الفهرس 
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Abstract
Chapter One starts off with the contentiousness of the term “Arab American” by explaining the lack of racial, social, religious and political homogeneity of the community, thus debunking any essentialist view of this minority. Moreover, the chapter ventures on a contextualization of Arab American literature as far as anthologizing is concerned. This is done while tracing the political and historical trepidations which overlap with the anthologies and which inform either the community’s racial recognition or rejection. The paradigm shift is made visible in the historically varying attitudes of the editors as a gauge for the transformation that the Arab American literary community has had to undergo.
Chapter Two sets out to chronicle the evolution of the several trends of Arab American feminism. The objective of the chapter is to contextualize this relatively new discourse against mainstream white feminism to highlight its inappropriateness as a discourse unsuited for Arab American women’s concerns and identities. As an alternative, women of color feminism is offered as another set of tenets which shares more affinities with women of Middle Eastern descent, yet is presented as a discourse lacking a great deal of emotional requirements and recognition for Arab American ideologies. The chapter then explores the complexities that Arab American gender/political justice activists and feminists face in trying to form rewarding cross- cultural coalitions with other feminists of color. It then goes on to give a brief historical outline for the Arab American feminist movement and inspects the motivations and reasons behind creating this discourse. A relevant interdisciplinary theoretical background is then suggested for the study. The chapter then rounds up the discussion by drawing attention to the already budding opus of Arab American literature and shedding light on the role that Arab American feminism could have in promoting the opus and in attracting critical attention to it
Chapter Three examines the non-fictional writings of a respected icon and a pioneer poet among Arab American feminist voices, Etel Adnan. The two works of non-fiction chosen for this study are Adnan’s Of Cities and Women: Letters to Fawwaz (1993) and her memoir In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005). Guided by several affinities that this study finds between the two works of non-fiction and the overarching tenets of Border Theory, this chapter sets out to illustrate how Etel Adnan’s writings have opened a middle passage that Homi K. Bhabha believed would evade the politics of polarity. Adnan’s subversive work defies her own colonial heritage and her work is an act of decolonizing herself first, shaping her own Self second and accepting it last. Adnan’s hybridity and the multiculturalism of her life style together with the international dimension always present in her work intensify the paradox of simultaneous criticism of both sides of the duality. Contingency is exhibited by Adnan as a reaction to the obvious contradictions of her life and her irresolution towards her identity and her exile render her dichotomous duality an apt illustration of the clash between construction of identity and exile, displacement and re-territorialization.
Chapter Four reflects on six poetry collections by two Palestinian American poets, namely Nathalie Handal and Suheir Hammad, both very actively involved in the feminist scene. The Lives of Rain (1996), The Neverfield (2005), Love and Strange Horses (2011) are selected as representative of Handal’s oeuvre whereas Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996), Zaatar Diva (2005) and breaking poems (2008) are chosen as demonstrative of Hammad’s poetic output. It is made obvious that whereas Handal, a representative of one trend of feminist thought, is negotiating her identity in a space that is liminal and provisional, Hammad, a model for the latest school of feminism that seeks recognition through alliances with other more established racial and cultural minorities in the U.S., has completed the transformation by circumnavigating borderzones altogether. Both poets resort to their respective techniques of identity formation which range from sexual revolution and the use of the female body to denote political resistance, all the way to re-conceptualizing notions of home and belonging.
Chapter Five zooms in on two works of fiction by two Arab American women poets, whose chosen texts are often referenced by feminist scholars exploring the female Arab American literary scene. Their central characters are illustrative of the construction of the Muslim and non-religious Arab American feminine identity, respectively. The first text, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) is by Syrian American poet Mohja Kahf and the second, Once in a Promised Land (2007), is by Palestinian-Jordanian American poet Laila Halaby. The subversiveness of both texts make them good examples for not only dismantling and correcting U.S. media’s counterfeit notions of Islam and Arabness, but also for representing an Arab American feminist trend that refuses to phrase the dilemmas of Arab and Arab American women in an either-or formula and both succeed in evading the binary