Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-30T01:11:43.694Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2018

Abstract

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography, Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel, Siraaj: An Arab Tale, which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Ebony Coletu, Perin Gurel, and Michelle Hartman for their brilliant comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

1 Amiri Baraka [as Ameer Baraka], “ ‘We Are Our Feeling’: The Black Aesthetic,” Negro Digest 18.11 (September 1969): 5, quoted in Radwa Ashour, “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975), 154.

2 Radwa Ashour, chapter 1 of The Journey, 1983, trans. Michelle Hartman, Comparative American Studies 13.4 (December 2015): 215.

3 Ashour, “The Search for a Black Poetics,” v.

4 Ibid.

5 For a short excerpt previously translated by Ghada Sobaie, see Abdel-Malek, Kamal, ed., America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature. An Anthology, 1895–1995 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 117119 Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Aidi, Hisham and Marable, Manning, eds., Black Routes to Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar; Daulatzai, Sohail, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Feldman, Keith P., A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Lubin, Alex, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Thomas, Greg, “Blame It on the Sun: George Jackson and the Poetry of Palestinian Resistance,” Comparative American Studies 13.4 (December 2015): 236253 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ashour, , “The Search for a Black Poetics,” 23 Google Scholar.

8 “First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” September 19–22, 1956, Présence Africaine 8–10 (June–November 1956): 225.

9 Ashour, , “The Search for a Black Poetics,” vii Google Scholar.

10 Radwa Ashour, chapter 8 of The Journey, 1983, trans. Michelle Hartman (Northampton, MA: Interlink, forthcoming 2018).

11 Fahim, Hussein M., Egyptian Nubians: Resettlement and Years of Coping (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1983), 45 Google Scholar. Although Nubian leaders were consulted, Hussein M. Fahim acknowledges, “There was no direct Nubian participation in the government’s formulation of plans.” Fahim, , Egyptian Nubians, 45 Google Scholar. For her part, Graham Du Bois celebrated the Soviet cooperation that resulted in the construction of the dam without acknowledging its negative impact on many Nubians. Rasberry, Vaughn, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 278 Google Scholar.

12 Janmyr, Maja, “Human Rights and Nubian Mobilisation in Egypt: Towards Recognition of Indigeneity,” Third World Quarterly 38.3 (2017): 722 Google Scholar.

13 “First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” 390. See also Ashour, chapter 8 of The Journey, trans. Michelle Hartman.

14 Ashour, chapter 8 of The Journey, trans. Michelle Hartman.

15 “First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” 390.

16 Wilford, Hugh, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 201202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 “First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” 217.

18 Horne, Gerald, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 6870 Google Scholar.

19 Baldwin, James, “Letter from Paris: Princes and Powers,” Encounter, January 1957, 53 Google Scholar. See also Jackson, Lawrence P., The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 447 Google Scholar.

20 Baldwin, James, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dell, 1961), 2728 Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 28.

22 Baldwin, James and Stein, Sol, Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century: Notes of a Native Son (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 82 Google Scholar.

23 Jackson, , The Indignant Generation, 452453 Google Scholar.

24 Baldwin and Stein, Native Sons, 94. In his later years, it seems like Stein did turn to racial analysis, if only to ridiculously bemoan the lack of White people at Baldwin’s sixtieth birthday party. Ibid., 24.

25 Ibid., 99. Stein described Du Bois “as an advocate of and apologist for slavery.” Ibid., 105.

26 Coletu, Ebony E. A., “A Complicated Embrace: Alex Haley’s Roots in Egypt,” Transition 122 (2017): 142 Google Scholar.

27 Pierre, Jemima, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 43 Google Scholar.

28 Ashour, , chapter 1 of The Journey (Comparative American Studies), 214 Google Scholar.

29 Horne, Gerald, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 258 Google Scholar.

30 Ibid., 210--11.

31 Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Egypt Is Africa (1 of 2 parts),” The Black Scholar 1.7 (May 1970): 20–27; Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Egypt Is Africa (Conclusion),” The Black Scholar 2.1 (September 1970): 28–34.

32 Ibid., 33.

33 Feldman, , Shadow over Palestine, 171, 165 Google Scholar.

34 Bois, Shirley Graham Du, “The Liberation of Africa: Power, Peace and Justice,” The Black Scholar 2.6 (February 1971): 33, 3536 Google Scholar; Bois, Shirley Graham Du, “Confrontation in the Middle East,” The Black Scholar 5.3 (November 1973): 34 Google Scholar.

35 Ali Crolius, “Profile: An Egyptian in Amherst,” UMASS: The Magazine of the University of Massachusetts, fall 1999, http://www.umass.edu/umassmag/archives/1999/fall_99/fall99_ugath.html; “Alumni,” W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, http://www.umass.edu/afroam/alumni-afroam, accessed November 3, 2016.

36 Thelwell, Michael, “Black Studies: A Political Perspective,” 1969, Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays in Struggle (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 138139 Google Scholar.

37 Ashour herself published a scholarly study of Conrad in 1983. See Ashour, Radwa, “Significant Incongruities in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ,” Neohelicon 10.2 (September 1983): 183201 Google Scholar.

38 Ghazoul, Ferial, “Folktales in(to) Postcolonial Narratives and Aesthetics,” in Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, eds. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (New York: Routledge, 2013), 136 Google Scholar.

39 Radwa Ashour, trans. and quoted in Sharawi, Helmi, “The African in Arab Culture,” Imagining the Arab Other: How Arabs and Non-Arabs View Each Other, ed. Tahar Labib (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 149 Google Scholar.

40 Nkrumah, Gamal, “Rendezvous with History,” Al-Ahram Weekly 437 Google Scholar, July 8–14, 1999, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/1999/437/bk9_437.htm. At one point, Mouird Barghouti had hoped to translate Turé’s writings. Ashour also approached Shaaban Mekkawi, who translated Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, to translate Turé. Mekkawi, who passed away before he was able to undertake the project, was Ashour’s graduate student; Thelwell served on his dissertation committee. Special thanks to Tahia Abdel Nasser for helping me to reconstruct this history.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Young, Lewis, “American Blacks and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies 2.1 (Autumn 1972): 7879 Google Scholar; Feldman, , Shadow over Palestine, 7475 Google Scholar.

44 Carmichael, Stokely, “We Are All Africans,” The Black Scholar 1.7 (May 1970): 1519 Google Scholar.

45 Bois, Graham Du, “Liberation of Africa,” 32 Google Scholar.

46 “First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” 226.

47 Radwa Ashour, Siraaj: An Arab Tale, 1991, trans. Barbara Romaine (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007), 10. “Jewel of the Arabian Sea” is Romaine’s admittedly “loose translation.” See Ashour, Siraaj, 11, 85n3 (chapter 2).

48 Though it is often transcribed in English as ‘Urabi or Urabi, for the purposes of this essay, I have followed Romaine’s spelling of Orabi in her translation of Siraaj and in Ashour, Radwa, “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller: My Experience as a Novelist,” The Massachusetts Review 41.1 (Spring 2000): 90 Google Scholar. For additional historical context on the rebellion, see Cole, Juan R. I., Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Culture Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

49 Powell, Eve Troutt, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 1 Google Scholar.

50 Newsinger, John, “Liberal Imperialism and the Occupation of Egypt in 1882,” Race and Class 49.3 (2007): 57 Google Scholar.

51 Jacobs, Sylvia M., The African Nexus: Black American Perspectives on the European Partitioning of Africa, 1880–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 180 Google Scholar.

52 Powell, , A Different Shade of Colonialism, 5 Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., 17.

54 See, for example, Jacobs, , The African Nexus, 180181 Google Scholar.

55 Lubin, , Geographies of Liberation, 51, 61 Google Scholar.

56 Ashour, , Siraaj, 2122 Google Scholar.

57 Newsinger, , “Liberal Imperialism,” 64 Google Scholar.

58 Ashour, , Siraaj, 67 Google Scholar.

59 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions [Autonomedia], 2013), 98.

60 “First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” 226.

61 Harney, and Moten, , The Undercommons, 76 Google Scholar.

62 Ashour, , “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller,” 90 Google Scholar.

63 Ashour, , Siraaj, 82 Google Scholar.

64 Kaplan, Sidney, “Herman Melville and the American National Sin: The Meaning of Benito Cereno ,” American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949–1989, ed. Allan D. Austin (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 174 Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., 173.

66 Pinfari, Marco, “The Unmaking of a Patriot: Anti-Arab Prejudice in the British Attitude towards the Urabi Revolt (1882),” Arab Studies Quarterly 34.2 (Spring 2012): 94 Google Scholar.

67 Ibid.

68 Ashour, , Siraaj, 6061 Google Scholar.

69 Ashour’s fellow University of Massachusetts student Allan D. Austin completed a dissertation on Blake in 1975 under the direction of Kaplan. See Allan D. Austin, “The Significance of Martin Robison Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975). Austin later published an anthology and a monograph on African Muslims in Antebellum America.

70 Lubin, , Geographies of Liberation, 65 Google Scholar.

71 Baldwin, , “Letter from Paris,” 53 Google Scholar; Baldwin, , Nobody Knows My Name, 2930 Google Scholar.

72 Ashour, , “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller,” 90 Google Scholar.

73 Ibid., 91.

74 Wenzel, Jennifer, “Remembering the Past’s Future: Anti-Imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World,” Cultural Critique 62.1 (Winter 2006): 7, 15 Google Scholar.

75 Ashour, , “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller,” 90 Google Scholar.

76 Ashour, , “The Search for a Black Poetics,” 32 Google Scholar.

77 Ibid., 148.

78 Abu-Haidar, J. A., Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provencal Lyrics (London: Curzon, 2001), 6 Google Scholar.

79 Ashour, , “The Search for a Black Poetics,” 175 Google Scholar.

80 Ibid., 173.

81 Ibid., 174, 157.

82 Henderson, Stephen E., “Introduction: The Form of Things Unknown,” Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 25 Google Scholar.

83 Ashour, chapter 2 of The Journey, trans. Michelle Hartman.

84 Middleton A. Harris, with Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith, The Black Book, 1974 (New York: Random House, 2009), 10. For more on The Black Book, see Howard Rambsy II, “Middleton A. Harris, Toni Morrison, and The Black Book,Cultural Front (blog), February 21, 2015, http://www.culturalfront.org/2015/02/middleton-harris-toni-morrison-and.html.

85 Hartman, Michelle, “ ‘Besotted with the Bright Lights of Imperialism’: Arab Subjectivity Constructed against New York’s Many Faces,” Journal of Arabic Literature 35.3 (2004): 294295 Google Scholar.

86 Ashour, chapter 13 of The Journey, trans. Michelle Hartman; Douglass, Frederick, “1852: What, to the American Slave, Is Your 4th of July?,” New York Times, July 4, 1975, 23 Google Scholar. For the full speech, see Douglass, Frederick, “What to the American Slave Is the Fourth of July?Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. Ira Dworkin (New York: Penguin, 2014), 119147 Google Scholar.

87 Hartman, Michelle, “Dreams Deferred, Translated: Radwa Ashour and Langston Hughes,” CLINA 2.1 (June 2016): 68 Google Scholar.

88 Ibid., 69.

89 Ibid., 70.

90 Ashour, , “The Search for a Black Poetics,” 176 Google Scholar.

91 Radwa Ashour, Specters, trans. Barbara Romaine (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2011), 134–35.

92 Ashour, , “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller,” 89 Google Scholar. See Harlow, Barbara, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar.