The 2020 theme for the Modern Languages Association annual meeting, “Being Human,” is central to the questions being teased out by this panel on the intersections of intimacy, belonging, and colonization within the transnational Arab community. The panel presenters represent diverse institutions, from both the United States and England, and a wide-range of career stages, from a graduate student to a senior scholar. What each addresses in their paper, though, speaks to an on-going conversation taking place at conferences in a variety of fields: What does it mean to be queer and Arab and human? In her presentation at the Arab American Studies Association’s triennial conference in 2017, Dr. Mejdulene B. Shomali discussed the dearth of queer Arab and Arab American representation in both fictional literature and critical scholarship. Following on Shomali’s call for increased attention to the intersections of Arab experiences with queer sexual and gendered identities, a panel titled “Visioning Radical Queer Futures: Transformative Practices of the Transnational Middle East” was formed for the American Studies Association’s 2019 conference. “Queer Arabs / Queer Narratives” aims to continue that scholarly conversation by bringing together three papers that examine literature from three different geopolitical spaces occupied by queer Arabs.

In 2002 Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai asked “If certain forms of queer and progressive organizing remain tied to forms of nationalist and imperial domination, how can queers of color both here and across the globe disrupt the neat folding in of queerness into narratives of modernity, patriotism, and nationalism?” This panel considers the works of transnational queer Arab authors that answer Puar and Rai’s call to “disrupt the neat folding in” through queer language practices. These authors deploy non-linear narrative techniques and multi-coded language to present characters that challenge racial constructions and dichotomies of gender and sexuality, which in turn raises further questions about the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, and sexuality. The three papers on this panel suggest that the analyzed texts disarrange the novelistic form and offer alternate futures as they explore and question the inherent queerness of time and language in the experiences of trauma and displacement. These simultaneously queer and Arab texts defy demands for conformity to storytelling norms, even as they use their stories to create a space in which they can reassert their humanity.

Sean Weaver begins the panel by establishing a framework in which to understand queer Arab identities as “Other.” Positing queerness as a means of overcoming the essentialist binaries created by colonization, he considers the ways Arab heteronormative national identities are queered/disturbed when attention is called to the fallacies inherent in singular national dichotomies. Analyzing Hasan Namir’s novel God in Pink, Weaver suggests that queer Iraqi narratives originating in colonized spaces offer alternative futures even as the nation attempts to erase queer Arab bodies.

Continuing Weaver’s theme of erasure, Mazen Naous moves the conversation to the Arab diaspora with a discussion of Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History. Focusing on the novel’s dissociative narrative form, Naous investigates the role of poetic and historical fugal-queering (contrapuntal combinations, doublings, and the double fugal structure in The Angel of History) in recovering effaced subjects. The novel narrates a “form of fugue” which manifests in twelve cycles of three dissociative voices with strategic variation. As the text remembers drone strikes in Yemen alongside loss precipitated by the United States’ AIDS epidemic, its voices are both musical and fugal. Analyzing the term “fugue,” Naous argues that these sonic and formal expressions queer both Middle Eastern history and that of the AIDS epidemic, offering a new understanding of what it means to be human and to “belong.”

William J. Spurlin transfers Naous’s analysis of narrative structure in Arab diasporic texts to the granular level of language, while also returning to the question of colonialism raised by Weaver. His paper analyzes and interrogates issues around linguistic, cultural, and sexual difference. An explication of selected texts by such Francophone Arab authors as Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, and Nina Bouraoui foregrounds translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their negotiations of multiple languages, histories, cultures, and publics. By writing in French, the writers do not merely mimic the language of their former colonizers, but inflect a European language with vocabularies and turns of phrase indigenous to North African cultures, thereby creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experience of sexual alterity which cannot be expressed in Arabic.

Ultimately these three papers respond explicitly to President Simon Gikandi’s thematic questions: “In an age of increasing xenophobia and social division, can literature provide a space of gathering, of the making of alternative communities? Can we come together in texts and other spaces of reading?” This panel suggests that the use of queer narrative and language as a tool in the construction of personal and national identities takes on spatial dimensions when considered within the context of the novel as a physical object. These queer Arab texts open up spaces in which lived experience, art, and political action merge and community forms.