This dissertation traces the conceptual and affective topography of "home" as a locus of personal identity, relationality, and collectivity at two sites of cultural production on the fringes of the Arabo-Islamic world. Specifically, I compare modern short stories and novels published by Francophone Maghrebian writers and Persophone Iranian writers over the course of the past century, focusing on tropes of longing, belonging, and unbelonging in these texts. In order to analyze the fraught modes of representation that dominate these works, I develop the concept of "un(der)writing," a theoretical framework that accounts for the ambivalent affects and unconscious libidinal forces at work in literary representations of home. This term, as I define it, evokes a double movement whereby the idea and sense of home is simultaneously underwritten and unwritten, affirmed and negated, appropriated and disowned.

By using this term, I seek to underscore the struggle between a person's political and affective investment in the home as well as the ruptures that emerge inevitably in the process of writing. That is, any politics built on a commitment to the home will be haunted by negative affects associated with it, just as any politics built on the necessity of disowning the home will be haunted by lingering attachments to that place. "Un(der)writing" thus serves as an analytic tool to expose the "ghosts" that emerge symptomatically in narrative representations of home and enables reading practices that are attentive to the self-deconstructive tendencies of literature in general.

Un(der)writing Home thus foregrounds the affective currents that flow through modern world literatures, elucidating the psychological investments that motivate collective identifications and drive the development of modernist aesthetics at two distinct sites of cultural production. Moreover, with its focus on authors who are relegated to the outskirts of dominant Anglo-European centers of literary production and reception, this study presents a way of reading "minor" literatures transnationally while respecting their cultural and historical specificity. As such, it provides new perspectives on emergent literatures of the Muslim world and offers a critical intervention into longstanding debates within Iranian Studies, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and the discipline of Comparative Literature.