Gibran Khalil Gibran as Arab World Literature

The monograph studies the Arab émigré writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. Reading his Arabic and Anglophone writings together, it situates Gibran within his worldly contexts of global modernity and the Arab Nahḍa or renaissance to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in Arab Nahḍa. In its situated close readings of Gibran’s work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception: namely, that the prophetic in Gibran is a mode of writing and imagination that straddles both languages; that the poetic is the universal imprint that fundamentally distinguishes his literary enterprise; and that the national for him stands for a creative ethics of belonging beyond religion and ethnicity. The book, furthermore, probes Gibran’s American reception alongside its Arabic counterpart. It highlights and interrogates the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of the Arab American writer. The aim of this critical examination is to demythologise Gibran, that is, to read his work in its literary, intellectual and historical specificity, and to investigate his intriguing reception and relevance as an Arab, world writer.