Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature by Waïl Hassan (review)

Mashriq & Mahjar 1, no. 2 (2013), 155–159 ISSN 2169-4435 WAÏL HASSAN, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Pp. 288. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. ISBN 9780199792061. REVIEWED BY STEVEN SALAITA, Department of English, Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), email: salaita@vt.edu Waïl Hassan’s Immigrant Narratives offers an ambitious subtitle: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. Yet this subtitle does not actually encompass the breadth of material Hassan covers. The five key terms of the subtitle have long been multi-definitional (and contested) among literary scholars: “Orientalism”; “Cultural Translation”; “Arab American”; “Arab British”; “Literature.” Yet Hassan does little to resolve those terms. This lack of resolution constitutes the strength of Hassan’s ambitious project, for he elucidates rather than simplifies, a necessity for those working with the complexities of cultural production in the Arab diaspora. Hassan thoroughly complicates the terminological commonplaces of dominant epistemologies of the Arab world. His analysis is performed dispassionately, but the very subjects he addresses render that analysis implicitly political, for the act of conceptualizing Arabs as multivalent agents rather than as immobile subjects contravenes a great quantity of conventional wisdom, much of it found in the humanities and social sciences. Hassan sets out this task early in the introduction: “This book is about how Orientalism has profoundly influenced immigrant Arab writers, how they have reacted to it, and how their position as cultural translators has shaped their discourses” (3). Hassan does not necessarily endorse the concept of an authorial translator of culture, but sees it as a critical methodology vis- à-vis his areas of inquiry. He notes, “I argue that the predominant stance of those writers has been that of a cultural translator who claims 156 Mashriq & Mahjar 1, no. 2 (2013) a privileged position to interpret the Arab world to American or British readers” (xii). The view of Arab American and British authors as cultural translators is not without complication. Hassan argues that such authors assign themselves this role, or in some cases are assigned the role by publishers and readers, but the notion of literature existing to satisfy curiosities about foreign cultures has led to variegated modes of exoticization. However, as Hassan notes, it is the very invention of exoticism that attracts publishers and readers in the West to authors of Arab origin. Immigrant Narratives explores the processes by which Orientalist discourses continue to influence the production and reception of Anglophone Arab literature. Hassan is also concerned with how the producers of Anglophone Arab literature interact with a set of discourses that precede and presuppose ideas about the Arab writer in modernity. Hassan is not working with a great deal of prior scholarly material. The vast majority of criticism of Arab writers discusses work in Arabic. Arabic literature has a longer and more distinguished history than Anglophone Arab writing, but this latter category has developed an academic and economic legitimacy in recent decades and needed the sort of thorough analysis that Hassan provides. Much of the extant scholarship on diasporic Arab writers working in English occurs under the rubric of “Arab American literature,” a term Hassan does not discard, but contextualizes with other hyphenated national communities: Arab Australian, Arab Canadian, Arab British, and so forth. However, the majority of his discussion is taken up with the United States and United Kingdom, mostly because of sheer quantity, but also because Hassan confesses to finding the “idea of Arab writers who communicate directly in English . . . exhilarating” (xi). It soon becomes clear that a different politics of translation emerges in Anglophone Arab work than that of Arabic-to-English conversion, which Hassan generally finds uninspiring because of what he deems “unsatisfactory and sometimes even prejudicial translations” (xi). According to Hassan, we cannot fully understand Anglophone Arab literature without thinking about questions of the dialectical relationships among author, reader, and publisher. He argues that “[s]ince the early nineteenth century, Arab modernity, politics, and the very sense of Arab identity have been profoundly impacted by the history of European, and later U.S., imperialism in the Arab world, in which...