Troubling Diaspora: Literature Across the Arabic Atlantic

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thousands of Arabic-speaking Ottoman subjects left their homes in Greater Syria and journeyed across the Atlantic to destinations through the Americas. This dissertation considers writing during this period of Arab transatlantic travel and migration, from the late 1860s to the early 1940s—from a period of political turmoil in the Ottoman Empire and growing knowledge about the “New World,” to the decades following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (which animated the need to rearticulate understandings of Arab identity within diasporic communities). While recent historical scholarship has revealed how Arab migrants sought access to legal and social privileges by aligning themselves with white or criollo elites in their new countries of residence, this dissertation turns to a literary corpus to consider underexamined dynamics between Arabs in the Americas and other marginalized communities. My analysis is motivated by the following questions: what claims of affiliation and difference appear in writings by Arabic-speaking travelers and migrants about the marginalized communities they encountered in their transatlantic travels? How did the authors’ displacement to the Americas—and specifically, the forms of racial stratification and legacies of conquest and enslavement they encountered there—inform the dynamics of affiliation and difference expressed in their writings? The dissertation approaches these questions through a selection of travel narratives and experimental fiction from three Arabophone authors whose work thematizes transatlantic encounters. These writers, ʿAbd al-Raḥmán al-Baghdādī, Ameen Rihani, and Shukri al-Khūrī, articulate ambivalent solidarities across lines of difference. That is, they project affinities with other racially or religiously marginalized communities, drawing parallels between histories of colonization and displacement in the Americas and the Mediterranean basin; yet they simultaneously reiterate colonial logics by placing themselves in hierarchical relation to other marginalized groups. By analyzing articulations of interethnic affiliation and exclusion in literary texts, I attend to how literature projects horizons of belonging across difference, while simultaneously circumscribing them—a dynamic I am calling ambivalent solidarity.