The prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era in Iraqi fiction. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations become noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectivities in 20^th-century Iraqi fiction, and then culls examples of recent diasporic Iraqi novels in which these subjectivities are encoded and amplified in distinct ways. In the diasporic novel, I argue, modern Iraqi intellectuals attain the conceptual and political distance necessary for contending retrospectively with their formative socialization experiences in Iraq. Through a new medium of marginalization—the diasporic experience of the authors themselves—they are equipped with a newfound desire to unmask subcultures in Iraq and to write more effectively about marginal aspects of Iraqi identity inside and outside the country. These new diasporic writings showcase processes of ethnic and religious socialization in the Iraqi public sphere. The result is deconstruction of mainstream Iraqi identity narratives and instrumentalization of marginal identities in a nonviolent struggle against sectarian violence.

This essay studies Afro-Asian sociocultural interactions in cultural production by or about Asian Latin Americans, with an emphasis on Cuba and Brazil. Among the recurrent characters are the black slave, the china mulata, or the black ally who expresses sympathy or even marries the Asian character. This reflects a common history of bondage shared by black slaves, Chinese coolies, and Japanese indentured workers, as well as a common history of marronage. These conflicts and alliances between Asians and blacks contest the official discourse of mestizaje (Spanish-indigenous dichotomies in Mexico and Andean countries, for example, or black and white binaries in Brazil and the Caribbean), which, under the guise of incorporating the Other, favored whiteness, all the while attempting to silence, ignore, or ultimately erase their worldviews and cultures.

The present paper offers a reading of three selected novels by two Anglophone Arab writers Diana Abujaber and Fadia Faqir. Our reading is fundamentally based on a philosophical post-humanist perception of other ethnic minorities as being inferior and un-human. In interpreting the three novels, Arabian Jazz (2003), My Name is Salma (2007) and Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014), a main concern is to bring to light how Arabs –and Muslims –have been zombified and de-humanized in Western mainstream media and culture based on a biased stigmatization and stereotyping of a large heterogeneous ethnic group wherein religions, traditions, languages and cultures are diverse. Also, a pivotal preoccupation is going to be the exiling journey of the protagonists from their homelands to Western countries, and how these journeys contribute to the post-humanization of the self, the identity and the culture of Arab displaced immigrants.