Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Forced Migration and Speculative Fiction

Since the 1990s, Arabic exile literature in Europe has increasingly become a literature written from the perspective of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and others who are situated outside normatively defined citizenship. In this book, Johanna Sellman analyses the changing aesthetic and political dimensions of Arabic exile literature and demonstrates how frameworks such as east-west cultural encounters, political commitment and modernist understandings of exile - which were dominant in 20th-century Arabic exile literature - have been giving way to writing that explores the dynamics of forced migration and the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands.

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.