Literary Ecologies and Post-9/11 Muslim Writing

In this chapter, I lay out some building blocks of my project, which concerns the small, but expanding, corpus of comparative literary studies of American Muslim writing. I analyse this corpus in terms of Alexander Beecroft’s literary ecologies, which requires an examination of the form and content of literary texts as well as their dissemination and reception, that is, the ways in which readers pull together authors and their works into a literature within the field of world literature. Since most contemporary writers work in/towards what Beecroft calls the emerging global ecology, my main proposal here is that American Muslim writing may not only find itself pulled into several directions through the workings of literary markets and diverse audiences, but also deliberately, through form and content, orient itself towards different ecologies.