Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity. Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others. Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Eurocentric frameworks, the book demonstrates how Arab novelists writing in English draw on nostalgia as a touchstone of Arabic literary tradition from pre-Islamic poetry to the present. Qutait situates Anglophone Arab fiction within contentious debates about the place of the past in the Arab world, tracing how writers have deployed nostalgia as an aesthetic strategy to deal with subject matter ranging from the Islamic golden age, the era of anti-colonial struggle, the failures of the postcolonial st
Table of Contents1. Introduction Defining Nostalgia The Uses of Nostalgia Language and Identity Reading Anglophone Arab Writing Memory as A Strategic Aesthetic 2. Chapter One: “The Chaos of Lost Empires” Standing By the Ruins The Imagined Present of the Past Traces and Translations 3. Chapter Two: “A War Between Yesterday and Tomorrow” Rewriting Colonial Histories Postcolonial Parallels Weaving Connections 4. Chapter Three: “Fractured Country, Broken Home” Leaders, Fathers and The Un-Homely Home Nostalgia for Mother/Lands Cacophonous Countries 5. Chapter Four: “Europe is My Dark Continent” Transplanted Nationalism Diaspora Community and Instability “Back Home” Transnational Islam in the Diaspora Mongrel Humanity and Undetermined History 6. Conclusion
