Arabic Exile Literature in Europe
Defamiliarising Forced Migration
- Provides a comparative and sustained analysis of how literary, political and aesthetic categories in Arabic literature are being rethought in response to contemporary contexts of forced migration
- Reads contemporary Arabic migration literature in dialogue with migration and borderland studies
- Analyses literary narratives set in less-studied Arab diasporic spaces such as Finland, Denmark and Germany, as well as on contemporary migratory routes such as the Mediterranean, Turkey and Eastern Europe
- Focuses on literature in the Arabic language while also including the work of francophone North African writers and writers publishing in both Arabic and European languages
Since the 1990s, Arabic exile literature in Europe has increasingly become a literature written from the perspective of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and others who are situated outside normatively defined citizenship. In this book, Johanna Sellman analyses the changing aesthetic and political dimensions of Arabic exile literature and demonstrates how frameworks such as east–west cultural encounters, political commitment and modernist understandings of exile – which were dominant in 20th-century Arabic exile literature – have been giving way to writing that explores the dynamics of forced migration and the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands.
Introduction
- Shifting Frameworks for Studying Contemporary Arabic Literature of Migration to Europe: A Case for Border Studies
- Harraga: Mediterranean Crossings in Arabic Migration Literature
- The Subversion of Borders and "Nightmare Realism"
- Mistranslation and the Subversion of Citizen-Migrant Binary
- Writing Against ‘Crisis:’ Defamiliarizing the Refugee Narrative in Arabic Literature and Theatre in Berlin
- Decentring the Metropole: Forced Migration Literature in London and Paris
Conclusion
Johanna Sellman draws our attention to a vital new development in contemporary Arabic literature, namely the work of Arab refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants in Europe. Convincingly arguing that twentieth-century paradigms for analyzing Arab-European encounters in Arabic literature are inadequate for understanding the speculative mode of this emergent corpus, Sellman develops a compelling new approach that builds on Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of "defamiliarization". This is a significant contribution to scholarship on modern Arabic literature.
[A] rich and valuable academic contribution to the study of literature of migration with its focus on the most recent trends and literary works as well as new Arabic diasporas like Berlin, Stockholm, and Copenhagen
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