Pushing back against configurations of Arabic literature that privilege the nation-state and/or national identities as an organizing principle, this paper will turn to the early modern period, immediately before the dissolution of the region’s great empires. Here I will look not toward the Ottoman lands but rather West, to the furthest Maghreb and the territories to its south across the Sahara. Pivoting away from a reading of the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 as the marker of literary modernity, I will consider a different invasion that had equally significant repercussions. Namely, I will interpret the textual tradition that memorializes Morocco’s 1591 invasion of the famous hubs of West African Arabic literary production, Timbuktu and Djenné - an event that remains the greatest pre-colonial fissure between Morocco and its Muslim neighbours in sub-Saharan Africa. This moment of invasion will serve as a way to analyse the consequences of the shifting borders of literary community in the Arabic textual production of this period, a moment when Arabic literature’s diversity – specifically its inclusivity of sub-Saharan Africa – became a point of notable contention. The interpretations I offer will hinge on the imaginative category of ummah - or universal Muslim community - as a condition of narrative possibility, an alternative to the national, but also as something for which textuality draws out its embedded tensions. Through a series of close readings of the Moroccan Abd al-‘Aziz al-Fishtali’s 16th century Manahil al-safa fi ma’ athir mawalina al-shurafa’ and Muhammad al-Saghir b. al-hajj ‘Abd Allah al-Ifrani's 18th century Nuzhat al-hadi bi-akhbar mulk al-qarn al-hadi in conjunction with the West African scholar Abd al-Rahman b. ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Imran al-Sa‘di’s 16th century Ta’rikh al-sudan, we will see that the texts that remember the invasion both from the Moroccan and West African sides implicitly articulate who has the right to Arabic and the tradition to which it is attached. Embedded within their literary tropes and elegiac prose, their assertions of belonging are unmistakably legible in their repeated manipulations of the conventions of classical Arabic literature, marshalled to either exclude West Africa from the Arabic-Islamic heritage or to legitimate its place within it. What emerges is a view of what we stand to gain by expanding our temporal and geographic scope when reading Arabic literature.

In the only language we ever speak, other languages always exist, Derrida tells us. And here, the law itself is translation. Tracing a thread from Mu?ammad al-M?gh?t through Wad?‘ Sa‘ada to the 21st century generation of prose poets reveals an Arabic poem whose investments are becoming exceedingly extra-linguistic. The motivation of this generation’s poetry and its direction are both outside the exercise of language, or rather the exercise of one language. Arabic is one medium for expressing poetic ideas or ideas about the poetic, it is not where the poetic impetus grounds itself. This paper examines the work of a host of contemporary Arab prose poets for whom the launching of the poetic engagement is a point of traffic between languages. Even if some of them only speak and write in Arabic, it remains a language infiltrated by other languages at its most basic levels of acquisition. I describe their stance and posture towards the poetic engagement as exophonic, using the term metaphorically to signal a degree of divestment from Arabic as a singular linguistic stratum. It is the Arabic of the information age, of texting and chatting, of emails, of bilingual and multilingual speakers; the Arabic shaped by the experience of 21st century’s “polyglot tribe.” With poets such as N??im al-Sayyid, (b. 1975, Lebanon), S?mir Ab? Haww?sh (b.1972, Lebanon/Palestine), and J?l?n H?j? (b. 1977, Syrian/Kurdish), the poem written in Arabic becomes a manifestation of multilingualism, translation, and exophony.

In recent decades, focus on transnational and cultural diversity in Arab literary production has expanded the definition and contours of what constitutes ‘Arabic’ literature. Whether through revisiting past stories, appropriating imperial texts or forging larger configurations of national and regional histories, this output constitutes an intervention in the renegotiating of Arab literary history in relation to interconnected global cultures. In Laila Lalami’s The Moors’ Account (2014), the author revisits Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s report on the Narváez’s failed expedition to Florida, the southwest and Gulf coast known as La Relación, and one of the early canonical texts of imperial Spain. By retelling he story from the point of view of Mustapha or Estebanico, one of the four survivors of the shipwrecked party, Lalami not only gives voice to the perspective of the first Arab-African encounter with the New World, but she contributes to the new and emerging modes of Arab cultural production in which diversity of race, ethnicity and religion is crucial to this new configuration. In my paper, I look at how this appropriation of a foundational text of early modern imperial exploration disrupts Eurocentric historical representation of the New World and highlights historical plurality within constructions of Arab literary and cultural history. Unlike the imperial monolithic and nationalistic paradigm of the original report, this narrative privileges a transnational mode of reading Arab cultural history and emphasizes a fluid and evolving concept of the subject positions in contact with indigenous modes of cultural practice. The novel also not only reflects this transformation through the more conciliatory and inclusive vision of the narrator but also performs it structurally through its style and rhetoric. I also engage with how this narrative intermingles elements from multiple Arabic narrative traditions to promote plurality through linguistic and cultural heteroglossia.