Towards a Theory of Arabic-Nigerian Multilingual Literary Aesthetics: A Critical Study of Contemporary Nigerian Arabic Fiction

Contemporary Nigerian authors writing fiction in Arabic represent an emerging but critically under-examined literary phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the relationship between Arabic literary aesthetics, Nigerian narrative traditions, postcolonial identity, and the transnational circuits through which Arabic literary production travels in the twenty-first century. This study develops an original theoretical framework for Arabic-Nigerian multilingual literary aesthetics through a systematic critical examination of the body of Arabic fiction produced by Nigerian authors published between 2005 and 2024. Drawing on a combination of Arabic literary criticism, postcolonial literary theory, and African multilingual aesthetic frameworks, the research assembles and analyses a corpus of 22 full-length Arabic novels and 45 short stories by Nigerian authors, situating each work within its author's biographical, educational, and institutional context and examining the texts for the distinctive aesthetic choices, narrative strategies, and cultural negotiations that characterise Arabic literary production from a Nigerian perspective. The study pays particular attention to the tension between adherence to Arab world generic conventions and the assertion of specifically Nigerian narrative voices, the treatment of Islamic themes in a Nigerian social context, and the deployment of multilingual textual strategies including untranslated Hausa, Yoruba, and English insertions. Keywords: Nigerian Arabic fiction, literary aesthetics, postcolonial literature, African Arabic literature, multilingual narrative.