This book critically negotiates the intersection between western and Arabic city literature deploying narratives of violence and fear penetrating into the heart of the Arab Inferno whereas people are colonized by the decadent moral codes of pre-industrial cities and tyrannized by military establishments and repressive / brutal regimes. Arguing that western city literature is born out of the existentialist complications confronting writers living in a highly industrialized and commercialized metropolis this pioneering study explores the attempt of a new generation of Arab writers to integrate...

This book navigates discourses of violence and racism in American and Arabic literatures breaking through trans-cultural barriers and interrogating the colonial history of the Middle East and Africa. Reconstructing the socio-political image of a shattered region, this critical study challenges politics of oppression advocated by local tyrannical regimes. Besides the book aims to subvert conspiratorial narratives which justify colonization by depicting the colonial process as a historically inevitable movement of progress toward bringing civilization to the land of the barbarians.