The poetics of contemporary Muslim immigrant fiction

Abstract

When looking at categories for the study of “World Literature”, the geographical situatedness of a novel’s particular setting or an author’s (birth)place of origin is often taken as a reference. Yet, mobility studies have shown the value of looking beyond the frames of Arab-American or South Asian literature. In this thesis, I posit the value of considering “Muslim immigrant fiction” as a category to better understand, explore, and compare the thematic and aesthetic influences of Muslim representations in world literature—as opposed to merely in isolated regions such as South Asia or amongst distinct ethnic groups like Arabs. Muslim fiction is a burgeoning field, both in academia and amongst contemporary readers; yet, most novels that fit within this genre tend to be examined as immigrant narratives or under the broader category of world literature. Despite growing interest in the field, Muslim fiction remains mostly amorphous and inadequately defined, with gaps in the scholarship. I proffer that this ambiguity of defining Muslim fiction takes its cue from the current anxieties that shape and complicate a Muslim’s definition of their own identity.

As such, I strive to make a meaningful contribution to scholarly conversations by first proposing a working definition of the genre of “Muslim immigrant fiction”, drawing on existing scholarship and as shaped by the subsequent analyses of my selected case studies, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Zoulfa Katouh’s As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow, and Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop. I build on the work of scholars such as Frederick Luis Aldama and Sue-Im Lee to move beyond the postcolonial tendency of ethnographic transparency by putting forth a framework to analyse the poetics of Muslim immigrant fiction.

This paper adopts Jonathan Culler’s definition of “poetics” as “the characteristic techniques, compositional habits, and ways of treating subjects in the literary practice under consideration.” My paper thus examines the poetics of Muslim immigrant fiction by exploring the various characteristic techniques and compositional habits—in the form of narrative features and thematic ideas—used to represent the Muslim experience in these narratives. In doing so, I hope to use this framework to:

a) identify a range of characteristic narrative features and themes for analysing Muslim subjectivity in the genre of Muslim immigrant fiction; and b) establish the productivity of reading a group of texts through this framework and to articulate the interpretive payoffs of doing so.

I posit the value of tracing the poetics of Muslim immigrant fiction by focusing on the aesthetics of estrangement, migrational trauma, and discourses of resistance.