Anglo-Arab Literatures Enmeshing Form, Subverting Assignation, Minorizing Language

[...]reading Anglo-Arab literatures ethnographically tends to deprive authors of the possibility of aesthetic interventions and by separating the aesthetical from the political, declares as nugatory any belief in the politics of form or fiction. [...]this type of ethnographic reading of Arabic literatures dates back to the early days of orientalism when the study of Eastern cultural productions was justified because it contained what was then regarded as useful information to understand the social and individual psyche of the Arabs. [...]the literary production of Arab writers, addressing a global audience in English, has largely been interpreted as a form of response or "writing back" (Ashcroft et al..) to the legacies of colonialism in the not-yet-postcolonial present (see for instance Ahdaf Soueif's second novel In the Eye of the Sun and Leila Aboulela's Lyrics Alley but also Suheir Hammad, Susan Abulhawa, and Selma Dabbagh on Palestine), to the politics of war (Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance), and to mounting racism and Islamophobia in the West (Leila Aboulela's The Translator). [...]Anglo-Arab literatures have made a long overdue entry (Loomba; Bernard et all) into the postcolonial literary canon. [...]Abdel Nasser's comparison of diasporic memoirs of return to Palestine in Arabic (Mourid Barghouti's Ra'aytu Ramallah), English (Najla Said's Looking for Palestine), and Spanish (Lina Meruane's Volverse Palestina) illuminates how Arab, Arab-American, and Latin American writers of Arab ancestry contribute to the redefinition of the genre and its particular role in the global cultural production on Palestine.