Abstract
Undergraduate college students in the USA often encounter the Arab Middle East through novels translated into English. These novels are often presented by instructors and understood by students as stylized but accurate depictions of Arab societies as they currently exist. This article argues that the extremely limited number of translated Arabic novels that have made their way into American classrooms perpetuate stereotypes about Arab societies. These novels present students with themes that are often ahistorical and infused with violence, misogyny, and religious fanaticism. Although students may be highly interested in learning about Arab societies, the literary content they come across encourages affective rather than critical or complex responses.
Highlights
Undergraduate college students in the USA often encounter the Arab Middle East through novels translated into English
We suspected that a book needed to meet certain expectations about violence, tribalism, misogyny, and religious fundamentalism to make its way through translation politics and into the classroom
The literary content of the undergraduate courses we identified in our research confirms rather than refutes stereotypes that students have already acquired from various sources: film depictions of Arabs as “wealthy and vile oil sheikhs ... crazed terrorists ... or camel-riding Bedouins” (Shaheen, 2003: 173); arts, such as belly dancing, that have been de-historicized and made safe for consumption (Maira, 2008); mass media narratives on the practice of Islam
Summary
What impressions of Arab masculinity might students acquire from the literature identified by our survey? According to this literature, the Arab male is first and foremost a product of colonialism. Season of Migration is not a depiction of an Arab society in the present; instead, it conveys an image of the Arab world that is ahistorical except for events related to Western colonialism and the arrival of so called modernity In doing so, it continues in the Orientalist tradition of exoticizing and sexualizing the Arab, Muslim, African male. In our experience of teaching the novel, students quickly identified this sexist dynamic They were not able to read through the rhetorics of self-identified “Islamist” groups that co-opt vulnerable youths like Taha into serving their political ends. It has been shocking to us that students see Taha’s self-annihilation through a suicide bombing as a victory over his oppressors His suicide is not presented as a victory in the novel, and it is surely not an Egyptian way of thinking— this interpretation is instead the product of pseudo-news programming in the US that has made suicide bombing a buzzword
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