|
|
The present volume contributes to critical discussions of American literature at the turn to the twentyfirst century in all of its diversity by focusing on the literary productions of specifically Arab American women writers published both prior to and immediately following the events of 9/11: Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage (1999), Mohja Kahf’s poetry collection E-mails from Scheherazad (2003), Laila Halaby’s novel West of the Jordan (2003), and Diana AbuJaber’s novel Crescent (2003). Given that relatively little critical attention has been devoted to the development of a substantial body of Arab American literature in recent years aside from surveys, Amal Abdelrazek’s study serves as a welcomed contribution to the general field of American Studies and more specific field of Contemporary American literature. According to Abdelrazek, the literary texts she examines all explore what it means to have what she calls a hyphenated identity and to live in between cultures, in the sense of always being both Arab and American and yet being completely neither Arab nor American. Indeed, all four texts present central characters who simultaneously embrace and resist both American and Arab culture as they are forever negotiating the two cultures, including the two culture’s different but equally subjugating constructions of them as Arab women, and working to explore and create fluid dynamic hybrid identities for themselves.
Abdelrazek insists that these authors’ literary productions be read as politically committed writing, in the Sartrean tradition that writers must engage and take stands on the important questions of their time. Her critical study carefully and subtly analyzes how the four writers at hand construct texts that actively work to represent the lives of Arab and Arab American women, which have remained virtually unrepresented until now, and that fully engage the variety of forms of oppression they have experienced both within their Arab cultures and within American culture as well as the difficulties they encounter in negotiating the two cultures of which they are simultaneously a part.