Waïl S. Hassan

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2025 Albert Hourani Book Award Honorable Mention

Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism

Oxford University Press

Based on an extensive analysis of Arab-Brazilian literary and cultural works since the twentieth century, this book makes a significant scholarly contribution to the understudied subject of South-South relations and transnational or interregional migration. Conceptually, the book shows the inherent contradictions in Brazilian national identity and ideology which simultaneously conceive of the Arab world as a site of both solidarity and otherness. While Brazilians commiserate with the Arab world’s colonial past, they also consider its Muslims to be distinct from Catholics. Consequently, and contrary to Western Orientalism’s binary configuration of us versus them, Brazilian Orientalism contains a ternary tendency to at once identify with and distinguish itself from the Arab world. 

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