Arabic-English intercultural and interlingual contacts in Ahdaf Soueif’s novels: a case of WEs ‘contact literature’ in the Expanding area

Historically, “[s]everal genres of so-called ‘contact literature’ have arisen in the Outer Circle English” (Bennui & Hashim, 2014b: 80; Kachru 1986: 160), as for example in India, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean where it has even led to both nativization and acculturation (Bolton, 2003: 198). Today, ‘contact literature’, characterised by a mixture of cultural and linguistic systems (Condon, 1986: 155), is emerging in some Expanding areas as well, as a new domain where English is creatively used. This occurs, for example, in Thailand (Bennui & Hashim, 2014b), China (Zhang, 2002) and Egypt (Albarkry & Hancock, 2008; Hassanin, 2012; Lebœuf, 2012) and would imply a move towards the inclusion of Expanding intercultural and interlingual literature in the WEs framework (Bennui & Hashim, 2014b: 80; Widdowson, 2019: 315). 28This paper, which is part of a wider research project, aims at investigating the phenomenon of intercultural and interlingual contacts in the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun (1992) one of her most famous work together with The Map of Love (1999). In In the Eye of the Sun, the author deliberately chose to use English, rather than Arabic, her mother-tongue, for creative expression and as a tool to relate about post-colonial Egypt. This creates hybrid perspectives (Lebœuf, 2012: 2) which constantly bring the West and the Arab worlds in contact (Lebœuf, 2012: 5) giving to her literature the privilege to be an intermediary between the two cultures (Blioumi, 2015), and a medium for spreading both intercultural and interlingual knowledge in readers through continuous use of culture-bound references, literary code-switching, lexical borrowing, and linguistic transfers from Arabic. On the footstep of Albarky & Hancock’s (2008) study, this paper’s methodology is based on Kachru’s (1987) framework on contact linguistic and thus on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the occurrence and typology of literary code-switching, lexical borrowings and all transferred discourse strategies (Kachru, 1986: 23) present in the novel focusing on the cultural and (socio)linguistic consequences of using these creative strategies in an Expanding literature as the Egyptian-English one.