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Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature

Migration to the Gulf in the Arabic Novel

By Nadeen Dakkak

Format

£95.00

About this book

Investigates how Arab novelists have represented the experiences of migrants in the Gulf States

  • Identifies a genre of Gulf migration fiction in Arabic
  • Focuses on Palestinian-Jordanian, Egyptian, Lebanese and Eritrean novels set mainly in Saudi Arabia and other fictional Gulf locales
  • Interrogates understandings of migration, exile and diaspora in Arabic literary studies
  • Contests essentialist images of the Gulf and of a uniform Gulf migrant experience

Arab migration to the Gulf unfurled in the midst of manifold political and economic changes and had crucial social ramifications all over the Arab world. Through the examination of a selection of Arabic migration narratives set from the 1970s onwards, this monograph asks: how have Arab writers responded to this phenomenon and what are the thematic and formal characteristics of literary attempts to represent the rarely acknowledged and complex affects that have been generated in subjective experiences of Gulf migration?

By foregrounding centre–periphery dynamics within the Arab world, the analysis decentres the emphasis on the encounter with the ‘West’ in scholarship on migration in Arab literature and culture. It challenges prevailing discourses on the Gulf and demonstrates the role of fiction in nuancing essentialist images of a uniform Gulf migrant experience.

Reviews

In this nuanced and incisive book, Nadeen Dakkak turns the spotlight on the literary manifestations of Arab migration to the Gulf, long overshadowed by (im)migration to the “North,” or the “West” – Europe and the Americas. In setting narrative fictions by Egyptian, Palestinian, Lebanese and Eritrean writers within a global context of imperial and capitalist relations, Dakkak debunks many stereotypes about Gulf countries and invites further studies of the vibrant literature from and about that part of the Arab world.
Migration to the Gulf in the Arabic Novel is a much-needed contribution to the study of migration in the Arabic novel. Dakkak convincingly argues for a re-theorization of ightirab (alienation) and regional center-periphery dynamics to account for experiences of Arab migration to the Gulf over the past few decades.
Table of contents

Series Editor's Foreword
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Oil, Migration and the Beginnings of a Genre

  1. Desert Encounters: Displacement and Alienation in Palestinian Narratives
  2. Between ‘Contract’ and ‘Land’: Egyptian Migration Narratives in a Decade of Transformations
  3. Gendered Gulf Encounters: Migrant Women and Alienation in the Desert Writings of Hanan Al-Shaykh
  4. Beyond the Citizen/Non-Citizen Dichotomy: Writing Class into the Narrative of Migrant Victimisation and Marginalisation
  5. The Gulf as a Space of Labour: Reproductive Work and the Production of Disciplined Migrant Bodies
  6. Fragile Claims: Second-Generation Narratives of Belonging and Exclusion

Afterword: The Future of a Genre

References
Index

About the author

Nadeen Dakkak

Nadeen Dakkak is Lecturer in World and Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She was IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in 2021–2022 and completed her PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is editor of Narratives of Dislocation in the Arab World: Rewriting Ghurba (Routledge, 2023) and has published a number of articles and book chapters on Gulf migration in literature and popular culture.

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