The Riḥlahs and Road Trips of Modern Iraqi Literature: Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī’s Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā

Abstract This article situates the 1955 novel Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā by Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī as an exemplar of and commentary on the dynamics of twentieth-century Iraqi cultural production. Drawing on Margaret Litvin’s application of “travel literature readings” to modern diasporic and expatriate literatures, it analyzes the novel’s protagonist—in the form of a reincarnated, radically reformed version of the Abbasid-era poet Abū Nuwās—as engaging in a “ riḥlah -road-trip,” traversing the United States alongside an anonymous narrator. Rather than fashioning a conservative extension of the pre- and early modern riḥlah genre, in view of the author’s historical moment and works, this article argues that Khulūṣī parodies this genre by constructing critical distance and building intertextuality simultaneously. Khulūṣī draws on riḥlah s of the past, in which Iraq is represented as an advanced cosmopolitan destination, to speak to Iraq’s future as a differently globalized, modernizing state that grapples with its perceived temporal and cultural regress, much like the novel’s time-traveling protagonist.