Reading Cultural Translation in Two “New Arrival” Arab American Novels

<p>This chapter highlights how Arab American writers have long been telling stories about immigration, displacement, belonging, and community formation. The chapter primarily focuses on Laila Lalami's work <italic>The Moor's Account</italic> (2014) and Rabih Alameddine's <italic>The Angel of History</italic> (2016) as examples of cultural translation and border crossing within literature. The shifts in the assessment and appreciation of Arab and Arab American literature and its translational relationship have occurred at a moment of power imbalance between Arab countries and the United States. The chapter argues that Arab cultural translation efforts are decentered, multivalent, and heteroglossic sites of resistance. It explains how the premigration and postmigration stories remind readers that the metropolitan site has been suffering from postcolonial melancholia owing to its loss of what it is supposed to be, a glorious empire.</p>