Abstract
I have thus far highlighted sociological and theoretical issues to generate topics of discussion. I raised these issues in the service of exploring a conceptual Arab American Studies, an undertaking that likely would be developed with some, perhaps considerable, emphasis on literature and literary study. It might be useful, then, to bridge the gap between area study and literary criticism before producing specific fictive analysis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1.
Other theorists have expounded on this sort of formulation in sophisticated ways. See further, for instance, Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Lisa Suhair Majaj, “New Directions: Arab-American Writing at Century’s End,” in Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing, ed. Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash (Bethesda, MD: JUSOOR, 1999), 76.
See further Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2003).
See further Shaw J. Dallal, Scattered Like Seeds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
See further Ibrahim Fawal, On the Hills of God (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1998).
For a few examples of analyses of American literature beyond geopolitical boundaries, see further Elliott and Stokes, American Literary Studies; E. Dean Kolbas, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Alison Russell, Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 12.
See further Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
It is ironic that among the critics today who produce politicized work is the venerable literary scholar Harold Bloom, known inside and outside of academe as a fierce defender of the purity of (almost exclusively Western) literature in the face of what he considers unacceptably proactive reading practices. Although Bloom remains one of the most insightful and sophisticated connoisseurs of the Western canon, he often reactively invokes the beauty of certain literary texts to rail against theoretical schools and political positions he finds unsavory. In How to Read and Why, for instance, he notes, “I intend no polemics here,” and then goes on to proclaim that “[h]istoricizing, whether of past or present, is a kind of idolatry, an obsessive worship of things in time,” supports “a yearning for canonical literary study that universities disdain to fulfill,” and condemns “the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism,” which “seem limitless.” See further Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), 24, 27.
John Whalen-Bridge, Political Fiction and the American Self (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 4.
See further Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
See further Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 518–36.
About this phenomenon, Mohomodou Houssouba notes that in the novel an “unsettling psycho social picture confronts the reader with the problem of Arab unity, which the prevailing order of things negates. There is neither solidarity nor unity among Arabs.” See further Mohomodou Houssouba, “Ever Since Gilgamesh: Etel Adnan’s Discourse of National Unity in Sitt Marie Rose,” in Majaj and Amireh, Etel Adnan, 138.
In my mind, this text remains the definitive account and analysis of the Lebanese Civil War. See further Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Although it is a bit dated, this text provides an excellent account of the factors that allowed Lebanon to descend into confessional struggle, and it is much more astute than the more popular From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman. See further David Gilmour, Lebanon: The Fractured Country (London: MacDonald and Company, 1987).
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, trans. Georgina Kleege (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1982), 60.
See further Ofeish and Ghandour, “Transgressive Subjects,” 123; see also Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
For instance, see further her poetry collection The Indian Never Had a Horse and Other Poems (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1985). A paragraph later, as if to legitimize Adnan’s tacit referencing of New World colonization, the unnamed narrator remembers “a feeling I had one dawn in the indian pueblo at Taos.” For more information about the appropriation of Indian stereotypes in the American subconscious, see Deloria, Playing Indian, and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian (New York: Vintage, 1978).
David Stannard’s controversial and polemical synthesis of New World colonization, which has now become a classic, bears out the veracity of my assertion. See further David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
See further Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
Stan Henry, review of KOOLAIDS: The Art of War, by Rabih Alameddine, Lambda Book Report, August 1998, 24.
Rabih Alameddine, KOOLAIDS: The Art of War (New York: Picador, 1998), 188.
Saree Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 277.
What Christianson meant by “extreme literature” is either a reworking or working over of established literary conventions, in turn creating a distinct type of work that defies comfortable generic classification. Some examples include Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1996) and Automated Alice (2000), Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House (1994), Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969), and Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).
As Roger W. Durbin suggests, “War, death, sex in a morally empty and meaningless world—when mixed on Alameddine’s palette, they make for fascinating reading. To make his point, Alameddine freely cites thinkers whose takes on life and death he finds laughably wanting.” See further Roger W. Durbin, review of KOOLAIDS: The Art of War, by Rabih Alameddine, Library Journal, 1 May 1998, 135.
Edward Said discusses this phenomenon at length in Orientalism. See further Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). Mohja Kahf also has analyzed sexuality and the image of the Orient in the Western imagination. See further Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). At the 2005 Kallimuna Conference, hosted by RAWI, a vibrant discussion about Western misconceptions of sexuality and homosexuality in the Arab World occurred, with many participants arguing that American notions of rabid homophobia in the Arab World are in many cases projections of American intolerance.
Gerry Smyth, “The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing the Border,” in Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, ed. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 43.
Syrine C. Hout, “Of Fathers and Fatherlands in the Post-1945 Lebanese Exilic Novel,” World Literature Today 75, no. 2 (2001): 288.
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformation in the Symbolic Construction of America (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 12.
Copyright information
© 2007 Steven Salaita
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Salaita, S. (2007). The Internationalization of the Nation: The Uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American Fiction. In: Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603370_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603370_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53687-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60337-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)