6. The Challenge of Anglophone Arab Studies: For a Post-Integrationist Critical Practice

I have always distrusted the Orientalist obsession with origins and roots in which seeing the Orientals’ true roots is hardly anything more than a function of where the Occidental stands.This is the first reason I would have liked to skip the question of beginnings entirely. I wanted no essentialist excuses for my approach to reading Anglophone Arab works. I would have preferred being liberated from the arguable obligation to begin my study by naming selected preand interstices among all other possible beginnings. I wanted to approach Anglophone Arab works as selfconscious works of art and literature without any Orientalist pre-qualification and without using any culturally specific interpretive code. There would have been no beginnings and no endings, no pre-texts and no intertexts of importance, and no interpretive prefiguration. Instead, Anglophone Arab articulations would have been approached as autonomous aesthetic works with their own sense of achievement beyond their existence as Anglophone carriers of Arab culture. They would be explained right from their respective inside, and they would be approached at the moment of their individual emergence. Their unique truth would firmly stand within the self-proceeding text or image, and that truth would emerge immediately from these representations’ close reading. Yet, the noble but equally naïve wish of recognizing Anglophone Arab works by universal standards in their pure aesthetic existence and not by using any particular (Anglo-)Arab predicament as the interpretive matrix would have run the risk of ignoring these aesthetics’ specific correlations, both regarding their discursive formation as well as with a view to their potential and de-facto discursive effectivity. The archival arrangement of possible Anglophone Arab statements and the terms by which we recognize the appearance of these statements—the order of Anglophone Arab discourse, so to speak—is much too striking regarding its non-intentional