Waïl Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Waïl Hassan’s Immigrant Narratives offers an ambitious subtitle: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. Yet this subtitle does not actually encompass the breadth of material Hassan covers. The five key terms of the subtitle have long been multi-definitional (and contested) among literary scholars: “Orientalism”; “Cultural Translation”; “Arab American”; “Arab British”; “Literature.” Yet Hassan does little to resolve those terms. This lack of resolution constitutes the strength of Hassan’s ambitious project, for he elucidates rather than simplifies, a necessity for those working with the complexities of cultural production in the Arab diaspora.