The Reliability Effect in Anglophone Arab Writing and Translation

Ali A. Alhajji argues that world Anglophone Arab writing presents cross-cultural communication as a matter of form and credibility before it is a matter of cultural content. Routinely read as cultural translation, through which “Arab worlds” become accessible to Anglophone publics, these narratives do not simply perform the translator’s role; they interrogate and destabilize it, staging mediation as an aesthetic and political problem. Integrating postcolonial studies, world literature, narratology, and translation studies into a single analytic frame, this book treats reliability not as a narratorial trait but as a system, produced across an ensemble of mediations (narrative voice, paratext, literary prizes, and translation practice) that allocate trust before and beyond the page. The Reliability Effect in Anglophone Arab Writing and Translation reads paratexts and prize circuits as interpretive infrastructures that pre-script how texts should be trusted; examine unreliable narration, fragmentation, and multivocal design as strategies that refuse testimonial transparency; theorize reverse translation (English ? Arabic) as re-appropriation rather than neutral homecoming; and develop overwriting (Arabic ? English) as the conversion of culturally situated narration into ethnographic legibility within translation economies of funding, prizes, and censorship. Case studies range from Fadia Faqir, Rabih Alameddine, and Rawi Hage to Tayeb Salih, Jokha Alharthi, and Elias Khoury. Across these sites, Alhajji advances his central claim: “worldliness” is an institutional demand that reshapes literary form and reception, and the “reliability effect” names the mechanism by which Arabness becomes readable, and contestable, in global English.