الفهرس 
from Diaspora to Hybridity: The In-Betweenness of Arab-American Pre and Post 9/11Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The dissertation focuses on the Arab-American community as an example of diasporic ethnic communities living in the US. It examines the representation of diasporic identity and consciousness in Arab diasporic narratives from the US. Central to the thesis is the restless quest of diasporic Arab-American women in order to find themselves a space between two cultures. They are struggling and resisting all hegemonic and patriarchal structures of oppression. They unrestlessly insist on creating a voice of their own. As diasporic and hybrid creatures, they are carving a space in Bhabha’s third space and Anzaldua’s ethnic borderlands to engage their hybrid identities. Related to the previous concepts and themes, issues such as dispora, space, displacement, culture crossing, ethnicity, gender, collective and individual identities, the Arab-American feminism dilemma of self-identification within two cultures and stereotypes will be highlighted throughout the thesis.
The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first one examines and analyzes the diasporic and hybrid experience of Arab-Americans and their in-betweenness pre and post 9/11. Moreover, the second chapter examines the diasporic element of displacement in Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003) and Once in a Promised Land (2007). The third chapter depicts the dilemma of the Muslim Arab-American woman who struggles to maintain a cross-cultural identity in MohjaKahf‘s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) and her collection of poems, Emails from Scheherazad (2003) in which Kahf introduces Scheherazad figure as a nexus of Muslim feminist rewriting of distorted orientalist representations of Muslim womanhood. Finally, the fourth chapteris dedicated to analyzing hybridity and ethnic borderlands which are best represented in Diana Abu Jaber‘s Arabian Jazz (1993), and Crescent (2003). It is worth noting that the literary works of these Arab-American women writers represent a new wave of Arab-American writing that places the Arab-American culture as part of American cultures. They also serve to undermine stereotypes and create new spaces for Arab-American women‘s subjectivities.