The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of the more nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among Arab British women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue and cross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their Arab American counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resist stereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popular culture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arab immigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looks at how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir's My Name is Salma and Arab American novelist Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light of the precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and in the United States. Chapter Two examines how Arab British women writers Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela valorize trans-cultural and cross-ethnic dialogues and alliances in their novels The Map of Love and Minaret respectively through engaging with the two (interlocking) strands of feminism in the Arab world: secular and Islamic feminisms. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate how the two novels of Arab American women writers Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent and Laila Halaby's West of the Jordan explore the contradictions of Arab American communities from within and employ strategies of intertextuality and storytelling to subvert stereotypes about Arabs. As this study is interested in exploring the historical and socio-political contexts in which Arab women writers on both sides of the Atlantic produce their work, the conclusion investigates how the two sets of authors have represented, from an Arab perspective, the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in their novels.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:538478 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Awad, Yousef Moh'd Ibrahim |
| Contributors | Valassopoulos, Anastasia ; Pearl, Monica |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/cartographies-of-identities-resistance-diaspora-and-transculturaldialogue-in-the-works-of-arab-british-and-arab-american-women-writers(80ca96ea-1ce5-4e2a-a6d2-019adc1a6036).html |
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