Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel by Mazen Naous (review)

Abstract

In Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel, Mazen Naous persuasively argues that the contemporary Arab American novel creates an empowering space for reimagining the lived realities of Arab Americans along “transcultural and transpoetic lines,” thereby countering stereotypical, orientalist, and homogenizing discourses about Arab Americans, particularly in a post-9/11 United States. Engaging the aesthetic and the political, and the aesthetic-as-political, Naous provides insightful textual analyses of prominent Arab American novels that take place in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United States. He excavates the innovative aesthetic interventions in each novel, showing how the novels’ poetics, thematic and political content, and narrative techniques are deeply intertwined and cogenerative. For Naous, these novels contribute to developing what he calls a “polyphonic multiplex of Arab American selfexpression and art” (191). The novels seek to recuperate Arab American identities and experiences from both invisibility and “hyper-in-visibility,” by casting characters, settings, and plots that demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Arab Americans and that elucidate their interconnectedness with other communities within and beyond the United States. In the first chapter, Naous provides a close reading of Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) by Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine. He argues that by incorporating the poetics of AIDS dementia and repetition, the novel unsettles mainstream myths about the United States’ legendary capacity to provide a safe haven for immigrants who have fled the violence of war and discrimination in their countries of origin. Here, Naous deftly shows the ways in which the author employs AIDS dementia as a means of queering religious texts by revealing their mutability and instability. Providing an analysis of Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Arabian Jazz (1993), the second chapter interrogates the role of jazz, particularly improvisation and the blue note, in advancing a “dialogic” Arab American experience that shares much in common with the struggles and resistances of other minoritized populations, particularly African Americans and Native Americans. Naous exquisitely deconstructs the names of the Arab American characters,