Racially white but culturally colored: Defining contemporary Arab-American literature and its transnational connections
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on the burgeoning field of contemporary Arab-American literature as an important site for negotiating the complexities of Arab-American identity. Arguing against the US Census Bureau's current racial categorization of Arab-Americans as white, my current project situates Arab-American literature within the US ethnic canon while underscoring the transcontinental and cross-cultural Arab-American connections to the Arab world. Drawing on a wide range of US ethnic and postcolonial theory and criticism, including such critical tropes as Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory, Audre Lorde's poetics, Khachig Tölöyan's theories of diaspora and transnationalism, and Lisa Lode's discussions of ethnic cultural formations, my research lays the groundwork for a complex analysis of Arab-American communal and individual identities, based on both national and transnational literary approaches. A selection of contemporary Arab-American literary works is handled in each chapter, focusing on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, multiple belongings, and transnational citizenship from an Arab-American perspective. These works include novels by Rabih Alameddine: I, the Divine (2001), and Diana Abu-Jaber: Crescent (2003); poetry by Mohja Kahf, Suheir Hammad, Dima Hilal, and Nathalie Handal; as well as memoirs by Edward Said: Out of Place (2000), and Joanna Kadi: Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker (1996). Highlighting the varying ethnic, religious, national, political, and cultural components of these texts' Arab-American makeup, this dissertation argues for a nuanced understanding of Arab-American communal and individual identities and their ties to the Arab world in general. The selection of texts analyzed in this study provides an in-depth investigation of some of the major themes and issues currently handled by a majority of contemporary Arab-American writers to highlight the most dominant tropes characterizing this fast developing literary field. This project, then, ultimately shows how literature not only becomes a conduit to examine the main Arab-American sociopolitical and cultural conditions, but becomes in itself a valuable record of a community's divergent and multitudinous concerns. It is a valuable discipline to investigate questions of identity and ethnicity for Arab-Americans since it complicates these questions by offering individualized segments of experience weaving into and simultaneously woven out of a larger and more general Arab-American tapestry.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Sagar, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature|Ethnic studies|Sociology
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