Literary and cultural production in multilingual contexts and pluralistic cultures involves articulations of identities and homes within sites of shifting power relations. These articulations reflect how writers use complex and creative navigation strategies to circumvent the constraining linguistic and discursive structures that tend to reinscribe fixed binaries of self, memory and space. These negotiations shed light on how artists cross borders where different language registers, discourses, gender identities and genres intersect. The produced literary texts in these conflicted zones of various crossings manipulate and adapt poetic discourse, linguistic variation and multilingual literary production to resist forms of cultural hegemony. Speakers on this panel expand the theoretical paradigm on reconfigurations of cultural border crossing in relation to language, identity and belonging. They examine how it is performed through texts that respond to unequal symbolic structures of signification between heritage Arabic and global English on the one hand and between the poetics of cultural translation and francophone queer autofictional writing in the Maghreb on the other. In crisis-ridden sites, such as the highly politicized Arab-Israeli context, language crossing works in tandem with translational tropes derivative of Abrahamic heritage to effect public diplomacy. Such translational praxis emerges also in the editorial experience of a comic collective where multilingual production facilitates diverse cultural transfer of graphic content within the multicultural and local/global nexus of publishing. Each presenter will speak for 15 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for Q/A session.

In the first presentation, Mari Odoy examines how Ahmad Almallah bridges the divide between global English and modern Arabic poetry written in the diaspora through the “self-bordering” trope of a linguistic home that sustains a form of diasporic belonging in the face of exile in Bitter English. Such a conflictual process rests on an act of translation that invokes a unique point on the linguistic spectrum between Arabic and English from which to write, intelligible in English but ripe and fraught with allusions to Arabic poetic tradition and its suggested discursive and rhetorical turns. As a form of diasporic cultural production, the poetic language resists linguistic hegemony while maintaining readership within an English-dominated “cultural system” of literary exchange.

William Spurlin examines the politics of language in new representations of same-sex desire in emergent literature written in French from the Maghreb by Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri. These writers bring the long-established traditions of gender and sexual alterity into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence within globally circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in North Africa in relation to the experience of emigration. They thus reclaim what has been written out of dominant narratives of postcolonial North Africa through strategies of cultural translation and (re)negotiation around incommensurable spaces of queerness. The presenter argues that by writing in French, these writers inflect French with vocabularies and turns of phrase of local Arabic/Maghreb dialects and occupy queered language spaces that mediate between the country of origin and settlement and become reconfigured within shifting power relations pertaining to race, gender, and the ongoing effects of European colonialism.

Riham Debian looks at the trafficking between (in-) commensurate languages and identities and the acculturation process in/through cultural translation in the Arab-Israeli context. She argues that the discursive hybridity that animates the Facebook page of the Israeli Defense Forces uses multiple languages, (with the interplay between the verbal and non-verbal and the centrality of spectacle) to negotiate a new cultural politics of the constructed Middle Eastern identity. She demonstrates how the semiotic technologization of Abrahamic discursive identity-politics exploits the interface between social media public diplomacy and language practice in Israel to mediate cultural translational acts that rewrite Abrahamic Middle Eastern cultures by deploying Arabic and sacred Islamic text through social media to promote public diplomacy.

In her paper, Angélique Girault expands this critical perspective of the dynamic politics of language crossing in relation to the cultural hegemony that operates in multilingual graphic publishing. She shows how Samandal (cf. salamander), a collective founded in 2007 in Beirut around a comics quarterly of the same name, manages not only to bring together local and international contributors in a quite experimental mode of production but to manipulate diverse cultural content to its advantage. By making the graphic content accessible in several countries, and offering a diversity of graphic content in several languages, Arabic, French, English, and more occasionally Spanish, German, Slovenian, Greek, Italian, and others, the comic magazine reinvents multilingual editorial publishing within Beirut, a site of an unusually dynamic local/global multiculturalism, by exploiting the cultural transfer between incommensurable languages and cultures.