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The son of Lebanese-Christian immigrants takes a nostalgic look at early immigrant life and the cultural schizophrenia that surrounds it. In this delightful anecdotal portrayal of Lebanese American culture, Eugene Nassar captures the joys and sorrows that characterized immigrant life in the twentieth century.
Arab Voices in Diaspora offers a wide-ranging overview and an insightful study of the field of anglophone Arab literature produced across the world. The first of its kind, it chronicles the development of this literature from its inception at the turn of the past century until the post 9/11 era. The book sheds light not only on the historical but also on the cultural and aesthetic value of this literary production, which has so far received little scholarly attention. It also seeks to place anglophone Arab literary works within the larger nomenclature of postcolonial, emerging, and ethnic literature, as it finds that the authors are haunted by the same 'hybrid', 'exilic', and 'diasporic' que...
The issues addressed in this volume include the limits of language and the need for linguistic form, the significance of creating.
This book presents for the first time a thorough study of the imagery in Wallace Stevens's poetry and the patterns which these images form. Heretofore, most discussions of Stevens's work presupposed an understanding of the difficult and bizarre surface imagery and dealt mainly with broad generalizations which often left the student of Stevens's poems unsatisfied. The brilliant surface of the poems, the detailed imagery of specific passages, is here examined clearly and systematically. The images, indexed at the back of the book, are examined in four natural groups: Figures of the Mind, of Disorder, of Order, and of Change. The last half of the book is concerned with close analyses of some longer poems of Stevens's using the information gleaned from the "anatomy" of the first half.
The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arab country, as well as Arab immigrant writing in many languages around the world.
The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections...
Predicated upon the towers of collapse, while T.S. Eliot, the representative modernist, in order to re-construct his culture out of the debris of its imperialist past, concluded his Waste Land (1922) by looking Eastward, into the all-pervading “shantih” of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese American, authored The Prophet (1923) to deconstruct such enterprise and retrieve a culture that was swirling in-between Darwinian metaphors and Nietzschean Nihilism. He who was exterior to the ‘omnipotent definitions’ of the West, saw in “Beauty” the “eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” So, to him, “you are eternity and you are the mirror.” This book is a read...
Mount Allegro is an extraordinary memoir, a celebration of Sicilian life, an engaging sociological portrait, a moving reminiscence of a fledgling writer’s escape from the restrictive culture in which he grew up. Jerre Mangione’s autobiographical chronicle of his youth in a Sicilian community in Rochester is one of the truly enduring books about the immigrant experience in this country. Family squabbles, soul-nourishing food, and the casting of evil eyes are only some of the ingredients of this richly textured book, although they must all take second place to its unforgettable characters. As Eugene Paul Nassar writes in the book’s Foreword, “Mount Allegro . . . gave a literary visibility and identity, amiable and appealing, to a poorly understood ethnic group in America, and did so at a very high level of artistry.”
Etching Our Own Image: Voices From Within the Arab American Art Movement is a celebration of Arab American art and identity. In the wake of 9/11, the need for Arab Americans to define themselves, rather than be defined by others has galvanized an artistic movement. This collection of writers includes poets, musicians, playwrights, creative writers, painters, conceptual artists, comedians and scholars of the arts who have gathered to assert for themselves what it means to be Arab American and an artist. Arab American artists use their art both to resist and to embrace their past, present and future. Through their art they retain their origins, while creating something new. They collaborate and come together. The artists included here are above all artists and the artistic renderings in this collection demonstrate their commitment to craft, innovation, and expression. They take on the task of etching their own image willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. By telling their own stories through their own artistic mediums, these voices from within the Arab American art movement reclaim their own image and tell the world who they are.