Latin American and Arab Literature

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.

Latin American and Arab Literature innovatively explores sites of cultural contact, literary intertextualities, and political solidarities across modern Arabic and Latin American literatures. Offering thoughtful close readings of a diverse range of textual genres and transcontinental literary exchanges, Abdel Nasser stages an exciting new model of horizontal south-south comparison.

This is a needed study, one that is long awaited, because so little is written about this fascinating comparison. It is entirely original and has a distinctive approach as well as being an original topic.

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).

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