous emergence of a female reading public underwrote the significant realist aesthetics of Vietnamese modernity. The project employs the term “post-mandarin” to describe how native intellectuals educated in the French baccalaureate system adopted European fields of knowledge, a new romanized writing script, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. Post-mandarin intellectuals mediated their critique of colonial modernity through the various subjectivities of modern women, portraying these women as transgressive romantics, sex workers catering to European men, patients in colonial dispensaries, and readers of novels. The book’s focus on sexuality reveals how masculine anxiety undercut the purportedly objective genre of journalistic reportage, how Vietnam’s modernist turn was a turn toward literary realism, and how Vietnamese socialist realism derived from a queer internationalism.

Can the subaltern joke? The author answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden — whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. She uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be carried across. She refigures translation as a performative telling in turn, from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between original and derivative, fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings. The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this Ocean of the Stream of Stories since before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages.

This book argues for the significance of the person as a legal fiction to contemporary literature of the United States and Caribbean. It shows how apparently defunct categories of exceptional legal personhood, such as the legal slave, move across and beyond their sites of origin to generate the meanings of exceptional legal personhood in the present. Contemporary literature responds to the slave personality as legal debris in the twenty-first century, haunting the archive of Atlantic slavery and contemporary black life as well as the legal identities of the refugee, the disappeared, the sex worker, the corporation, the sailor, the fugitive, the pregnant woman, and the fetus, among others. The book examines aesthetic and ideological engagements with legal personhood in work by Francisco Goldman, Edwidge Danticat, Rosario Ferré, Gayl Jones, John Edgar Wideman, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Kara Walker. Tracking hemispheric histories of the juridical person, it re-frames current debates in American, African American, Caribbean, and postcolonial studies. It questions liberal frameworks for civil and human rights as well as what the book identifies as death-bound theories of personhood, in which forms of human life within current political and economic structures are figured primarily as dead in law or as wasted, disposable, or bare life. Rather than subscribe to liberal or death-bound paradigms, an aesthetics of salvage enables contemporary literature to respond in provocative ways to the law’s defining powers over the person and to call for thinking anew the limits and potential of the legal person.

This book reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of “illiteracy” as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. “Illiteracy,” it claims, can offer us a way of talking about what cannot be subsumed within prevailing modes of reading, such as the opposition between writing and orality, that have frequently been deployed to distinguish between modern and archaic peoples and societies. The book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally recognized postcolonial narratives. It tackles a series of the most important political/aesthetic issues in Latin America that have arisen over the past thirty years or so, including indigenism, testimonio, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and migration to the United States via the U.S.-Mexican border.Through a critical examination of the “illiterate” effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, the book goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable forms of antagonism that advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.

Should a writer work in former colonial language, or in a vernacular? The language question was once one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation for being a dead end of narrow nationalism. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this book studies the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the chapters follow the emergence of a politics of language from colonization into the early independence decades and through to the era of neoliberal development. Chapters explore the works of well-known francophone authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked vernacular artists with whom they are in dialogue. Pushing back against a prevailing view of postcolonial language debates as a terrain of nativism, this book argues for the language question as a struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they produce literary commensurability by suturing vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, this book models both a new understanding of translation and a different approach to literary comparison.