Rawi Hage’s <i>Cockroach</i> and Laila Lalami’s <i>The Other Americans</i> : images of twenty-first century Occident in Arab eyes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The East–West encounter in the twenty-first century is a major theme in the works of contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic writers. However, unlike some Arab intellectuals and writers of the previous centuries whose accounts hyperbolically praised Western lifestyles and cultures, twenty-first-century Anglophone Arab diasporic writers draw a different image of the Occident. We argue that their texts tend to restructure Arab people’s inherited glamorised image of the ‘West’ by depicting the difficulties that Arab immigrants and refugees face there. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore the representation of the Occident in Lebanese-Canadian novelist Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008) and Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans (2021). We conclude that the selected novels, as well as other contemporary Anglophone Arab diasporic texts, can provide an insight into the importance of Occidentalism as a mechanism through which Occidentalist literature sheds light on the unconceived matters that Arabs, whether immigrants or living in the Arab world, are oblivious to and reminds the ‘West’ of the struggles that Arab immigrants/refugees encounter while living in Western societies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".