The current human crisis in the Arab world—from the violent war in Syria to the increased human drowning in the Mediterranean and exile from North Africa—calls into question the ethics of humanism as a framework of analysis in such deteriorating human conditions. As a region shaped by civil wars, displacement, exclusionary nation-states and religious extremism, the Arab world is marked by the emergence of non-conventional human experiences that represent complex forms of humanism. Contemporary Arab writing in Arabic and English highlights the shifting configurations of the human in a way that disrupts fixed paradigms and binary structures in western scholarship. This session aims to explore unconventional forms of humanism by demonstrating how literary and aesthetic examples transcend the lenses of Eurocentric humanist approaches to Arab writing. Much of the scholarship on modern Arab writing focuses on the aesthetics of humanism through western lenses and therefore paying little attention to the specific social, political and regional conditions that have produced these human and sub-human practices.

The three panelists in this proposed session examine different contexts that illustrate comparative and transcultural configurations of the human in contemporary Arab writing. The session complicates conventional paradigms of humanist inquiry by illuminating both human and subhuman practices, and by further showing the often-neglected social and political realities that impact the formation of the human in the world today. Each presenter will be given 18 minutes, leaving about 20 minutes for questions and interaction with the audience at the end.

In “Placing the Human in Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude,” Michael Lackey examines the shifting and different views towards the Arab as a human and subhuman figure in the eyes of neocolonial French writers inside and outside North Africa.The work of the Moroccan author, Hassan Najmi, demonstrates the way Arab culture and art are empowered through modernist aesthetics, specifically through the conception of the Arab through the lens of biased comparatism. Examining this dehumanizing trope in Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude (2014), a literary text set in Morocco, France and the United States, Lackey elucidates how culture is misread in a way that exposes how the Arab is perceived as both human and sub-human by various western writers. The difference in perspective towards the Arab figure in Gertrude pinpoints to the scale of humanism often used by Europeans when perceiving the unfamiliar humanism of the other. Lackey’s paper sheds light on this under-examined framework in cultural studies and the need to further deconstruct its interpretative mechanism.

Focusing on Arab writing in America, Roberta Wolfson analyzes the way Arab and Muslim writers are challenging the rhetoric of Islamophobia and misrepresentation by generating alternative perspectives and responses to the tragic events of 9/11. In “(Mis)Reading the Arab Body as (Non)Human in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land,” Wolfson shows how Laila Halaby’s work, Once in a Promised Land (2007), offers an alternative history of 9/11 that destabilizes the popular view of the United States as a victim of terrorism and heroic defender of liberty and freedom. Halaby’s work critiques US security rhetoric post 9/11 and the racialization of Arabs as sub-humans and bodies of threat to American values. By analyzing how Arabs are viewed as subhuman, Wolfson demonstrates how Arab-American historical fiction subverts the binary frameworks of good/bad, us/them, Christian/Muslim that fuel the one-dimensional Islamophobic rhetoric used in the War on Terror.

Finally, Kim Grimaldi investigates how the notion of the human in contemporary Arab writing is redefined and reimagined through the appropriation of canonical European writing. In “Retribution, Trauma, and Bodily Memory in Ahmad Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Grimaldi asks how does the work of the Iraqi novelist, Ahmed Al Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), urge its readers to rethink the neocolonial American occupation of Iraq? Who is disabled and dehumanized by this war and how might the violence and trauma of the Iraq war animate the politics of retribution in literary terms? By exploring these questions in the context of the Iraqi novel in English, Grimaldi illustrates the complex relationship between what it means to be human, to have a body, to be animate, and to have memories. Taking memory as her point of analysis of the human body, Grimaldi asserts that memory is transmitted bodily, rather than residing simply in the mind. Body and mind are not separable. Traumatic memory alone cannot communicate this perspective and the body fails to offer its new host any notion of its identity. For Grimaldi, this new critical perspective places trauma and its recollection as central to the conception of the disabled human and unconventional humanism, especially in the context of war.