What makes Arabic literature Arabic? Although possible answers are as diverse as the authors and works placed under this category, contemporary practices in world literature usually begin with Arabic as a language of expression. However, texts in English, German, and Italian, among others, can be categorized as Arabic literature, often amended as diasporic or exilic. Moreover, due to colonial language policies in the region, literature in French appears in surveys of postcolonial Arabic literature, such as works by the leading Algerian writer Assia Djebar.¹ Less prominent in world literary studies are authors who write in Arabic but identify with other languages, such as Kurdish, Assyrian, or Hebrew. Although textually absent, these and other languages can infuse, haunt, and enliven texts in Arabic. Such is the case for the prominent Syrian-Kurdish writer Salim Barakat, resident in northern Europe, whose experimental Arabic foreignizes the language from within, echoing the Iraqi modernist poet Sargon Boulos’ observation that Arabic is home to many languages.² In these and other literary experiments in and with Arabic, the absent presence of other languages renders both categorization and translation challenging, which may help to explain their relative marginality in comparative studies of Arabic literature.

When it comes to defining Arabic literature, language, countries of birth, countries of residence, nationality, and cultural and/or diasporic identity can all play a role depending on the case, whether it is an individual text or a national or transnational tradition. This capaciousness can pose a problem for scholars. Those who follow sociological and institutional approaches might respond by showing how publishers, prizes, universities, and other actors consecrate Arabic literature within national, exilic, and world literary circuits.³ Another path, often used in debates over language choice, is to read what writers say about their own works and use these extra-textual comments to determine what authors believe they are doing. In both cases, the question of what makes Arabic literature Arabic circles back on itself (a key movement in this study) to take the following form: When do literature, its producers, and/or readers think they are making (or doing) something called Arabic literature?

The present study adopts this question to track a major expression of Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. At the height of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, progressive writers and translators between Morocco and Iraq launched a self-conscious effort to produce a transregional literary system, with attendant new norms of language, style, interpretation, and circulation.⁴ For these anti-colonial actors, Arabic literature was Arabic to the extent that it expressed and amplified what they perceived as a unified experience of politics and emancipation that extended primarily between Morocco and Iraq, but could also be found farther afield, such as in Sudan and the Gulf. Writers called their (and their imagined readers’) experience, which shifted from revolutionary hope to profound despair, Arab. Literature’s task was to give voice to their feeling of participating in this political-historical experience – variously named revolution, totality, defeat, and more – that unified myriad local and national events, and myriad individual emotions. To that end, anti-colonial Arabic literature (and its makers) would travel back and forth, experiment with new genres, work between languages, and generate an enduring understanding of literature as a transregional reflection of Arab experience.

From the outset, a certain circularity is apparent: Transregional literature is Arabic because it expresses an experience that is Arab because the makers of a new, anti-colonial literature felt and said it was so. They did not use the adjectives Arab/Arabic to delineate ethnic, racial, or religious forms of identity, but this did not always prevent their words from enacting exclusionary, even chauvinist violence. They saw the Arabic language as their critical medium, ambition, and at times the ground to theorize collective experience and history. Yet Arabic transregional literature, I show, exists in other languages.

Thus, while language and identity claims matter deeply for this transregional corpus, it is united by writers’ claims about the scale of the world they perceived themselves acting within, and the ideas and practices of literature they produced in relation to it. They called that scale Arab. The makers of transregional literature circulated distinctive ways of knowing and perceiving that they treated as common sense, or “what we all know” in the words of ʿAbdellatif Laâbi, a leading theorist in this study: that they shared political and emotional horizons with distant places and people who, like them, were enacting, awaiting, or gazing back on hopes of Arab emancipation. The literature they produced, in turn, indexes language and event across vast geographic spaces and spans mass uprisings and romantic betrayals – all under an evolving category of Arab experience.⁵

Arab Nationalism

The pathways and bounds of Arabic transregionalism reflect writers’ political and emotional commitments to Arab nationalism (العروبة and القوميّة العربيّة, also translated as pan-Arabism and Arabism). Arab nationalism holds that the peoples “from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the [Persian] Gulf” share a privileged connection rooted in language, history, emotion, and memory.⁶ With origins in the late nineteenth century, Arab nationalism was a popular anti-colonial ideology, “the generational choice of millions” in the mid-twentieth century (Di-Capua Reference Di-Capua2018: 109). The “liberation generation’s” struggle for justice and self-determination forged “Arab national identity,” explains Marwan Bishara, and established a transregional culture of resistance to oppression that continues into the present century (Bishara Reference Bishara2012).

For politically committed, progressive intellectuals of that generation, decolonization was “a transregional Arab affair” (Di-Capua Reference Di-Capua, Pannewick, Khalil and Albers2015: 89; Bishara Reference Bishara2012). They turned away from Europe and looked east and west for concepts, practices, and solidarities to work through the meaning of emancipation.⁷ The transregional in this study mirrors the geography writers on both sides of the region adopted as the scale of their political experience and, in turn, their literary system. To designate the subregions they saw themselves working across, I adopt the term “Maghreb” for Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.⁸ The Mashreq names their “eastern” territories – beyond Egypt, capital of Arab nationalist politics – comprising Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan.⁹ The Mashreq’s literary center was Beirut, whose star rose in the 1950s as the new hub of progressive print culture.

For transregionalists, it was vital to construct circulation networks and print culture practices connecting Maghreb and Mashreq. To that end, they met, founded journals, gave speeches to one another, (co-)translated each other, compared each other’s works, cited each other, contributed to each other’s publications, and became friends. Others traveled, relocating to teach and learn Arabic and to write memoirs, novels, and stories reflecting on their encounters.

Their making of a transregional literature took place amid political foment. In the 1950s and 1960s, real projects for Arab unification across national borders were imagined and underway, including the union of Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic (UAR, 1958–1961).¹⁰ In the 1950s, “pan-Arab statism … was on the rise,” and many writers placed their faith in the Arab nationalist state as the “embodiment of popular sovereignty” and “a sacralized politics [that] offered a form of postcolonial salvation” (Di-Capua Reference Di-Capua2018: 113, 109). These states would adopt pan-Arab solidarity, notably, with Palestine, as an anti-imperial platform.¹¹ As Maghrebi nationalist movements battled for independence, their activists traveled east to Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, which Egyptian president Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser made a center for activists from across the region. Among them were transregional writers.¹²

Scholars acknowledge Arab nationalism as formative for modern Arabic literature and the discipline.¹³ Nevertheless, the field has been wary of tackling these imbrications. If Arab nationalism shaped anti-colonial solidarities and popular emotions in decolonization, it is also the notorious ideology of repressive, chauvinistic, populist regimes that took power in the second half of the twentieth century, including Nasser’s state, which brutally repressed communists and the Muslim Brotherhood; the Baʿth (Arab Resurrection) Party, whose branches ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003 and Syria from 1963 to 2024; and the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) state, which ruled Algeria after independence in 1962. Notorious for single-party and authoritarian rule, Arab nationalist states marginalized the cultures and languages of non-Arab minorities, including Kurds and Assyrians. In the Maghreb, monolingual constructs of Arab nationalism collided violently with centuries of shared life between Arab, Amazigh (“Berber”), and Jewish populations, and their diverse linguistic and cultural practices.¹⁴

Arab Scale

Transregional writers drew on Arab nationalism as a cluster of political and emotional commitments and concepts of language that shaped their ideas of what an Arabic literary system is, what kinds of language it should use, where it should circulate, and how it leads imagined readers toward emancipation. The scale of their transregionalism echoed the Arabist rhetoric of parties and states, which appealed to common Arab destinies and the glory of the Arabic language, and ideas of Arabic literature as a transregional system, long predating decolonization. Yet writers equally worried about Arab scale, its (dis)connection to national struggles and ordinary life, and its potentially distorting effects on language. Even when transregional literature celebrates emancipation on an Arab scale, it simultaneously imagines palpable, local life and words grounded in indisputable meanings. At once reproducing and correcting the scale of decolonial Arab nationalism, transregional literature defined itself in relation to a politics called Arab.

Scholars often frame Arabic literature as contesting or engaging a constituted object called politics. Taking up scale as a literary stance, I emphasize transregionalism’s performed relation to the object of politics, which it understood and narrated as Arab. In the 1960s, transregionalists surveyed an increasingly bleak scene: popular riots in Morocco that were put down by the monarchy, inaugurating “the Years of Lead”; single-party, military rule in Algeria; Nasser’s repression of his domestic opposition; military coups in Iraq and Syria; and the defeat of Arab forces in the 1967 War, a major setback for the Palestinian cause. In the 1970s, Palestinian fighters moved from Jordan to Lebanon, where civil war broke out in 1975, triggering Israel’s invasion in 1982 and the departure of Palestinian forces for Tunisia. Transregional literature would absorb these and more events as Arab experience, adopting various terms to name its political object, such as Arab revolution (الثورة العربيّة) at the peak of decolonial hopes and, more soberly as the century wore on, Arab reality (الواقع العربيّ) and Arab regimes (الأنظمة العربيّة).

As transregional literature narrated Arab politics, it produced itself as a set of literary practices that acted on the same Arab scale. This interaction shaped the transregional literary system and its anxieties. For example, when Mashreq writers envisioned an open, ambient movement of Arab revolution in the 1950s, they created a print culture that emphasized embodiment to ground that revolution and materialize it in specific sites (Chapter 1). These metaphors, in turn, had to circulate to those sites of revolution on the pages of transregional journals.

Underlying such on- and off-page ambitions was a key concern in transregional literature’s consolidation of itself: that the Arabic language was jeopardized by Arab nationalist politics. Often, writers attributed language crisis to the hollow speeches of dictators and pan-Arab slogans. Yet from the 1950s, progressive thinkers worried that the scale of Arab nationalism might drive its disconnection from ordinary life. From the start, an Arab scale for politics required literature to intervene: to flesh out hollow words, to imagine their material meanings, to draw poetry “back” to daily life, and more. In other words, the problem to which transregional literature answered with itself was scaled as Arab both by a proper language and by the horizons of Arab nationalist ideology. When literature announced itself as the necessary, autonomous, and corrective force on and for Arab scale, it set in motion the range of literary strategies that are the subject of this book.

To date, the political focus of this corpus has contributed to its marginality in comparative literature. Because it is preoccupied with wars and oppressions, area-based approaches have foregrounded themes of violence, Palestine, exile, gender, and religion.¹⁵ New comparative perspectives on Arabic literature in the past two decades shy away from what appears as a politically overdetermined and even formally unadventurous corpus, focusing on Arabic literature between the late nineteenth century and World War II.¹⁶ Replete with references to Arab realities and Arab regimes, transregional literature tends to generate a sense of an insiders’ conversation, one populated by chronologies (e.g., 1948, 1967, 1973) and shorthand terms (self-critique, the Arab state) that bolster the uninitiated reader’s feeling of being, precisely, uninitiated.¹⁷

This atmosphere is an outcome of a literature that adheres to, and self-consciously participates in, bounded scale. It is not a sign of atavistic “complexity” or literary resistance to modernism, whether on the part of writers or the Arabic language. Transregionalists worked under what they saw as common sense: that the decolonization of Algeria, for example, fundamentally concerned individuals in Iraq. This concern was politically interested, just as someone in Canada or Mexico might follow a US election as an event that impacts their lives. Yet it was also emotionally and conceptually driven, reflecting a doxa about the way the world was (or is) organized that exceeded, and still exceeds, literature. Consider the leading Syrian academic Kamal Abu-Deeb’s comments in 1988:

It would be absurd to understand this passage as claiming all states, from Morocco to the Gulf, are staffed by ethnic Arabs or Arabic-speakers, or that they rule over exclusively Arab populations who lead homogenous lives. Nor is Abu-Deeb engaging in neo-colonial, geopolitical speech on “the Middle East.” Rather, like numerous writers and thinkers, he reproduces a notion of scale so normalized that it passes unnoticed: that something called Arab politics unifies daily life, oppressions, and defeats across national borders in a space that, in English today as in Arabic, is often called the Arab world.

Even at a commonsense scale, the term “Arab” occludes ethnic and linguistic diversity. Its implications shift with context and use. Transregional writers, even those who sensed the risk that their invocations of Arab scale might slide into harmful or exclusionary meanings, did not overcome the silencing and suppression postcolonial states enacted in the name of Arab and Arab-Islamic identities. That risk traverses this study, which is why I attend to locations of thought and acts of appropriation within transregional literature. My readings recall that “efforts to produce difference” in linguistic and literary systems “inevitably meet the resistance that sustains the stability of all cultural systems. Such stability is always totalitarian by implication” (Terdiman Reference Terdiman1989: 14). Yet as the movement of uprisings across the region that began in December 2010 attested, the doxa of Arab scale still holds profound relevance for progressive politics.

Transregional Literature

The mutually constitutive relation between transregional literature and Arab scale yielded a vital expression of literature whose influence remains. According to it, Arabic literature is the expression, in any language but most often in Arabic, of an Arab political experience that began with the hopes of decolonization and foundered, by the late twentieth century, into defeats and dictatorships. Because this literature speaks for Arab scale, it is often accepted as speaking authoritatively for Arabic literature. This reception not only perpetuates the erasure of difference under “Arabness” and of other, non-nationalist expressions of literary culture and practice from the region. It also erases the contingent, diverging, and anti-colonial acts of making a literary system that created transregional Arabic literature. As this study moves from the mid- to the late twentieth century, it tracks the eclipse of transregionalists’ efforts to build circulation and translation networks, which ranged across genres and languages. In their place, by the mid-1980s, is the Arabic novel, which speaks on transregional terms of an Arab loss: from progressive, anti-colonial, and revolutionary hopes to authoritarian devastation.¹⁹

In its attention to the flows of people, ideas, and texts across national borders, this study draws on transnational methods, notably calls to approach “transnational experiences and attitudes as particularistic rather than universal … as situated and located in concrete texts” (Volland Reference Volland2017: 10). By situating my inquiry at the scale of the transregional, I respond to calls for “new (or renewed) geographies that go beyond the nation but resist the centrifugal pull, the temptation, of ‘the world’” (Bush Reference Bush2014). Driven and theorized by writers, Arab literary scale enacted a “significant geography”: one that is recurrent across location and time, that is textured, and that mattered to its makers (Laachir, Marzagora, and Orsini Reference Laachir, Marzagora and Orsini2018: 294).

Despite the rise of world literary approaches, a perception endures that literary writers from the Maghreb and Mashreq are representatives of national culture.²⁰ This point can be understood in terms of content, where a story from Algeria, for example, is believed to express something about Algeria and/or Algerians. It also bears on literary systems and what Bourdieu-inspired analyses call literary fields. According to these, writers enter and are consecrated within national, regional, and/or world literary fields. In extensive scholarship inspired by Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, which theorizes Paris as the capital through which literature accedes to world consecration, these circuits are often framed as stable, distinct, even mutually exclusive.²¹ The regional tends to be seen, somewhat self-evidently, as lying between national and world fields: escaping national constrictions, yet still “narrow” and less prestigious than the global (Leperlier Reference Leperlier2020: 528).

On the path to nuancing these heuristics, my introduction of “trans” in “transregional” preserves the internal differentiations and unpredictabilities of a regional literary system in the making.²² Transregional Arabic literature did not only scale up from writers’ respective national positions. Writers’ mutual reach across Maghreb and Mashreq textured their emergent literary system with differences, memories, topoi, and peripheries internal to Arab scale. For this reason, I emphasize “the refraction of worlds within worlds or embedded scalar processes of worlding literature” in transregionalists’ discoveries, domestications, and theorizations of the borders and centrifugal differences within Arabic transregionalism (Tsu Reference Tsu2018: 187). One source for their rescaling was the decolonial rejection of Europe – and with it, what comparatists call world literary standards and capitals for literature.

In its turn away from Europe, transregional literature signaled its difference from an important precedent for Arab literary scale: the late nineteenth century nahḍa (translated as renaissance, awakening, or revival).²³ This formative period of Arabic literary modernity, with centers in the Mashreq and Egypt, was “marked by self-interrogation and a ‘constant reworking of the meaning of community’” (Johnson Reference Johnson and Davies2013: xi). Scholars note efforts to systematize the Arabic language and the emergence of an accessible register of Arabic for journalism and literature. These language experiments were tied to questions of shared heritage and collective futures; literary writing in the nahḍa “offered a way of restaging a relation to the past” (Sacks Reference Sacks2015: 107). For Jeffrey Sacks (Reference Sacks2007), nahḍa criticism on the Arabic language and its literature marked the inauguration of modern Arabic literature.

The literary forms of the nahḍa were not “imported from the West,” notes Rebecca C. Johnson, but negotiated “through interaction with Europe” (Reference Johnson and Davies2013: xi). Nevertheless, transregional literature after decolonization abandoned the nahḍa’s European gaze. One writer even announced his rewriting of this transregional precedent: The Moroccan poet ʿAbdellatif Laâbi, in late 1960s translations of Palestinian poetry, declared his moment a “Second Nahḍa” (Chapter 5).²⁴ Eschewing Eurocentric world scale, transregionalists continued to address – in the content of their works, translations, and publishing locations – the Arabic literary system even from lengthy exiles in capitals like Paris and London.

Transregionalism is not captured by accounts of authors departing their nations to choose either Beirut (Arab) or Paris (world). Rather, the scale of experience that propelled this literary system was transnational (Arab) from the start.²⁵ Literature’s engagement with national culture does not disappear in a system that did not replace the nation with an Arab frame, but sought to change the meaning of representing national contexts under Arab scale. Echoing another major decolonial initiative in the region, the journal Lotus, transregionalists wanted to change how readers understood national or sub-national events – by revealing them as part of an Arab significant geography.²⁶

In its aspirations, transregionalism was “a largely self-contained whole or demarcated field with its own procedures of transmission and regulation” (Cleary Reference Cleary2021: 4–5). At the level of practice, this literary system’s struggle was to produce itself as an integral and internally translatable literary world. For some writers, this struggle authorized appropriations and misreadings of places and peoples elsewhere in “Arab” space. Others, however, grappled explicitly with the interactions between national and Arab frames as transregional literature’s critical literary, linguistic, and theoretical problem. In these moments, writers reflexively engaged in system-making, staging questions and theorizations over literary scale that scholars often imagine as our exclusive domain.

Language

Transregionalists’ ambitions to establish a coherent literary system necessarily passed by way of the Arabic language. Practically, writers recognized the need for a print language accessible to transregional reading publics. They faced numerous obstacles, key among them the legacy of French colonial rule in the Maghreb. Particularly in Algeria, French settler colonialism had tried to obliterate Arabic-language education and replace it with French. In the aftermath of colonial rule, transregionalists found themselves working across “multilingual locals” where writers and readers operated in French, spoken Arabic, Tamazight, and other languages (Orsini Reference Orsini2015).

As transregionalists traveled back and forth, they entered and imagined what Karen Thornber (Reference Thornber2020) calls literary contact nebulae. Some would domesticate the difference they encountered into confident assertions of translatability, solidarity, and the triumph of the Arabic language. Many others would texture literature’s Arab scale with explorations of separation and difference. For example, Moroccan novelist Mohammed Berrada wrote in his memoir of studying in 1950s Cairo that he imagined traveling east to learn Arabic as a decolonizing practice at once intimate and foreign: a new dwelling in his mother tongue (Arabic) born of encountering transregional difference (see Chapter 6).

Conceptually, the Arabic language was central to transregionalism’s decolonizing ambitions and Arab scale. As Yasir Suleiman notes, “the general trend in [twentieth-century] Arab nationalist thought is to treat Arabic as the marker of the Arab national identity” (Reference Suleiman2019: 156). For Arab nationalist thinkers since the late nineteenth century, the Arabic language was not merely the expression of a national spirit; it enacted, both as medium and structure in its own right, what Syrian thinker Zaki Arsuzi, leading ideologue for the Baʿth movement, called the genius of the Arabs (Watenpaugh Reference Watenpaugh1996). In this, Arab nationalists drew on older, ethnolinguistic conceptions of the language. Annette Lienau traces these to the expansion of Islam across zones of linguistic plurality from the seventh century, where “Arabic as an evolving ethnonymic designation” fused linguistic mastery with civilizational, moral, and religious markers of belonging (Reference Lienau2023: 12). The 1947 Arab Socialist Baʿth Party constitution, for example, succinctly expressed an Arab nationalist account of ethnolinguism when it declared that “the Arab is the one who speaks Arabic.”

As linguistic ethnonym (Lienau Reference Lienau2023: 73), Arabic sits uneasily within Eurocentric categories of race and identity, particularly when the register of language intended by “Arabic” is fuṣḥā (Modern Standard Arabic; I will refer to it as written Arabic). Transregionally legible, fuṣḥā was the anticipated medium of the Arabic literary system during and after decolonization. It resulted from nahḍa reforms to modernize Arabic and is an acrolect, or prestige, form of language. Fuṣḥā means the most clear and eloquent language, and it connotes moral and intellectually incisive discourse. But fuṣḥā is the mother tongue of none. Native speakers of Arabic grow up speaking dialects and learn fuṣḥā in school. This point is of critical importance for contexts where states imposed Arabic as an ethnonym for national belonging – and for literary systems that use, or call for, fuṣḥā as the medium of Arab scale.

When writers ascribed fully to Arab nationalist dreams of a language uniting all, they wrote fuṣḥā as though it not only expressed but instantiated an Arab experience that binds across distance and plurality. In such moments, progressive writers perpetuated coercive ideas of Arab identity as an “intuitively felt … subjectivity” inextricable from language, the latter revealed as nothing more than “thoughts and feelings masquerading as words.”²⁷ They collapsed Arabic’s internal flux and transregional variations into one register, such that “imagining the Arab nation, from Beirut” during decolonization relied on “the shared Arabic language” (Bardawil Reference Bardawil2020: 39).

In what follows, this perspective and its certainties are historicized as gestures within a decolonial literary system. Rejecting Orientalizing stereotypes of Arabic’s conservatism or immutably religious character, I explore how the transregional literary system negotiates the borders, coercions, and promises of Arabic as both the medium and figure of collective experience for Arab scale. My contention is that transregional Arabic literature – despite the efforts of its makers and its occasionally vociferous protests to the contrary – was and is not internally unified, nor did it have to be. This system produced a textured set of literary and interpretive practices that speak for Arab literary scale and in the name of Arab collectives that were, historically, caught between conflicting demands for homogeneity and monolingualism; for emancipation and difference; and for the making of literature along new geographic, linguistic, and interpretive lines.

What does it mean to say the Arabic language was both a medium and figure in transregional literature? An example is provided by Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani’s “The Impossible Language” (1988), which (as all Qabbani’s work) is written in fuṣḥā:

Qabbani (1923–1988) was the iconic poetic voice and critic of Arab nationalism. The scale of his poem is Arab. The term translated as “nation” implies his homeland (Syria) and the Arab nation: frames that coexist rather than cancel one another out. Meanwhile, the Arabic language is a metaphor (figure) for a collective experience of repression. The language of the poet’s nation, unlike any language in the world, has been sealed off: robbed of its flexibility, the openings of freedom blocked. However, the poem additionally deploys language as a barometer of belonging: If you can read the medium of this poem, Qabbani implies, you live the dispossession of which it speaks. For Qabbani, who grew up speaking dialect, this Arab, linguistic-political dispossession could not be resolved by substituting fuṣḥā with spoken Arabic. When Mashreq writers lamented Arabic’s crises, they likely had the banalized tones of Arab nationalist speeches and censorship in fuṣḥā in mind. Yet transregional poetry remains free, indeed must assert itself, in accessible diction, against a terrifying Arabic – in Arabic.

By shifting the location of Qabbani’s “impossible language” to a Maghrebi context, we can begin to glimpse differences that collided within transregional literature. There, his figure of Arabic would play out differently because it is written in fuṣḥā. After independence, Moroccan and Algerian states imposed fuṣḥā as the national language in reforms controversially dubbed “Arabization.” With roots in anti-colonial nationalist movements that saw the Mashreq’s and Egypt’s Arabic cultures as “the source of life and resistance,” Arabization reforms purported to recover, through language, the authentic, Arab-Islamic national identity that had been suppressed by colonial rule (McDougall Reference McDougall2011, 260; on this topic in Morocco, see Part II). Anne-Emmanuelle Berger explains the stakes of these reforms in Algeria:

Much has been written on Arabization’s cultural and socioeconomic violence, which epitomizes “the failures of decolonization” – notably in Algeria (Twohig Reference Twohig2019a: 8). Arabization delegitimized spoken Arabic and erased Tamazight languages from national life, an erasure contested after 1980’s Berber Spring (Tafsut Imazighen).²⁸ Moreover, Arabization insisted that dialectal Arabic speakers had to reform their speech into state-sanctioned Arabic (Gafaïti Reference Gafaïti and Berger2002: 30).

In settings of state language reform, Qabbani’s terrifying Arabic bears an additional layer of meaning. It adopts Arab scale to describe political-linguistic dispossession in the same fuṣḥā that states imposed on diverse populations to make them Arab. Fuṣḥā, in this literary setting, becomes a medium of aesthetic protest, a metaphor of shared experience, but also the symptom and simulacra of state violence.²⁹

Transregional literature staged but did not resolve these differences. To the contrary, leading Mashreq writers, such as Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef (Chapters 2 and 3) and Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar (Chapters 3 and 7), participated as teachers in Algeria’s language reforms. Ideas about language and Arab scale contained in transregional literature went beyond literary practices to become complicit in Algerian national trauma (Benrabah Reference Benrabah1999).

Comparison

One outcome of this entanglement is that, despite growing calls for new comparative paradigms across French and Arabic in Maghrebi studies, transregional literary scholarship on the postcolonial period remains rare.³⁰ This hesitance around comparison across Maghreb and Mashreq perpetuates – rather than critically reflects on – challenges that arose in the transregional system after decolonization. Today, scholars still struggle with a sense that writers from these subregions seem to be involved in different conversations, even operating with incompatible building blocks for literature. This difference is widely attributed to proper language use, which bolsters stereotypes of French as modern and open to literary play, and Arabic as a conservative, religious language. Indeed, extensive literature and theory in French from the Maghreb links the specter of written Arabic to the state’s paternal authority: Arab socialism in Algeria and conservative Arab-Islamic nationalism in Morocco.³¹

The conceptual separation of Maghreb and Mashreq into French and Arabic is further perpetuated in university departments that house Maghrebi literature under French studies and the Mashreq (and Egypt) under Middle Eastern studies.³² This structuring of knowledge production obscures the translingual realities of subregional literary settings, as Karima Laachir (Reference Laachir2016) notes for the Maghreb, and historical efforts to connect these literary worlds in the second half of the twentieth century.

The coming chapters take seriously divergences in subregional systems, language practices, and interpretive sensibilities as formative to a literary system that presented itself, and is often understood today, as unified and self-evident. The experiment undertaken is to read in a comparative relation that does not “reduce one [part] to the other, make it the other’s moon” (Saussy Reference Saussy1995: 34). For example, Chapter 3 reads the Algerian Kabyle poet Farida Aït Ferroukh’s smuggling of spoken Arabic and Tamazight into French with Youssef’s calls for print reforms in Arabic. However, my comparison does not resource Maghrebi literature as a pluralist, plurilingual corrective for Mashreq-centric Arab nationalism. Such an approach would satisfy academia’s normative ideals of literature (as progressive, pluralist, etc.) but elide the historical efforts of leading Maghrebi authors to build an Arabic literary system. Rather than go outside the transregional Arabic system for its critique, I track its multiscaled formation across diverse genres and literary practices in Arabic and French.³³

My approach navigates a multifaceted understanding of fuṣḥā as literary medium and symbolic figure, both for transregionalists and for conservative actors invested in static Arab and Arab-Islamic nationalisms.³⁴ Their avatars of the language were powerful fetishes of Arab nationalism that appeared in state reforms and print culture in the second half of the twentieth century.³⁵ Yet at no point did they legislate all possibilities for Arabic as a literary language. Indeed, for many progressive writers, the purpose of the new, transregional literature was to develop and circulate alternative practices of Arabic: to liberate themselves and their imagined readers from the control of repressive states that spoke – just as this literature did – on an Arab scale.

To read transregionalism’s making across embedded scales and multiple languages, I read poetry and novels, the focal genre of world and Arabic literary studies, with journals, and translated anthologies. In the latter, understudied genres, writers anticipate their readers and reflect on literature’s work with different strategies to those found in novels. Yet their driving scale and thematic concerns are common to the transregional system. My analytic reliance on literature’s address to Arab experience, moreover, allows me to read texts in French within the transregional corpus.

If dynamic critiques of language drove Arabic transregionalism generally, the Maghreb’s insertion of itself into this system yielded an emphasis on translation.³⁶ In chapters on Morocco, I track uses of French in translational practices that ask the colonial language to erase itself, making new, more subversive fuṣḥā visible. These erasures were interim strategies to make other Arabics visible to readers who could not (yet) read fuṣḥā. Such uses of French offer a twist on Bakhtin’s observation, neatly paraphrased by Lital Levy, that “language in literature is always both represented and representing” – in this case, a language other than itself (Levy Reference Levy2017: 4, emphases in original).

Hubs and Topoi

To structure my analysis of the transregional literary system, I adopt a framework of hubs and topoi. Hubs denote material locations for literary production and publication: where journals were printed and sent out transregionally, where writers met and gave speeches, and where hopeful novelists submitted their texts to publishing houses with wide circulation networks. Topoi name the sites that transregional Arabic literature adopted to figure and translate, almost always from a distance, the Arab experience they felt propelling their literary and political action. The recurrence of these topoi confirms, for a transregional Arabic literature too often relegated to political discourse, that “to speak of literature is to be essentially involved in [a] mode of repetition” (Sacks Reference Sacks2007: 40).

The primary hub in this study is Beirut, which in the 1950s was the site of a new print culture “characterized by linguistic multiplicity, increased access to texts in circulation, and a prevailing sense of political immediacy” (Di-Capua Reference Di-Capua2018: 14–15). “At the end of the 1950s, Lebanese publishing had become the crossroads of Arabic intellectual publication,” in no small part due to the publishing industry’s “striking degree of autonomy from the State” (Mermier in Creswell Reference Creswell2019: 4). Offering contribution and distribution networks from Sudan to Iraq, Beirut rose to compete with the traditional literary hubs of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. Intellectuals from Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon displaced the preeminence of the Egyptian intelligentsia in a push “to politicize culture in the service of decolonization” (Di-Capua Reference Di-Capua, Pannewick, Khalil and Albers2015: 89). This politicization took place along Arab nationalist lines, and the new genre of the Arab nationalist journal would circulate across the region and represent transregional dialogue, debate, and exchange on its pages.

The second hub for transregional literary activity is the Moroccan avant-garde in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While less prestigious and with more limited transregional circulation than its Beirut peers, this movement also launched journals transregionally and on Arab nationalist lines. Its inclusion in this study is an example of an internal periphery, in which Maghrebi writers announced themselves as active producers and theorists of transregional literary exchange. They did so in a decolonial turn away from Europe and to counter long-standing depictions of the Maghreb in Arabic literary systems as the passive recipient of westward traffic (Agbaria Reference Agbaria2022: 21–22; McDougall Reference McDougall2011: 252).

The inaugural topos of transregional literature is Algeria, whose War of Independence (1954–1962) ignited feelings of revolutionary unity in a space stretching from Morocco to Iraq. When the Algerian War began in 1954, it was a beacon of hope, a “Mecca of revolution” for observers across the Maghreb-Mashreq, the Global South, and the world (Byrne Reference Byrne2016). The Algerian people’s struggle had particular meanings for transregionalists who saw it as the epicenter of an Arab revolution spreading across the region. For them, Algeria’s independence made this revolution manifest as political reality. To adopt Syrian Marxist Yasin al-Hafiz’s phrasing, Algeria was “a true test for the building of Arab society,” and “a test for ‘the revolutions’ that we manufacture” (Reference al-Hafiz1979: 66).

Palestine is the topos for transregional literary activity from the Maghreb in the late 1960s. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Palestine for Arab nationalist ideology and Arabic literature. For the present study, two points can be highlighted. First, Palestine enters the transregional literary system as an avant-garde literary movement led by a new generation of poets in the 1960s. They represented a parallel, revolutionary periphery for the Maghrebi left theorizing its own inclusion in transregional Arabic literature. The second dimension of Palestine as topos relates to the arc of state Arab nationalism that transregional literature narrates. Because postcolonial Arab nationalist states (most famously Egypt under Nasser) adopted the liberation of Palestine as a key rhetorical cause – but failed to enact their promises – transregional literature would subsequently use this topos to signal the banality of Arab nationalist speech as a crisis of language on an Arab scale.

So pervasive is this association between hollow slogans and state commitments to Palestine that readers familiar with post-1967 Mashreq political thought may be surprised to find that transregionalism’s concerns about the scale of Arab nationalist language date to the Algerian War. This defamiliarization of stock narratives in another, important transregional textual system – “Arab political thought” – confirms the analytical benefit of a Maghreb-Mashreq frame.

This point brings me to the paths this study does not pursue. Critical accounts of transregional Arabic literature could be told through 1967 and the topos of Palestine (see Harrison Reference Harrison2016a). Another approach would center Egypt’s place in Arabic literary systems and influence on Arab nationalist thought. My analyses do not engage with Tunisia’s rich literary production and interactions with the Mashreq, and I give more space to Mashreq engagements with the Maghreb than vice versa, leaving important literary voices like Algeria’s Waciny Laredj (Wāsīnī al-Aʿraj) for future studies. Maghrebi Jewish and Amazigh critiques of Arab nationalist politics merit far more space than I could give them here. Finally, women are outnumbered by male voices. Although I critically track a yearning for paternal authority across the transregional system, my analysis does not, in the end, rectify this gender imbalance.

Trajectory

Part I of this study addresses Mashreq progressives’ writings on, and travels to, Algeria during and after the War of Independence. It reads print culture’s often appropriative projections of Arab nationalism onto Algeria and literature’s accompanying efforts to ground transregional scale within daily life and ordinary language. Part II moves to the Moroccan avant-garde’s embrace of Arab nationalism and Palestine in the late 1960s, conceptually tracking this movement’s production of national scale within transregionalism. Structurally, these parts proceed in parallel fashion. An initial chapter studies a journal that launched itself toward the transregional system. On the Mashreq side, the Beirut-based, Arab nationalist literary journal al-Ādāb printed poetic and essayistic writings on Algeria’s war (Chapter 1). In the Maghreb, the Souffles journal produced writings on (and after 1968, in) the Arabic language and Arab nationalism before founding the transregional, Arabic-language journal Anfās in 1970 (Chapter 4).

The second chapter of each part identifies a poet who was associated with these journals and studies their efforts to texture the transregional literary system with internal difference and language renewal. Chapter 2 follows the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef to independent Algeria, where he began a lifetime engagement with the Maghreb as a site for quotidian poetics that reflect on Arab political experience in fuṣḥā. I situate Youssef’s poetics in dialogue with Syrian thinker Mutaʿ Safadi’s critiques of Arab nationalist slogans in al-Ādāb, and Algerian critiques of Arabization by leftist intellectuals Sadek Hadjerès and Mostefa Lacheraf. Unlike Youssef’s investments in fuṣḥā, Hadjerès and Lacheraf called for a new written Arabic rooted in popular practice and community, founding an Algerian political culture “as basic as the bread we eat or the air we breathe” (Lacheraf in Bensmaïa Reference Bensmaïa and Waters2003: 11).

In Part II, Chapter 5 follows Souffles-Anfās editor ʿAbdellatif Laâbi to Beirut in 1970, where he theorized the Maghrebi periphery within Arabic transregionalism, which he dubbed a Second Nahḍa. The chapter studies his translations and theorizations of Palestinian poetry as performing dialectical ties between national and Arab scales, which Laâbi imagined as (Arab) totality. For the Moroccan thinker, transregional poetry amplified readers’ perceptions of a common Arab experience by mobilizing figures of Arab revolt across proper languages. Moreover, his translations, against conservative ideas of fuṣḥā under the Moroccan monarchy, attested to the revolutionary vitality of Arabic in the Mashreq. Long after the hopes of decolonization faded, the ties of transregionalism remained: In 1999, from their exiles in Paris, Laâbi would translate Youssef’s poetry into French.³⁷

Parts I and II conclude on different notes. Chapter 3 brings Algerian literature in French into comparative dialogue with Arabic transregionalism. I investigate investments in, and avoidances of, polysemy in poetry by Algerian Kabyle writer Farida Aït Ferroukh and Saadi Youssef. Poststructuralist reading methods, which emerged in tandem with Maghrebi literatures after decolonization and remain predominant in literary studies, valorize polysemy as a sign of emancipatory reading. In contrast, Mashreq transregionalists associated ambiguities of reading with coercive, state-supported hermeneutics that deprive readers of interpretive autonomy. Drawing on critical essays, calls for print reform, and an interview with Youssef, this chapter outlines a new comparative method for literatures across Maghreb and Mashreq, French and Arabic, founded in plural interpretive sensibilities, or systems of interacting with texts.

Chapter 6 ends Part II by surveying the memory of Morocco’s transregionalism from the end of the twentieth century in Mohammed Berrada’s novelistic memoir, Mithla ṣayf lan yatakarrar (Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated, Reference Berrada1999). I explore Berrada’s theorizations of the Arabic language as transregional medium and figure. Shuttling between Morocco and Egypt, the memoir narrates the political devastations of Arab nationalism and crisis of Arabic through the dream of an emotionally driven Arabic language that once propelled Morocco’s transregional avant-garde. In the postcolonial present, all that remains is nostalgia and hollow slogans.

Berrada’s memoir initiates the final phase of this study, which asks how, beginning in the 1980s, Arabic novels renewed the geographies and tasks of transregional literature by looking back to decolonization. Part III shifts from the decolonial making of transregional literature, which writers imagined amplifying Arab experience en route to freedom, to the later novel’s work of interpreting the decolonial past, and specifically the Algerian topos. In Part III, I track an enduring self-understanding of Arabic literature as expressing Arab political experience through Algeria. Although this topos is not necessary for literature to speak Arab significant geographies, it retained a powerful emotional and conceptual charge through the last century. With it, novelists narrated a bitter divide between decolonial hopes and the devastated present as Arab experience. Part III continues to note transregionalism’s appropriations of Algeria. It also asks to what extent literature’s returns to decolonization’s topoi marked a closure in the late twentieth century, cordoning off imagined futures into a known, Arab horizon (Sacks Reference Sacks2007: 32).

Part III circles a scene of interpretation in three novels in Arabic about Algeria’s War of Independence: a male intellectual gazes upon, and attempts to interpret, a circular image. Chapter 7 reads Haydar Haydar’s novel Walīma li-aʿshāb al-baḥr: Nashīd al-mawt (Banquet for Seaweed: Ode to Death, 1983) with Lebanese author Etel Adnan’s poem L’Apocalypse arabe (The Arab Apocalypse, 1980). Each text uses celestial imagery – an Arab planet and Arab sun, respectively – to figure the devastating violence of the present. In Haydar’s transregional novel, the planet’s circling gravity marks a closed, transhistorical Arab repetition of revolution and massacre led by strongmen. In contrast, Adnan’s poem uses transregional language to inaugurate global relations for Arab scale.

Chapter 8 reads Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s best-selling novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1993). In it, a bracelet, the authentic sign of the Algerian woman-nation, grounds the promise of a “true” Arabic in the postcolonial present. Like Haydar, Mosteghanemi imagines a stark separation between the Algerian War – when men were honorable and language was utile – and the ruined Arab present, ruled by banalized words and corrupted men. Her novel adopts Arab literary geography, weaving the topoi of Algeria and Palestine together, but gently critiques transregionalism’s gendered representations of the Algerian nation.

Chapter 9 explores what the transregional system excluded. Algerian novelist al-Tahir Wattar’s novel al-Lāz (The Ace, Reference Wattar1974) was rejected by Mashreq publishers in the 1970s for its purported denigration of the war. Transgressing the conventions transregional literature erected around Algeria, Ace figures an interpretive sensibility to come, merging thought and emotion. At stake was an invitation for transregional literature to shatter its own taboos and explore new imaginaries of emancipation: beyond the war of decolonization that inspired a generation. It is to that war that Chapter 1 now turns.