Rawi Hage's Cockroach and Laila Lalami's The Other Americans: images of twenty-first century Occident in Arab eyes

The East-West encounter in the twenty-first century is a major theme in the works of contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic writers. However, unlike some Arab intellectuals and writers of the previous centuries whose accounts hyperbolically praised Western lifestyles and cultures, twenty-first-century Anglophone Arab diasporic writers draw a different image of the Occident. We argue that their texts tend to restructure Arab people's inherited glamorised image of the 'West' by depicting the difficulties that Arab immigrants and refugees face there. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore the representation of the Occident in Lebanese-Canadian novelist Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008) and Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami's The Other Americans (2021). We conclude that the selected novels, as well as other contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic texts, can provide an insight into the importance of Occidentalism as a mechanism through which Occidentalist literature sheds light on the unconceived matters that Arabs, whether immigrants or living in the Arab world, are oblivious to and reminds the 'West' of the struggles that Arab immigrants/refugees encounter while living in Western societies.

Automated summary

The representation of the Occident in the works of contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic writers offers a different image of the West compared to previous Arab intellectuals and writers. These texts aim to restructure the glorified image of the West inherited by Arab people, depicting the challenges faced by Arab immigrants and refugees. The importance of Occidentalism in shedding light on the struggles encountered by Arab immigrants/refugees in Western societies is highlighted in novels like Rawi Hage's Cockroach and Laila Lalami's The Other Americans.