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العنوان
Borderland Arab-American Consciousness in selected Works by Mohja Kahf and Laila Halaby /
المؤلف
Abd El Rahman, Nehal Ashraf Mohammad.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / Nehal Ashraf Mohammad Abd El Rahman
مشرف / Sara Rashwan
مشرف / Somaya Sami Sabry
مشرف / Somaya Sami Sabry
تاريخ النشر
2019.
عدد الصفحات
242p. ؛
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
ماجستير
التخصص
الأدب والنظرية الأدبية
تاريخ الإجازة
1/1/2019
مكان الإجازة
جامعة عين شمس - كلية الآداب - اللغة الانجليزية
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

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Abstract

The genre of Arab-American literature, especially novels, has experienced an authentic boom in the last decade, which opens up a wide field of questions concerning the aesthetics and politics of Arab-American literature in a post 9/11 U.S. context. That is why, Arab-American novelists tend to employ literary strategies to resist stereotypes and misconceptions about their Arab communities in American popular culture. Thus, this study examines the representation of diasporic identity and consciousness of Arab-American women living in the borderland, those who are torn in-between two identities. They are both inside and out, they dwell upon the hyphen that acts as a form of resistance to all the racism, discrimination, fragmentation and negative stereotyping before and after the terrorist events of 9/11. Additionally, they face various forms of displacement on notions of identity, consciousness, home, and belonging. The study argues that the events of 9/11 constitute the heterogeneity, difference, and plurality of Arab-American experience and identity. Undoubtedly, Arab racialization prior to and after 9/11 has come to permeate Arab-American consciousness, as a unique condition of psychic fragmentation.
Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in The Tangerine Scarf (2006) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) highlight the ways in which Arab diasporic subjects counter the sense of ‘Otherness’ and multiple forms of exclusion that grounds their estrangement in the diaspora. These works illustrate that Arab diasporic individuals and communities reconstitute themselves as the in-between/third space subjects, who maintain multiple attachments that bind their Arab homeland to new places of settlement, and in doing so, create new forms of homeland.
Further, Mohja Kahf and Laila Halaby examine Arab-American women protagonists’ struggle to find a space for themselves within their families and their communities in order to
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construct their hyphenated identities. Their work opens possibilities for Arab-American women’s subjectivities in the in-between space, as cultural mediators that defy East/West binaries. Thus, they destabilize a clear cut notion of a stable U.S. culture based on prescribed standards of stereotyping and escape a neoliberal logic that validates only certain kinds of diversity.
The study draws on several intersecting theoretical models, as Third Wave Feminism, and Arab-American Feminism among other theories but it is based primarily on Anzaldúa’s borderland theory and her mestiza consciousness as well as Homi Bhabha’s notion of third space as the medium to explore and investigate them in relation to Arab-American women’s experience in America