The purpose of this thesis is to firmly situate the fictions of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women writers who write in English within the corpus of ethnic and mainstream literary criticism. I aim to position these fictions within their historical and sociopolitical contexts. I also aim to shift the focus from the texts’ female protagonists to male and minor characters in order to explore how the writers construct both political Islam and Islam as a private faith; how they construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities; and how they respond to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror. I argue that these fictions offer some of the most astute reactions to the events of 9/11 and their repercussions. I also argue that Arab American literature in general and Arab American women’s literature in particular is more canny than its Arab British counterpart. Thus, I aim to show how Arab American literary productions refract a development from the literature of self-exploration to that of transformation allowing them a well-deserved spot in Ethnic-American literary studies and in time, mainstream American literary studies. Another of my aims is to investigate how Arab American and Arab British writers highlight the diversity of Arabs, Muslims and Islam, thus addressing essentialist reductions of Arabs and Muslims as a monolithic group. In chapter one, I investigate how Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret negotiate issues such as Islamic clothing. I also question anew Arab women writers’ perceived role as “cultural commentators.” In chapter two, I explore how Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities, and how they challenge the Anglo-American stereotypical representations of Arab Muslim masculinity. In chapter three, I analyse how Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, Frances Khirallah Noble’s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy and Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter negotiate cultural, political and social views of America. I aim to examine whether Halaby, Noble and Yunis’ ambiguous position, as legally ‘white’ citizens who are also members of a marginalized and religiously racialized minority, offers them a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for future research.

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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

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This dissertation aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of Arab-American feminist critique through an exploration of the work of four contemporary Arab-American women poets: Etel Adnan (1925-), a poet and a visual artist and a writer, Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-), poet, a song writer, and a novelist, Mohja Kahf (1967-), a poet, an Islamic feminist critic and author, and Suheir Hammad (1973-), a hip-hop poet and political activist. The study traverses the intersections of stereotypical racial and Orientalist discourses with which these women contend, and which have been further complicated by being shaped against the backdrop of the “War on Terror” and hostility against Arabs, Muslims and Arab-Americans in the post-September 11 era. Hence, the study attempts to examine their poetry as a tool for resistance, and as a space for conciliating the complexities of their hyphenated identities. The last two decades of the twentieth-century saw the rise of a rich body of Arab-American women writing which has elicited increasing academic and critical interest. However, extensive scholarly and critical attention was mainly drawn to novels and non-fiction prose produced by Arab-American women writers as reflected in the huge array of anthologies, journal articles, book reviews and academic studies. Although such efforts aim to research and examine the racial politics that have impacted the community and how it relates to feminist discourses in the United States, they have rarely addressed or researched how the ramifications of these racialised politics and discourses are articulated in Arab-American women’s poetry per se. Informed by a wide range of postcolonial and United States ethnic theory and criticism, feminist discourses of women of colour such Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory, and Lisa Lowe's discussions of ethnic cultural formations in addition to transnational feminism, this study seeks to lay the groundwork for a complex analysis of Arab-American feminist poetics, based on both national and transnational literary approaches. The dissertation addresses the following questions: how does the genre of poetry negotiate identity politics and affiliations of belonging in the current polarized and historical moment? How do these women poets challenge the troubling oppressed/exoticised representations of Arab/Muslim women prevalent in the United States mainstream culture? How does each of these poets express their vision of social and political transformation? Emphasising the varying ethnic, religious, national, political, and cultural backgrounds and affiliations of these four poets, this dissertation attempts to defy any notion of the monolithic experience of Arab-American women, and argues for a nuanced understanding of specificity and diversity of Arab-American feminist experiences and articulations. To achieve its aim, the study depicts the historical evolution of Arab women’s poetry in the United States throughout four generations in order to examine the deriving issues and formative elements that contributed to the development of this genre, and also to pinpoint the defining characteristics marking Arab-American women poetry as a cultural production of American women of Arab descent. Through close readings and critical analyses of texts, the dissertation offers an investigation of some of the major themes and issues handled by these Arab-American women to highlight the most persistent tropes that mark this developing literary genre. Eventually, this study shows how literature, and specifically poetry becomes a conduit to investigate Arab-American cultural and sociopolitical conditions. It also offers productive explorations of identities and representations that transcend the rigid essential totalising categorisation of identity, while attempting to forge a new space for cultural translation and social transformation.

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