Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature

Abstract

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.