In the Arab world, the literary canon is classified and studied under such monolithic labels as nation, genre and generation. Thus literary critics speak of the Egyptian Novel, the Syrian Theatre, the 60s generation etc. This categorization is, however, not unique to the region. Latin American literary canons are organized in a similar manner. As a product of the kinds of nationalist and anticolonial projects of the 19th and 20th centuries that characterize the Third World, such classifications helped highlight similarities and continuities within national and regional spheres and in the process aided in the construction of national and regional identities. However, as with much that pertains to the postcolonial project, such methods also continued to uphold and maintain the cultural hegemony of the North by focusing on creating historical master narratives and genealogies that rely on such notions as “influence” and “rupture”. Take for instance the case of the Arabic novel which continues to be understood vis-à-vis the Euro-American model. This paper thinks beyond such canonical categories and genealogical interpretations by offering a different theoretical and methodological reading of the archive. It will do so by analyzing a number of literary and artistic tropes that emerge around the notion of “the people” in the late 50s and early 60s in the Arab World and Latin America. These tropes, which cross genre and regional boundaries, helped mark the cultural production of the early national-socialist period in both parts of the world. In thinking beyond such categories, this comparative approach provides an analysis of the emergence and popularity of certain aesthetic modes at given historical moments as a horizontal and transregional process necessitated by specific socioeconomic and political contexts rather than as a process of imitation or adaptation.

This paper will approach comparative Arab studies from the vantage point of the developing field of Transnational American Studies. Scholars like Donald E. Pease and Shelley Fisher Fishkin have called for increased attention to the different ways that American literature, culture, politics, and history transcend the nation-state, through both the literal and figurative movements of money, people, and ideas across and beyond national boundaries. In addition, John Carlos Rowe has argued that these transnational (or “postnational”) scopes are inherently comparative, turning their attention to different American “border zones” such as the Pacific Rim and the black Atlantic. However, when it comes to the Arab world, Transnational American Studies scholars have offered little by way of either comparative studies or literary and cultural analysis (with the exception of studies in political science and, on occasion, transnational history). In part, this is due to the simple fact that, whereas the field of American Studies has prioritized transnational projects, its scholars are rarely equipped with the linguistic skills required to read Arabic texts in their original languages. In a more abstract sense, however, transnational approaches to the U.S. and the Arab world evoke a host of interesting yet challenging questions, such as: If American studies has concerned itself with “border regions” to address issues of American colonialism, how might we conceptualize an American-Arab imperial “border,” and is such a concept appropriate to a comparative study? What are some models for comparative literary and cultural analysis that can address American imperial culture? And what role would the Palestinian struggle play in such frameworks? This paper will explore the possibility of a comparative American-Arab studies that integrates an analysis of U.S. power in the region and Arab responses to it. To do so, it analyzes representations of the PLO in the U.S. and Arab world in the late 60’s and 70’s, highlighting conflicting perspectives on the PLO’s transnational connections, what Paul Chamberlin calls its “global offensive,” and its role in Third World revolutionary culture. As such, the paper gestures towards an analysis of how Palestinian resistance has shaped American imperial culture and how Palestinian and Arab cultural production have served as a counterpoint to American cultural and political hegemony.

The early twentieth century was a tumultuous time for the Arab world: under disintegrating Ottoman rule and aggressive European colonial occupation, Arab writers found themselves simultaneously torn from and pulled towards an Arabic literary heritage and a foreign European tradition. Through translation and imitation, Arab writers produced works of fiction, poetry and drama that spoke to local concerns in a foreign idiom. These new literary forms called for a new set of rules for aesthetic appreciation and criticism. In the last decades of the 19th century, the famous lectures of Husayn al-Marsafi on literary method coincided with the translation of parts of Henri Boileau’s Art Poétique by Muhammad Uthman Jalal (1876) and occasioned a crisis in literary criticism’s direction from a traditional to a revivalist trend, and a third trend that attempted a reconciliation between the two. In the early decades of the 20th century, Taha Hussein, Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad, and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, among others, took charge of the course of modern Arabic literary criticism. Their critical contributions spoke to the contradictory pull between aesthetics and politics in the reading of Arabic literature that continues well into this century. From structuralist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic to socialist approaches, Arabic literary criticism today remains torn between speaking to a Western tradition and finding a critical vocabulary that is more resonant with its own story and context. This paper places the critical terminology of Husayn al-Marsafi’s lectures on adab (Arabic belles-lettres) in conversation with Taha Husayn’s and Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad’s categories of subjective literary criticism to rethink the genealogy of Arabic literary criticism in the 20th century. It focuses especially on the resonance of these categories in the critical work produced in the context of comparative literature programs and initiatives in the Arab world, asking how a return to this earlier conversation between the two critical giants can point to some lingering orientalist, self-orientalizing and colonialist taxonomies in the reading and appreciation of Arabic literature today. The paper finally uses this conversation to reread critical genealogies of the Arabic novel that use Western criteria to dismiss the novels of the early 20th century as failed imitations and thus not relevant to the study of the modern Arabic novel.

The historiography about the beginnings of modern Arabic literature is usually centered on developments in Lebanon and Egypt from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards that among other things led to the emergence of modern narrative prose (fiction), presumably the first Arabic novel. Although textual production from the pre-print age, notably the early eighteenth century has been more and more included into comprehensive studies (see recently Abdelrazzak Patel, 2013), a remarkable void around the turn to the nineteenth century remains. While I do not deny the significant changes that occurred in the Arab milieus in Ottoman society between the two centuries, I presume, however, that the novel in its formal features did only emerge within some already existing literary context. To put it differently, many of the aesthetic features of the novel were not entirely alien to its readership and can be traced to the production of narratives that were circulating orally and in written form (mostly manuscripts). My paper aims to reconstruct the emergence of modern Arabic prose fiction from within. "From within" designates an approach that focusses on similarities in narrative texts from different periods, examining the narratological and rhetorical constitution rather than socio-historical aspects. After briefly questioning early and recent scholarship on the emergence of Modern Arabic literature, I will take as a point of departure for my intertextual examination Khalil Khuri's Alas, "I'm not a European..." (1859/60) which is often considered the first novel in Arabic language. In my analysis of its features, I suggest to distinguish between the author-narrator's implicit claim for renewal and revival of the classical literary heritage and the narrative's embeddedness into established textual strategies. Finally, I argue that prominent features of Khuri’s novel can be broadly contextualized within three fields of narratives from the early and middle Ottoman period (mainly eighteenth century). These are first of all autobiographical writings (e.g. travelogues), second, shorter biographical entities (e.g. hagiographic anthologies), and third, oral story telling (e.g. popular epic).