This panel will explore how literary and cultural productions from the modern Arab world have historically troubled the divide between formal or “literary” Arabic and informal, “dialectical” Arabic. Starting in the late nineteenth-century with the period known as the “Arab Renaissance” (Nahda) and proceeding through the current boom in Egyptian dialectical (‘ammiyya) literature, the panelists trace an alternate history of the Arabic language as a spectrum of registers, translated out of and into, constantly defined and redefined not by the ideologies of language authorities but by the affects and attitudes of its users.

Beginning with Charles Ferguson’s coining of the term in 1959, scholars in the West have consistently treated Arabic as a “diglossic” language, with a single formal register and a multiplicity of regional, dialectical variations. The formal register is variously referred to in English as “literary,” “classical,” “written,” “Qur’anic” or “Modern Standard” Arabic (fusha), while the various informal registers are generally called by their regional names. Yet as recent scholarship by Kristen Brustad, Madiha Doss, Gunvor Mejdell, and others has illustrated, the boundaries that divide the “literary” from the “dialectical,” the formal from the informal, and the written from the oral have always been porous when it comes to Arabic. Taking their cues from linguistic anthropology, on the one hand, and from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical writings on heteroglossia, on the other, scholars of Arabic are increasingly understanding these divides as ideological rather than empirical, based on the attitudes, affects, and practices of language users rather than on objectively observable realities.

Together, the papers on this panel think beyond diglossia to consider how Arab authors, translators, literary critics, and audiences have negotiated questions of identity, solidarity, and self-definition through a spectrum of performative Arabics.

Peiyu Yang will start with “Triangular Translation: The Anti-Colonial Subversion of Nahdawi Multi-Lingualism,” an exploration of the print and textual imaginary of China in Arabic literature from the Nahda period. Working with materials translated from Chinese to French and English, and then again from French and English to Arabic, the paper elaborates a theory of “triangular translation” to show how Nahdawi writing about China turned Orientalism against the discourse of colonialism, as Arab translators developed innovative methods for revitalizing Chinese source materials previously neutralized by European Orientalist translations. Triangular translation offers a model for rethinking lateral transmission and exploring how multilingual translators switch between registers as they use language to undermine colonial power.

Moving into the twentieth century, Michael Allan’s paper, “Twisting Tongues with Kilito and Fanon,” considers two contrasting accounts of linguistic fluency and understanding in Arabic. The first, from Abdelfattah Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, recounts converging stories of speakers nearly fluent in foreign tongues: an Italian inspector in a detective novel taken aback by a character’s fluency in the Venetian dialect, and Kilito’s own encounter with an American student nearly fluent in darija (Moroccan Arabic). Where Kilito’s stories frame language in terms of guest and host relations, Frantz Fanon, in a footnote to remarks on Algerian radio, describes listeners who, like himself, do not understand the formal Arabic of the FLN broadcast, but who tune in nonetheless, in solidarity with the Algerian liberation movement. If, in the first instance, linguistic fluency frames the conditions of trespass and transgression, in the second, tuning in bespeaks a form of solidarity and alignment beyond linguistic comprehension. Weaving together Kilito and Fanon, models of linguistic fluency versus allied listening, “Twisting Tongues” pushes the dynamics of Arabic multilingualism from the crisscross of these competing stories to the different political communities they imagine.

Finally, Brady Ryan’s paper, “Language and Historical Critique in al-Mawluda,” brings us into the twenty-first century to address the role of language registers in Egyptian author Nadiya Kamil’s 2018 novel al-Mawluda (2018). Kamil re-routes Egypt’s twentieth-century history, politics, and culture through the life and communist political commitments of her mother, Na’ila Kamil, née Marie Elie Rosenthal. Writing primarily in Egyptian ‘ammiyya, with Italian, French, formal Arabic, and English expressions, names, material objects, and cultural references also peppered into Marie’s narrative voice, Kamil moves beyond narrative monologue to engage readers in a dialogic encounter. She does not write ‘ammiyya against fusha, nor Arabic against French or Italian. Rather, through Marie’s multilingual narrative voice, Kamil criticizes national histories and the closed national identities they support, exposing the cultural multitudes that exist(ed) in Egypt without ceding to nostalgia for colonial cosmopolitanism. Marie’s story and narrative voice insist upon a localized sense of social, familial, and political belonging that is rooted in international political and cultural links.