Arab American Literature

Catalog description

Study of Arab American literary writing. This course surveys the history of Arab American literature, from the tradition's beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century to the present, emphasizing close reading and aesthetic analysis, literary history, and Arab American history and experience. The course will survey Arab American writers and literary genres, including significant figures, themes, and diverse histories, and the course will pay attention to the literature's intersections with migration history, Palestine politics, and US involvement in the Middle East. The course will also emphasize the national and religious diversity of Arab American culture, which intersects migration histories from a wide array of areas, ranging from South Asia through North Africa. We will focus on the Arab American literary canon's relationship to other subfields and literary study more generally, including issues such as ethnicity, culture, diaspora, gender, politics, and identity. A major emphasis of the course will be on analyzing literary texts as lenses to reflect, refract, and focus on Arab American identity. By way of analyzing the interrelationships between literary representation and Arab American experience, the course will attend to a number of key themes in Arab and Arab America cultural history, including Arab life in the late 19th-early 20th century Ottoman Empire; immigrant life in turn of the century America and questions such as assimilation, preservation of tradition, family life, social mobility, and male/female relations; Arab involvement in US social, cultural, and political institutions; Arab Americans and their relationships with the Middle East; generational and denominational differences among Arab Americans; and Arab Americans and anti-Arab and Islamophobic prejudice.