Bearing the above in mind, this panel foregrounds portrayals of migrants and migration in Arabic and Arab diasporic literature and film. Whereas an earlier scholarly discourse focused primarily on depictions of Arabs as voyeurs, consumers, and students of “Western” culture; as partially assimilated minority subjects in Europe and the United States; or as the protagonists of exilic narratives of political disenfranchisement (El-Enany 2006; Hassan 2011; Said 1999), this panel responds to more recent calls to rethink migrants and migration as an integral part of a transnational Arab imaginary extending from the Gulf region to the Maghreb, while also encompassing geographies in the traditionally designated “West” as themselves rich sites of Arab/ic cultural production (Chubb 2015; Hassan 2018; Sellman 2018). It does so by emphasizing the intersection of migration and work as a critical nexus that yields valuable insights about migrants in Arab/ic literature and film as embodied subjects who resist reduction to the nomenclature (refugee, asylee, exile, domestic servant, wage laborer, etc.) that has sought to define them solely by their political, legal, or economic standing in the contemporary global order.
The panel begins with a pair of papers that interrogate how female migrants in texts by two contemporary Arab authors mobilize affective and somatic dimensions of work to disrupt social and conceptual frameworks that yoke migration to the exigencies of the global economy. In the first paper, Katie Logan reads Egyptian author Miral al-Tahawy’s 2010 Arabic-language novel Brooklyn Heights as a text that posits knowledge produced through the working body as inherently feminist, yet without glorifying the socioeconomic conditions that necessitate manual labor in the first place. Linking such labor with motherhood, gender, and memory, Logan challenges the notion that deep thought about migration can only take place within discourses that obscure the affective work of the migrant herself.
In the second paper, Hanan Al-Alawi examines Kuwaiti stateless poet Mona Kareem’s 2016 epistolary poem “Kumari” to argue that the dispossessed bodies of migrant domestic women in the Arab Gulf generate a feminist visceral knowledge that evades co-optation into a reproducible commodity. Noting that migrant subjectivity has yet to be explored via an understanding of the body as a site that precludes commodifiable experience, Al-Alawi demonstrates how the somatic articulations of the titular Kumari—a South Asian woman employed in the home of an Arab Gulf family—generate an alternative feminist liminality evident in the text’s aesthetic form.
Moving from the individual migrant experience to the collective, a second pair of papers investigates forms of labor among Arab migrant groups that resist precarity and reclaim agency in migratory conditions of displacement. In the first of these two papers, Salman Rafique considers the precariousness of life for Tunisian laborers in contemporary France as depicted in Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s feature film The Secret of the Grain (2007). In Rafique’s analysis, the film shows how economic precarity under the logic of neoliberalism is distributed unequally across race, class, gender, and citizenship, while yet simultaneously becoming an impetus to modes of relationality organized publicly and privately by the affective and immaterial labor of the workers.
Daniel Behar’s paper concludes the panel by examining blogging, poetry, and creative nonfiction produced by a self-identified population of “nafar”—Syrian migrants living abroad who have configured a makeshift post-national collective concentrated around the physical space of the “job center” (locales that serve Middle Eastern food and hukkahs, as well as organizing leisure activities and language classes). Constituted primarily by their shared attitudes toward work, Behar argues, the nafar articulate new sensibilities and subjectivities outside the humanitarian playbook that has overdetermined the figure of the Syrian migrant since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Each panelist will be allotted maximum 10–12 minutes to speak, leaving approximately 25 minutes for discussion at the end of the session.