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Master of Arts / Department of English / Gregory J. Eiselein / In her collection of poems The War Works Hard (2005), Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail presents her readers with unembellished insight into the Iraqi war from a woman's perspective. This perspective is rarely voiced in Iraqi war literature which is dominated by male writers concerned with men's heroism at the battle front and boundless patriotism. At the same time, these male authors rarely depict Iraqi women's experiences of war beyond the battle grounds. Even when women are present in such literature, they often share their men's point of view on war and voice only their acceptance of it. Mikhail, however, contemplates a counter narrative to this stereotypical female role by presenting women who protest war and the destruction it causes. Her poems portray mothers, lovers, sisters and daughters who protest war's brutality and injustice. Some of the women in Mikhail's poems protest war by directly or indirectly criticizing its institutions and condemning the leaders who promote it. While other women in her work find that their protest lies in their de-fragmentation of the destruction and loss caused by war, thus refusing its power over them and their loved ones. Yet, the most important form of women's protest of war in Mikhail's work is recollection. Through the recollection of their fragmented memories and lives, Mikhail's women manage to survive and find a spark of optimism in the darkness that war has unleashed. Their survival and their ability to re-establish their lives apart from war and the presence of men constitutes a powerful and dramatic protest of war's control over their lives.

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Discrimination occurs against underrepresented and misrepresented cultures in the United States of America. Hate crimes, racism, and stereotyping are not only against adults but also students in the educational system. These actions are causing division within our nation. There is a movement for transforming the classroom into one that is culturally inclusive for everyone. These Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) methods can help to unite our nation by celebrating diversity. One very effective method to achieve this is by using multicultural literature in classrooms as a way for students to see themselves as if looking in mirrors, understand their peers as if looking through windows, and empathize with other cultures as if stepping through a sliding glass door into the other culture (Bishop, 1990). Arab Americans too often are experiencing discrimination at the same or worse levels than other underrepresented and misrepresented cultures. The goal of this study was to find quality books by and about Arab Americans as multicultural literature is an effective means for creating a culturally inclusive classroom. My first step was to locate any and all books I could find that were written by or about Arab Americans. Then using specific parameters, I narrowed my findings to list only the quality literature I found within the last ten years. These findings are listed for teachers to use and access with ease. While reading these books in the classroom, it is important to initiate conversations with and among the students. Therefore, I created a list of general guiding questions that pair with the literature for teachers to use in their classrooms to get their students talking and thinking about the multicultural books they are reading. These discussions can help move classrooms into ones that celebrate individual cultures, embrace diversity, and instill empathy among the students.

This research investigates the intersection of religion, self-identification, and imperialism in a number of Arab American literary works. It engages a wide array of, and contributes to, scholarship from American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Islamic Studies, Global Studies, and Transnational Literary Theory. The project examines two groups of writers: the first group consists of American cultural conservatives of Arab or Muslim descent, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Bridgette Gabrielle, and Wafa Sultan, while the second includes Arab American literary writers Mohja Kahf, Leila Ahmed, Ibrahim Fawal, and Alia Yunis. The former employ the traditional autobiography genre to produce master narratives, while the latter utilize the memoir, novel, and short-story cycle genres to challenge hegemonies and master narratives. The cultural conservatives, I contend, belong to a growing transnational body of writers whose phenomenon constitutes an extension of what Matthew F. Jacobs calls an “informal network” of transnational self-identified specialists (4). In their autobiographies, Ali, Gabrielle, Darwish, and Sultan concentrate on the Middle East, Muslims, and Arabs, but they are unique in the sense that their policy-oriented personal narratives explicitly seek to influence not only American attitudes and practices aimed at Arabs and Muslims, but also those directed at American citizens of Arab or Muslim descent. Furthermore, their culturally-conservative traditional autobiographies Infidel (2007), Nomad (2010), Heretic (2015), Now They Call Me Infidel (2006), Because They Hate (2006), They Must Be Stopped (2008), and A God Who Hates (2009) deem American multiculturalism a serious danger to the United States and the West, a thesis not unlike Samuel P. Huntington’s in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). In this research project, I claim that Arab American literary writers have had to face, and write against, the predominance of this old-new clash of civilizations idea which has evolved into a discourse promulgated by the self-identified experts of the “informal network” and the cultural conservatives of Arab or Muslim descent. The Arab American literary novels, memoirs, and short-story cycles my study closely examines trouble the clash of civilizations discourse. Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999), Fawal’s On the Hills of God (1998), and Yunis’s The Night Counter (2009) are arguably representative of trends in, though not limited to, the contemporary Arab American memoir, novel, and short-story cycle genres and are best understood as literary writing within the context of this broader American tradition of interpreting the Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims and the specific cultural conservative fixation on Arab and Muslim Americans. / Graduate