Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The definition of “Arabic literature” has historically been restricted to works written in the Arabic language. Arabic literature is a supra-national tradition corresponding not to one but to twenty-two nation states. Instead of multiple nations with multiple languages, as in Africa, South Asia, or Europe, here are multiple nations with one language. It is true that in the shadow of Arabic there exist regional and minority languages, such as Kurdish, Somali, and Amazigh, but in terms of literature and especially the novel, these have been far less influential than Arabic and colonial languages—English and French—in which a significant number of Arab writers have produced a body of work that has been difficult to categorize. Arab migration and Diaspora since the late nineteenth century have further compounded the problem of literary categories. The Arabic novel today is written around the world, in at least eleven languages: Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. The linguistic plurality of Arab novelistic production invites comparative study of Arab writers who work in different languages, on all six continents. This paper draws out the implications of this redefinition of the category of “Arabic literature” for the organization of the field of study.