"Nostalgic Longing as Healing" examines nostalgia and the various objects associated with it in Diana Abu-Jaber’s 2003 novel Crescent. The prevalence of nostalgic longing in the novel is directly linked to the ways the Iraqi American protagonists process the pain of exile, the loss of loved ones in violent events, and the lasting effects of the Gulf War. Personal memorabilia—collected by the protagonists with the intention of commemorating and establishing links to home and to the past—ultimately function as tools to cope with grief and trauma while living in the present. This process helps the characters reclaim the sense of agency that was stripped away as a result of America’s late-20th c. military intervention in Iraq. This paper features close readings of the novel in relation to the interplay between nostalgia and memorabilia, and it engages with Svetlana Boym’s ideas about nostalgia, Susan Stewart's work on souvenirs and collections, and Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire.

In her recent publication, More Iranian (2023), Nahal Tajadod presents an autobiographical account that chronicles her life alongside the distinguished French novelist and screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière. More Iranian is divided into two sections: “Iran” and “Anīrân” (signifying “non-Iranian” or “non-Iran”). At first glance, the book’s title and this type of categorization suggest the assumption that the Iranian and French cultures are positioned in a confrontational and polarized relationship. Tajadod’s autobiography seems to be a narrative of being an Iranian, with a strong emphasis on Iranian identity; but, as the book progresses, we understand that this memoir is about cultural interaction and intercultural coexistence rather than constructing a binary opposition between the Self and the Other. The present essay seeks to demonstrate that the phrase “More Iranian” should not be narrowly interpreted in its literal sense; rather, in this context, being more Iranian implies being more transnational, and this cultural interaction constitutes a mutually cross-fertilizing dialogue. In this regard, the essay, also, aims to show how the immigrant writer in diaspora, here, creates a literary space that is hybrid and brings forth the characteristics of Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space. To substantiate the claims made, cultural semiotics with a poststructuralist approach is employed. Subsequently, ideas derived from this semiotics are redefined and elucidated in relation to Bhabha’s views on the Third Space. Accordingly, culture is intercultural. It is in the process of translation that cultures add to each other's richness and redefine themselves while meeting another cultural being. Third Space describes a space in which we can overcome the problematic claims to cultural purity and homogeneity, and embrace the hybridized nature of cultures. It is a space full of mobility, dynamism, constant translation, transition, cross-fertilization, hybridity, transformation & change, pluralism, and creation. In Nahal Tajadod’s autobiography, the semiospheres of the Iranian and French cultures exposes their borders to each other. In this way, they deconstruct oppositional semiotic relations. Therefore, More Iranian creates a literature that through the constant crossing of the mentioned semiospheres contributes to the circulation, mobility, and dynamism of the consciousness of the textualities and intertextualities. The book does not solely belong to one language or a national and geographical domain, nor does it adhere to a singular linguistic tradition. Tajadod’s More Iranian is a transtextual narrative, much like a text awaiting translation, since its truth is constructed through continuous border crossings, dialogue, and translational interactions.

A romantic relationship blossomed at the end of the 19th century between an aristocratic woman from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a Syrian itinerant salesman. The affair resulted in the marriage of the two lovers, but not before legal actions, surveillance, arrests and imprisonment were all visited upon the couple, instigated by the woman’s brothers, who were appalled by the idea of their sister marrying a Syrian immigrant. The story became a cause célèbre, drawing the attention of not only local gossips and major American newspapers, but also that of the Lebanese journalist and writer, Salim Sarkis, who immortalized the fraught love affair in Arabic in a book published in New York City in 1904. The book makes compelling reading and is a rich source for the study of Arab immigrant life in the US. It is also one of the earliest Arabic books published in the US. But what makes Sarkis’s book fascinating as a literary work is that it begins as a nonfiction account of the sort one might expect of a journalist telling a factual story. However, after 35 pages in this genre, Sarkis abruptly shifts his style to something quite akin to a nonfiction novel, presenting the remaining 150 pages of his book in this manner. Sarkis’s decision to tell a factual story in novelistic form at this period is groundbreaking. Indeed, in its US context, Sarkis’s work predates by many decades American “New Journalism” and the appearance of nonfiction novels by the likes of John Hersey, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. This paper first describes the tumultuous story of the protagonists’ affair, placing it in the context of Arab immigrant life of the time; it then offers a brief biography of the author, Salim Sarkis; finally, drawing upon research into the genre of nonfiction narrative, United Hearts in the United States is analyzed as a nonfiction novel. The paper argues that Sarkis’s literary approach was unique for—and well ahead of—its time. Reasons for Sarkis’s choice of this genre are also suggested.

In her 2016 book Look, Solmaz Sharif incorporates language from the United States Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms. This language expresses the third-space and transnational impulse of the poems as the military language defamiliarizes the English it appropriates, while forcing us to attend to the militarism present in our everyday lives. In her stunning poems Sharif deconstructs binaries between the intimate and the militarized, home and abroad, the self and the other, in a way that looks back at power and scrambles references in order to expose the bones of what Lisa Parks calls “vertical hegemony.” In her title poem, “Look,” Sharif shows how technologies of surveillance, technologies of communication, the body, and the weapon, exist in an assemblage. Sharif’s poems, in their tracking of the materiality of violence, freely cross borders, holding space for ghosts in a radical poetic of transnational feminist theory. Sharif ultimately mobilizes a transnational consciousness as she demonstrates how America as a nation state calls itself into being through the violence it perpetuates outside its borders. She also proposes an alternative in a material disruption or re-routing which resonates with contemporary grassroots refusal to let the destructive machines of capitalism take the quickest route.