Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar
Files
Department
English & Comparative Literature Department
Abstract
A prominent device assumed by the contemporary Anglophone Arab memoir is that of the ‘return narrative’. This chapter focuses on Palestinian-American author Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab American Family and London-based Libyan novelist Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. Looking for Palestine and The Return represent a new form of transnational literature that explicitly seeks to cut across the Orientalised circuits of literary and cultural exchange by which memoirs from the Arab world are typically written, published and read. They trace personal and political trajectories that draw attention to the Middle East of the twenty-first century and that explore the dynamics of return in this rapidly changing context. By closely attending to these memoirs of return, I aim in this chapter to reveal how the genre of Anglophone Arab autobiography engages established networks of literary transmission and reception, and, in so doing, sheds new light on the Middle East.
Publication Date
2018
Document Type
Book Chapter
Book Title
The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East
Editors
Karim Mattar and Anna Ball
ISBN
9781474427685
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
City
Edinburgh
First Page
349
Last Page
361
Keywords
Anglophone Arab autobiography, memoir, postcolonial Middle East, return, transnational literature
Disciplines
Arabic Language and Literature
Recommended Citation
APA Citation
Abdel Nasser, T. K.
(2018).Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar. Edinburgh University Press. , 349-361
https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/785
MLA Citation
Abdel Nasser, Tahia Khaled Gamal
Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.pp. 349-361
https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/785