AFRS 105 - The Self and the Western Other in Modern Arabic Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

The cultural “encounter with the West” is a major theme in modern Arabic literature and culture. In this course, we read and discuss an array of novels, novellas, and short stories that depict personal and collective histories of encounters between Arab and African postcolonial subjects and the West, both at home and in the diaspora. We analyze a selection of documentary and feature films by North African and Middle East directors that dramatize this encounter and explore its consequences. The course familiarizes students with persistent orientalist and colonialist representations of Arab and Islamic otherness in Western literary and cultural discourses. Students develop a better understanding of the region’s cultural complexity and its unresolved relationship to a Western global modernity that it contests and admires simultaneously. The readings include critical excerpts from Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and literary works by such authors as Assia Djebar and Tayeb Salih, among others. Mootacem Mhiri.

Prerequisite(s): This course is one of three prerequisite pathway courses for AFRS 200.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS