Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

This third space, in-between Arab and American cultures, refuses categorization, fixity, and closure. Instead, Arab American women live in fluid “third-time spaces,” which enables them to mix with both cultures, breaking down all dichotomies between an essentialized self and other while retaining and celebrating their differences.

Difference

Although we often associate ethnicity with an exotic otherness or with a sense of authenticity perhaps attributed to a minority culture or an alien religion, contemporary Arab American women writers in this book emphasize hybridity and diaspora, rather than roots, as a primary means of resisting essentialized identity politics. Their works shift away from narrow identity politics determined by static notions of race and gender toward a rearticulated politics of difference.

Arab American writers seek to challenge the dualism or opposition between self and other by questioning stereotypes that constitute Arab women as different from Americans. These writers promote a dynamic identity of negotiation and resistance, celebrating rather than denying difference, a kind of difference not determined by a dominant culture but one that breaks down the dichotomy between self and other—for in every self resides an other and in every other resides a self. Indeed, living in a world of global communications, trade, and migrations of people, one cannot believe in a culturally closed identity or authentic self as opposed to fluid and changing identities that mix and mingle and have become historically mobile. More constructively, one can break, without doing away with, the classic dichotomy of self/other or us/them and consider I and other or us and them as mutually overlapping despite the fact that differences exist that we must still affirm. Difference, however, should not be seen as mere division.

Gayatri Spivak’s and Trinh Minha’s theories of difference and identity highly inform this discussion of difference by their emphasis on the existence of differences between us and them or self and other, while at the same time breaking down the dichotomy between these different entities (self/other or us/them).