Multiple Horizons of Expectations, Multiple Gibrans: Or, Gibran as World Literature

Chapter Four investigates the reception of Gibran’s Anglophone work in the United States and the Arab world. Excavating the early reviews of Gibran’s books in the US, the chapter discusses how and why they were received as monolithically ‘Oriental’ and ‘spiritual’, a modality of reception that flattens his text and predetermines its value in that cultural location. Also, the chapter examines the ways in which cultural translation and exoticism produce the symbolic value of The Prophet in the US, obscuring both its literary polysemy and the visibility of works other than The Prophet, leaving Gibran uncanonised. Highlighting the recontextualisation of Gibran in the Arab cultural geography, the chapter discusses his appropriation as a poet of modern vision and rupture by modernist poets such as Adonis and Yusuf al-Khal, going on to underscore the significance of the ‘Arabisations’ of The Prophet and the creative and philosophical afterlife of the Anglophone Gibran in Arabic. This movement reveals another regime of value that reconfigures how Gibran’s text is read, compelling us to disrupt the putative correlation between ‘English’ and the concept of ‘world literature’, and to deprivilege Euro-America in acts of literary and aesthetic evaluation.