Latin American and Arab Literature: Transcontinental Exchanges

Since the 19th century, Arab migration from the Ottoman Empire to Latin America and Latin American travel to the Arab world has created transcontinental routes - and in the late 20th century, the translation of Latin American classics into Arabic flourished in the Arab world. Drawing on Latin American and Arabic novels, travelogues, memoirs, short stories and chronicles from Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, Tahia Abdel Nasser shows how cultural exchange between Latin America and the Arab world cemented historical and diplomatic ties. She also explores how a new cadre of men of letters - poets, writers and intellectuals - shaped Arab Latin American encounters in the late 20th century.

Tahia Abdel Nasser is Assistant Professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. She has published in Comparative Literature Studies, Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Alif: Journal of Contemporary Poetics, Journal of Arabic Literature, Dictionary of African Biography (2011), Mahmoud Darwish: The Adam of Two Edens (2001) and The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (2001).