Geographies of Escape: Diasporic Difference and Arab Ethnicity Re-Examined.

Abstract

By means of a selective choosing of authors of Arab diaspora, this dissertation seeks to explore what it means to “write against the grain” in the context of differing national and ethnic affiliations. Literary works by migrant communities Christian and Jewish who settled in Brazil and Israel, and trace their origins to Lebanon, Morocco and Iraq, are covered in the chapters: Raduan Nassar’s Portuguese-language novel Lavoura arcaica (1975) published in Brazil; Albert Swissa’s Hebrew novel Bound (1990); and Samir Naqqash’s “Iraqi,” Arabic-language short stories Tantal (1978) and The Day the World Was Conceived and Miscarried (1980). These pieces of literature perform radical disruptions of dominant literary culture in Portuguese, Hebrew and Arabic respectively, opening rich linguistic possibilities in the body of Brazilian, Israeli and broader Arabic-language literatures. Detailed literary analysis of each work reveals the complex intersection of identities –ethnicity, race, religion, class, gender—and the diverse ways in which literature thematizes and aestheticizes those identities through language. Most importantly, through a close reading of the literary language and aesthetics in these works, this research project brings identity politics and aesthetics into a fruitful conversation, considering diasporic ethnicities as identities created anew in each instance of narrative framing. This theoretical gesture proposes a method to read social identities such as ethnicity from a literary text rather than into it, advancing a vision of social identity that is fluid and malleable in the context of literary creation and imagination. In the specific texts under consideration, the authors pose “geographies of escape” that dodge the seeming finality of cultural and geographical displacement by imagining and cultivating taboo attachments to place and memory. These attachments, in turn, descend into an appearance of pathology and madness due to their resistance against the harsh pressures of assimilation or transculturation in the new homeland.