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In addition, according to Abdelrazek, these writers explore the dilemma of Arab Americans who celebrate their U.S. citizenship and yet also have to cope with their country’s less than supportive and/or at times aggressive military stances toward some of their countries of origin as well as the dilemma of Arab American women who are stereotyped as passive subjugated women by Americans and oppressed by Arab gender strictures but do not want to give up certain aspects of their Arab culture. By exploring a distinct Arab feminism that moves past ethnocentric notions of women and makes room for a variety of guises that women’s agency can take, Abdelrazek challenges the reductive tendency within American feminism of positing Arab and Arab American women as necessarily subjugated, as possessing no agency, and thus as in need of rescue. Instead, she reads the literary texts’ hyphenated Arab American women characters as asserting a form of agency that resists both the East’s and the West’s perceptions of them. The committed quality of these writers’ work also emerges from their careful delineation of the multiplicity of Arab American identities given different countries of origin, class status, racial status, and specific experiences—for example, immigrants, exiles, and refugees face substantially different situations and traumas; different Arab nations’ cultural traditions vary; first generation Arab Americans experience life differently than subsequent generations; and mixedrace Arab Americans face specific challenges.
Given the growing recognition by readers and critics alike that the landscape of American literature is changing at a rapid pace along with its demographics and given the national attention focused on Muslim and Arab Americans following the events of 9/11 and subsequent war in Iraq, the present volume is a timely addition to the field of American Literary Studies. Abdelrazek’s study not only calls attention to the active literary production of Arab American women writers but also engages in a serious scholarly analysis of their writing. Moreover, the literary analyses have extraliterary relevance since they focus on the complex position of Arab American women and the challenges they face in their daily lives within U.S. culture in ways that complicate and in effect invalidate stereotypes.