Out of Place: Arab and Arabic Narratives Between Empires

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

From dismembered campsites to destroyed homes, Arab and Arabic literature have long contended with themes of exile, displacement, and what it means to live, in Edward Said’s words, “out of place.” In answer to this conference’s call to think through the creative possibilities amid the “late stage” of empire, this panel turns to Arab and Arabic narratives by authors, artists, and everyday people traveling in and between empires in decline.

Spanning from people who navigated the decline of the Ottoman Empire to those today grappling with the decline of the American empire, our panelists explore how both voluntary and involuntary travel transforms the construction of self, community, and belonging. Whether through literature, poetry, or oral histories and narratives, we investigate how textual and oral forms both shape—and are shaped by—movement across imperial boundaries. How does travel prompt new literary forms? How does writing ‘make sense’ of journeys (chosen or forced)? How do genre, medium, and language affect these transit narratives? How can historians surface them, and how do poets wrestle with writing them? When an empire is in crisis, how do the experiences of those moving in and out of it offer creative possibilities for reimagining selves and communities in its wake?

By tracing journeys and the narratives they produce, we examine how writing not only responds to but actively reshapes the crises of empire, proposing new ways to conceive of belonging, resistance, and possibility in the precarious moments of imperial decay.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Root Seeking and Root Muddling: A Diasporic Study of Edward Said’s Out of Place - Sara Abou Rashed, Ohio State University

• 'A person in the form of a specter searching': Darwish and the Aesthetics of Palestinian Spatiality - Yasmeen B Ayoub, Loyola University Chicago

• Sustaining Narrations: Exploring Arab Druze Women’s Gatherings as Sites of Knowledge, Resource Sharing, and Collective Care - Deena Z Naime, University of Southern California

Chair

• Zaina Ujayli, The University of Southern California

Biographical Information

Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet and incoming Comparative Studies PhD student at the Ohio State University. Her writing, scholarly and creative, interrogates exile, belonging, diasporic subjectivities in literature and the relationship between diasporas and home. Sara is also the creator of the autobiographical one-woman show, A Map of Myself, which traces her family’s displacement journey. Her works appear in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, as well as the anthology A Land with a People and 9-12 ELA curriculum from McGraw Hill, among others.A former poetry fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, she earned her BA from Denison University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.

Deena Ziad Naime is a PhD Candidate in the department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation is titled Sabaya Druze: Generations of Druze Feminism Through Shared Spaces of Zyarat, Emotional Intimacy, and Care (Work). Her project centers women’s spaces fostered in Druze communities in the Levant and the North American diaspora in order to contextualize the concept of Druze feminism - as well as the cultivation of spaces of intimacy and care among women as an intervention in feminist research methodology. Naime also holds a BA in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Middle Eastern Studies from California State University, Long Beach and MA in Women’s Studies from San Diego State University where she wrote her thesis on Arab American women’s disruption of mainstream “self-care” vis-á-vis U.S. neoliberal capitalism. She is invested in using academia as a site to co-create spaces both in- and outside of higher education through radical approaches of listening, feeling, and engaging - inspired by the Druze feminist praxis she theorizes.

Yasmeen B. Ayoub is a doctoral student in English at Loyola University Chicago. They focus on diasporic, postcolonial, and decolonial literatures, and their related critical theories. Their prospective research and dissertation look to diasporic Palestinian literature for a phenomenological depiction of space, and subsequently to interrogate conceptions and experiences of mobility and movement, nationalism, geography, and place.