Between the Transnational and the Ethnic: Arab-American Literary Renegotiations of Self and Home

FAIN: FT-58117-10

Carol N. Fadda-Conrey
Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY 13244-0001)

In this book-length study, I examine the pivotal role that the Arab homeland plays in shaping Arab-American identity. Throughout the book, I look at a wide variety of literary texts by Arab-American writers spanning the second half of the twentieth century to the present to analyze the ways in which their depictions and understandings of an Arab homeland, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in the construction of a complex ethnic Arab-American subjectivity. As one of the first extensive critical studies of contemporary Arab-American literature, this project expands the analytic scope of this field by underscoring its inherent trans-disciplinary and transnational features, including the way it borrows from the Arab literary tradition while echoing the experiences of other immigrant and minority writers in the US. Such a multidimensional approach presents Arab-American writers' own versions of being Arab and/or Muslim in the US and living between two warring homelands.