Proxidistant reading: Toward a critical pedagogy of the nahḍah in US comparative literary studies

This chapter focuses on both the theoretical importance and the practical experience of teaching the dynamics of early Arab literary modernity to non-specialist audiences–undergraduate and graduate–in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahḍah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman "decline" and post-European "awakening" and thus reinforce Orientalist views of Arab-Islamic culture in a post-9/11 era of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment; and second, a relative dearth of high-quality, in-print, and affordable English translations. Indeed, throughout late nineteenth- and especially early twentieth-century Arabic literary history and criticism, the scholar of the nahḍah encounters Arab self-murder. That the term nahḍah also translates as "awakening" compounds its translational instability. Certainly "awakening" skirts the direct comparison to European history that "renaissance" – a periodization freighted with European historical assumptions and cultural politics – implies.