Johanna Sellman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University. She has published articles in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including: Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Theatre Research International, Journal of Arabic Literature and Al-Arabiyya: Journal of The American Association of Teachers of Arabic. This will be her first book.

Johanna Sellman draws our attention to a vital new development in contemporary Arabic literature, namely the work of Arab refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants in Europe. Convincingly arguing that twentieth-century paradigms for analyzing Arab-European encounters in Arabic literature are inadequate for understanding the speculative mode of this emergent corpus, Sellman develops a compelling new approach that builds on Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of "defamiliarization". This is a significant contribution to scholarship on modern Arabic literature.

• IntroductionShifting Frameworks for Studying Contemporary Arabic Literature of Migration to Europe: A Case for Border StudiesHarraga: Mediterranean Crossings in Arabic Migration LiteratureThe Subversion of Borders and "Nightmare Realism"Mistranslation and the Subversion of Citizen-Migrant BinaryWriting Against ‘Crisis:’ Defamiliarizing the Refugee Narrative in Arabic Literature and Theatre in BerlinDecentring the Metropole: Forced Migration Literature in London and ParisConclusion