Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies: The Poetics and Ethics of Anglophone Arab Representations

Basic data for this project

Description

The geographic focus of the research project switches continually between what we have become accustomed to call the Arab-Islamic world and the American West. However the specific perspective of the analysis searches beyond these imagined geographies, seeking to track down completely different (interstice) spaces: theoretical spaces of transmigrant criticism, artistic-media spheres of resistive performance, and the literary non-places of narrative identifications. For this purpose I analyze selected cultural productions of Arab- American transmigrants, which are scarcely fixable within the binary Orientalist-Occidentalist matrix of ethnicity and cultural identity. This particular de-centering quality will be elaborated by exploring the critical interventions, literary texts and audio-visual works of intellectuals whose biographies and works are decisively influenced by constant physical and topological-discursive movements between the Middle East and the US.