Until recently, Arab-Brazilian relations have been largely invisible to area studies and Comparative Literature scholarship. Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) is the first book of its kind to highlight the representation of Arab and Muslim immigrants in a century of Brazilian literature and popular culture, from the 1920s to the present, revealing anxieties and contradictions in the country’s ideologies of national identity. Waïl S. Hassan shows how Brazilian novels, short stories, and telenovelas depict the Arab East paradoxically as a site of both otherness (different language, culture, and religion) and solidarity (with cultural, historical, demographic, and geopolitical ties). Hassan explores the differences between colonial Orientalism’s binary structure of Self/Other, East/West, and colonizer/colonized, on the one hand; and on the other hand Brazilian Orientalism’s ternary structure, which defines the country’s identity in relation to both North and East.