In the ten years since the beginning of the Arab uprisings, the so-called Arab Spring and its repercussions have not only become the object of considerable media coverage and innumerable academic analyses, they have also often been fictionalised. In fact, there have been so many fictional adaptations of the uprisings that what the Egyptian author Youssef Rakha calls the ‘Arab Spring Industry’ now also constitutes a segment on the Western literary market. This segment includes a small number of texts – mostly in translation or written by diasporic writers – which paint a differentiated picture of the uprisings and their continuing revolutionary potential. Most Western fictionalisations of the uprisings, however, barely grant any representational space to the revolutions themselves, and hardly any of the texts prioritise the revolutionary claims for bread, freedom and social justice. Instead, these texts are often deeply preoccupied with a self-referential processing of the uprisings. This processing frequently manifests in the books’ predominantly unsuccessful attempts at distancing themselves from Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist forms of representation. Although most of the books try to overcome such forms of representation, they often replicate the very stereotypes which they try to surmount. In fact, this tendency is so strong – and marketable – that it is also discernable in some works by diasporic authors.

Through their transnational and comparatist design, the preceding close readings of the works of non-diasporic and diasporic authors have not only unfolded striking similarities of narrative structures and configurations which transcend the Orientalist literary traditions of individual countries, but they have also revealed the transnational impact of Neo-Orientalism. While most of the Western representations of the Arab uprisings struggle to transcend inveterate clichés and dichotomous modes of representing the Islamicate Other, they still rely on stereotypes which cast the Other as allegedly affect-driven, prone to violence, lust and passivity, backward or as incapable of establishing democracy or rule of law – even if often in an ironic or self-referential way. Moreover, most of the works adopt frames of insecurity, difference and distance to depict the Arab uprisings. As a consequence, although the texts feature narrative attempts to overcome individual stereotypes, this endeavour proves futile because the overarching frames of insecurity and distance in which they present these stereotypes remain mostly unchallenged. Fundamental reframings in different contexts of meaning are thus the exception rather than the rule.