Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Forced Migration and Speculative Fiction

• Provides a comparative and sustained analysis of how literary, political and aesthetic categories in Arabic literature are being rethought in response to contemporary contexts of forced migration
• Reads contemporary Arabic migration literature in dialogue with migration and borderland studies
• Analyses literary narratives set in less-studied Arab diasporic spaces such as Finland, Denmark and Germany, as well as on contemporary migratory routes such as the Mediterranean, Turkey and Eastern Europe
• Focuses on literature in the Arabic language while also including the work of francophone North African writers and writers publishing in both Arabic and European languages

Since the 1990s, Arabic exile literature in Europe has increasingly become a literature written from the perspective of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and others who are situated outside normatively defined citizenship. In this book, Johanna Sellman analyses the changing aesthetic and political dimensions of Arabic exile literature and demonstrates how frameworks such as east–west cultural encounters, political commitment and modernist understandings of exile – which were dominant in 20th-century Arabic exile literature – have been giving way to writing that explores the dynamics of forced migration and the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands.