Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab Uprisings: Tensions in English, French and German Language Fiction

This book presents an analysis of English, French and German language fiction about the so-called Arab Spring. Through a transnational comparison of texts by a wide range of authors, both non-diasporic and diasporic, Julia Wurr investigates the commercialisation of Neo-Orientalist and securitised elements in short fiction and novels aimed at the Western literary market, and examines the role which the literary market plays in constructing, aestheticising and marketing mental boundaries between the Islamicate world and the West. By bringing together approaches from the social sciences with literary close readings, this study does not only carve out recurring tropes, frames and figurations which are complicit in diffusing a Neo-Orientalist and anti-Muslim imagery into mainstream society, but it also shows how influential frames of insecurity - precarity, affective masculinity and terror - refract the adverse psychosocial consequences of the neoliberal project into a securitisation of the Other.

Julia Wurr is Junior Professor for Postcolonial Studies at the Institute for English and American Studies at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. In 2019, she completed a Ph.D. thesis exploring the Neo-Orientalist commercialisation of the Arab uprisings in English, French and German language fiction. Her current research focuses on the relationship between identity and inequality in Postcolonial Theory as well as on the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of natalism and anti-natalism in postcolonial fiction.