Cartographies of Identities: Resistance, Diaspora, and Trans-culturalDialogue in the Works of Arab British and Arab American Women Writers

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Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of themore nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among ArabBritish women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue andcross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their ArabAmerican counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resiststereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popularculture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arabimmigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looksat how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Arab Americannovelist Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light ofthe precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and inthe United States. Chapter Two examines how Arab British women writers AhdafSoueif and Leila Aboulela valorize trans-cultural and cross-ethnic dialogues andalliances in their novels The Map of Love and Minaret respectively through engagingwith the two (interlocking) strands of feminism in the Arab world: secular andIslamic feminisms. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate how the two novels of ArabAmerican women writers Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent and Laila Halaby’s West ofthe Jordan explore the contradictions of Arab American communities from withinand employ strategies of intertextuality and storytelling to subvert stereotypes aboutArabs. As this study is interested in exploring the historical and socio-politicalcontexts in which Arab women writers on both sides of the Atlantic produce theirwork, the conclusion investigates how the two sets of authors have represented, froman Arab perspective, the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in their novels.

Keyword(s)

Arab American; Arab British; Arab Women Writers; Diaspora; Islamic Feminism; Trans-cultural Dialogue

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