Disforming The American Canon

“Has the potential to completely remake American Studies while serving as an excellent example of what theoretical informed criticism should be.” Paul Bové University of Pittsburgh To date, few critical studies have examined the African-American slave narratives that were written in Arabic, and none of these has seized the occasion to reconsider the problems of translation and canon formation, the relationship between literacy and reason, and the relation of Western Enlightenment reason to Arabi