Overview

This book explores the formative correlations and inventive transmissions of Anglophone Arab representations ranging from early 20th century Mahjar writings to contemporary transnational Palestinian resistance art. Tracing multiple beginnings and seminal intertexts, the comparative study of dissonant truth-making presents critical readings in which the notion of cross-cultural translation gets displaced and strategic unreliability, representational opacity, or matters of act advance to essential qualities of the discussed works' aesthetic devices and ethical concerns. Questioning conventional interpretive approaches, Markus Schmitz shows what Anglophone Arab studies are and what they can become from a radically decentered relational point of view. Among the writers and artists discussed are such diverse figures as Rabih Alameddine, William Blatty, Kahlil Gibran, Ihab Hassan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Ameen Rihani, Edward Said, Larissa Sansour, and Raja Shehadeh.

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9783837650488

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A constant theme in Markus Schmitz's excellent book, Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies: The Poetics and Ethics of Anglophone Arab Representations, is the idea of movement: setting in motion, transmigrations, flights, and turnovers. And indeed, the book itself sets in motion a mobile transnational conversation that shuttles between time-periods, between regions, between texts, and between maitre a penser. Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies masterfully combines fine-grained textual analysis with meta-theoretical concerns to better anatomize the paradoxical representation of Arab bodies and voices, at once hypervisible and silenced. The book's diasporic and interdisciplinary framework and impressive spatio-temporal scope goes hand in hand with a lively, insightful, and compelling examination of the cross-border interconnectedness of texts and cultural practices.--Ella Shohat, author of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, New York University

"""Markus Schmitz offers a brilliant retheorization of both the poetic practices of Anglophone Arab cultural production and the potential future directions of critical practices of Anglophone Arab (literary and cultural) studies."" Christian David Zeitz, Anglistik, 32 (2021)"

Author Information

Markus Schmitz teaches Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Münster University, Germany. His research revolves around (Anglophone) Arab Representations, Relational Diasporic Studies, Theories and Methods of Cross-Cultural Comparison, Forced Migration and Border Regimes, (Post-)Orientalism and (Post-)Occidentalism, Spatial Theory, and (Counter-)Archival Arts. Current projects include a comparative study on Middle Eastern and African Refugee Imaginaries.

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