Eritrean Literature and its present in Arabic language

Abstract

Following the international success of authors from the Eritrean diaspora such as Abū Bakr Khaāl and Ḥajī Jābir, an interest on the extent of Eritrean Literature has emerged. As a matter of fact, the standard Arabic literary canon could be analyzed and constructed under new paradigms. Accordingly, in this paper we take Eritrea as a case study to describe the historiographical and present state of the art on the Islamization and Arabization of historical Abyssinia, attending to the sociology of culture and the literary production. We try to identify references, authors, and works in defining a coherent account of Eritrean Letters in its different languages: Arabic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Italian and English —for the first time in our academic bibliography—, to finally focus on the boom of Eritrean narrative in Arabic language. The paper ends with a preliminary study of the most important Eritrean novels in Arabic.