3. Khalid’s Book and How Not to Bow Down Before Rihani

Abstract

First published in 1911, Ameen Fares Rihani’sThe Book of Khalid has long remained neglected in the intellectual history of both the Arab world and North America. In 2012, it was republished by Melville House’s Neversink Library, thanks to the efforts of Todd Fine and his Project Khalid, a campaign to commemorate the book’s centennial anniversary. Written in English by a self-identified Arab, the novel is usually perceived as the inaugural text of Arab-American immigrant literature and is thus hastily assimilated into the gradually expanding national canon of so-called ethnic literatures. Additionally, other critics reclaim The Book of Khalid for Arab cultural history by placing it among the first modern Arab novels, thereby implicitly affirming the Eurocentric devaluation of earlier novelistic writings in Arabic. It is probably correct to say that the narrative anticipates many of the challenges related to the experience of geographic dislocation and the dynamics of translocal identification that are addressed in later Anglophone Arab migratory