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Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2018

Ira Dworkin
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Abstract

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography, Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel, Siraaj: An Arab Tale, which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

Keywords

Radwa AshourSiraaj: An Arab TaleShirley Graham Du BoisEkueme Michael ThelwellFirst International Congress of Negro Writers and Artistscolonialism
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Ebony Coletu, Perin Gurel, and Michelle Hartman for their brilliant comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

1 Amiri Baraka [as Ameer Baraka], “ ‘We Are Our Feeling’: The Black Aesthetic,” Negro Digest 18.11 (September 1969): 5, quoted in Radwa Ashour, “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975), 154.

2 Radwa Ashour, chapter 1 of The Journey, 1983, trans. Michelle Hartman, Comparative American Studies 13.4 (December 2015): 215.

3 Ashour, “The Search for a Black Poetics,” v.

4 Ibid.

5 For a short excerpt previously translated by Ghada Sobaie, see Abdel-Malek, Kamal, ed., America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature. An Anthology, 1895–1995 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 117–119 Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Aidi, Hisham and Marable, Manning, eds., Black Routes to Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar; Daulatzai, Sohail, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Feldman, Keith P., A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Lubin, Alex, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Thomas, Greg, “Blame It on the Sun: George Jackson and the Poetry of Palestinian Resistance,” Comparative American Studies 13.4 (December 2015): 236–253 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 Nkrumah, Gamal, “Rendezvous with History,” Al-Ahram Weekly 437 Google Scholar, July 8–14, 1999, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/1999/437/bk9_437.htm. At one point, Mouird Barghouti had hoped to translate Turé’s writings. Ashour also approached Shaaban Mekkawi, who translated Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, to translate Turé. Mekkawi, who passed away before he was able to undertake the project, was Ashour’s graduate student; Thelwell served on his dissertation committee. Special thanks to Tahia Abdel Nasser for helping me to reconstruct this history.

41 Ibid.

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48 Though it is often transcribed in English as ‘Urabi or Urabi, for the purposes of this essay, I have followed Romaine’s spelling of Orabi in her translation of Siraaj and in Ashour, Radwa, “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller: My Experience as a Novelist,” The Massachusetts Review 41.1 (Spring 2000): 90 Google Scholar. For additional historical context on the rebellion, see Cole, Juan R. I., Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Culture Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

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92 Ashour, , “Eyewitness, Scribe and Story Teller,” 89 Google Scholar. See Harlow, Barbara, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar.