The Arab diaspora has shaped Arabic literature for more than a century. The Mahjar circle — Khalil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, Elia Abu Madi, Amin Rihani — wrote in early-twentieth-century New York and Boston in an Arabic that had been transformed by their distance from the Arab world. The mid-century Arab literary diaspora was Soviet (al-Bayati in Moscow, Adonis in Beirut), then Parisian (Kanafani's contemporaries), then increasingly Anglophone.
The contemporary Arab diaspora is now plural: London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Helsinki, Sydney, the Gulf cities themselves. Ahdaf Soueif, Susan Abulhawa, Rabih Alameddine, Hisham Matar, Adania Shibli, Mohja Kahf write in English; Sinan Antoon, Hassan Blasim, Inaam Kachachi, Hoda Barakat in Arabic from the diaspora. The question of what counts as "Arab" literature when the writer is third-generation Detroit or second-generation Birmingham is one of the live questions of contemporary Arab letters.
