Chapter 19 - Arabic Diasporic Literary Trajectories

Summary

This chapter explores a range of narrative fiction in Arabic in addition to two novels that hybridize Anglophone Arab literature with Arabic poetic influences. Theoretically anchored in critiques of bio/necropolitics, forced displacement, magical realist environmentalisms, and planetarity, the chapter examines eco-ambiguous visions of desertness in Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust, forest/border thresholds in Hassan Blasim’s “Ali’s Bag,” bio-connective ambivalence in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and Beirut Hellfire Society, and (eco)lienation in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. Stretching from the North African desert to the European forest, from the North American city to contested spaces in the Middle East, the (dis)located works by the diasporic writers addressed here trace the contours of a planetary geoaesthetics that is concerned with borders and their transgression, resistance to immunitary bio/necropower, and reconstructions of comemorative geographies. An Arabic diasporic literary geography hence emerges as an ever-expanding space of encounter for unbounded modes of being, witnessing, telling, and resisting.