The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of existence in the contemporary age of rapid communication of ideas has incited a renewed interest in studies of world literature. This is particularly significant with reference to Middle Eastern authors who have tried their hands, more than any time before, in writing works of fiction that address a global audience. Accordingly, the present study investigates the politics and poetics of born-translated Anglophone novels composed by select Middle Eastern authors in the last two decades. The subject is developed via the theoretical framework developed by contemporary critics of world literature including Damrosch, Casanova, Cheah, and Walkowitz. The category of “poetics” addresses issues related to the specific strategies and mechanisms, novelistic techniques, and rhetorical methods employed by these authors which identify their texts as instances of born-translated fiction. The “politics” addresses issues such as the choice of the subject matter, the depiction of social class and gender, audience and readership, the representation of space, and subjectivity. Through detailed readings of Kae Bahar’s Letters from a Kurd (2014), Sumia Sukkar’s The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War (2013), Elif shafak’s Honor (2012), Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2008), Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Laleh Kadivi’s The Walking (2013), and Prochista Khakpour’s The Last Illusion (2014), it is shown that these narratives employ similar techniques to make their narratives translatable and appealing to a global audience. While the study articulates major and minor differences in their authors’ approaches to and portrayals of their homeland, it also demonstrates the existence of a set of common formal, structural, and even thematic resemblances that exist among these diverse, sometimes incongruous, texts. The findings of the study suggest that these texts, through practicing partial fluency and self-translation, articulate themselves as global narratives at a time when the thirst for exoticism is dramatically heightened. The findings also suggest that the choice of the subject matter and the portrayals of the characters and the homeland are under the influence of factors beyond the authors’ personal preferences: factors like the demands of the global market, geopolitical determinants, and the critical historical moment in which these narratives are produced. While the majority of the selected narratives preserve a degree of originality by problematizing the stereotypical representations of the Middle East and the Middle Easterner established by other diasporic novels from the Middle East, two of them passively and uncritically reproduce those same clichés.
