Waïl S. Hassan – författare

Arab-Brazilian relations have been largely invisible to area studies and Comparative Literature scholarship. Arab Brazil is the first book of its kind to highlight the representation of Arab and Muslim immigrants in Brazilian literature and popular culture since the early twentieth century, revealing anxieties and contradictions in the country's ideologies of national identity. Author Waïl S. Hassan analyzes these representations in a century of Brazilian novels, short stories, and telenovelas. He shows how the Arab East works paradoxically as a site of otherness (different language, culture, and religion) and solidarity (cultural, historical, demographic, and geopolitical ties). Hassan explores the differences between colonial Orientalism's binary structure of Self/Other, East/West, and colonizer/colonized, on the one hand; and on the other hand Brazilian Orientalism's ternary structure, which defines the country's identity in relation to both North and East.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world.The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

Since the work of Edward Said first appeared, countless studies have shown the ways in which Western writers--sometimes unwittingly--participate in the oversimplified East/West dichotomy of Orientalism. Yet no study has considered how writers from the so-called Orient approach this idea. A wide-ranging survey of the vast and diverse world of Anglophone Arab literature, Immigrant Narratives examines the complex ways in which Arab émigrés contend with, resist, and participate in the problems of Orientalism. Hassan's account begins in the early twentieth century, as he considers the pioneering Lebanese American writers, Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran. The former's seminal novel, The Book of Khalid sought to fuse Arabic and European literary traditions in search of a civilizational synthesis, whereas the latter found success by mixing Hindu, Christian, mystical, and English Romantic ideas into a popular spiritualism. Hassan then considers Arab immigrant life-writing, ranging from autobiographies by George Haddad and Abraham Rihbany to memoirs of exile by the Egyptian-born Leila Ahmed and Palestinian refugees like Fawaz Turki and Edward Said. Hassan considers issues of representation in looking to how Arab immigrant writers like Ramzi Salti and Rabih Alameddine use homosexuality to reflect on Arab typecasting. Ahdaf Soueif's fiction reflects her growing awareness of the politics of reception of Anglophone Arab women writers while Leila Aboulela's fiction, inspired by an immigrant Islamic perspective, depicts the predicament of the Muslim minority in Britain. Drawing upon postcolonial, translation, and minority discourse theory, Immigrant Narratives investigates how key writers have described their immigrant experiences, acting as mediators and interpreters between cultures, and how they have forged new identities in their adopted countries.

Arab immigrants began to arrive in the United States in the late-nineteenth century and in Britain after World War Two. Those immigrants have produced a vast literature that remains relatively unknown outside of specialist circles. Like other ethnic literatures, Arab-American and Arab-British writing treats a variety of themes such as the immigrant experience, the lives of minorities, cultural misconceptions, and stereotypes. In addition to that, Arab immigrant writing also reveals unique perspectives on complex issues that continue to shape our world today, such as inter-faith relations, the tangled politics of the Middle East, the role played first by the British empire then by the United States in the region, the representations of Arabs and Arab culture in British and American societies, and the status of Muslim minorities there. Although those issues have acquired an unprecedented urgency in the post-9/11 period, they have preoccupied Arab-American and Arab-British writers since the early days of the twentieth century.Immigrant Narratives offers a critical reading of that tradition from its inception to the present. Drawing upon postcolonial, translation, and minority discourse theory, it investigates how key novelists and autobiographers have described their immigrant experiences, and in so doing acted as mediators and interpreters between cultures, and how they have forged new identities in their adopted countries.