Discuss the specific impact of oppression and conflicts in the Arab world on the migrant’s journey in two selected texts.

Discuss the specific impact of oppression and conflicts in the Arab world on the migrant’s journey in two selected texts.

Description

In the critical essay of 3,000-4,000 words, you are required to engage with two of texts studied on the module, as well as relevant critical and theoretical material. A list of essay topics will be available below later in the term.

The word count includes footnotes but excludes the bibliography. Work exceeding the word limit will be penalised.

This module examines the transcultural and transnational spaces imaginatively created in the works of Arab writers who are originally from North Africa and the Middle East and migrated to European and North American countries. The core module texts are novels, memoirs, and short stories that cross boundaries spatially but also socio-culturally and linguistically.

These works confront the waves of political repression, socio-economic crises, conflicts and geopolitical upheavals in the Arab world, as well as unprecedented rates of illegal migration, especially to Europe.

The module texts are mostly Anglophone Arab literature and translations from Arabic and French. We will approach the texts as both specific to particular political and cultural geographies and also reflective of people’s physical and intellectual itineraries in a world where borders are alternately opened and closed.

We will mainly look at place, memory, identity, home, diaspora, exile, refugee status, clandestine migration, surveillance, human rights, conflict, resistance and revolution, postcolonialism, nationalism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, assimilation dynamics and integration policies, gender, religious diversity and extremism, life-writing, as well as language, translation, and the transcultural imagination.

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