Resistance and Transcultural Dialogue in the Fiction of Anglophone Arab Women Writers: Towards Diasporic Arab-American and Arab-British Poetics of Identities

Abstract

This study focuses on Diasporic Identity construction in two contemporary novels which are respectively West of the Jordan by the Arab American writer Laila Halaby and The Map of Love by the Arab British novelist Ahdaf Soeif. It negotiates the Arab women diasporic identity formation as expressed by and represented in the fictional narratives of this set of writers. It aims to shed light on the different modalities of identity construction adopted by these authors to reflect the heterogeneity and diversity of Arab women in diaspora. The present dissertation essentially applies a postcolonial-transnational feminist approach to examine the life of Arab women in both sides of the Atlantic and the challenges they face socially, culturally, politically and psychologically as postcolonial “Third World” women in diaspora. In fact, these writers defy the oppressed, invisible, and voiceless image that the term Arab woman connotes in the West by creating strong women characters that forge a new identity for themselves after a long journey of losses and memories that necessitates both nostalgia and criticism of their homelands and the dislocations which they constantly occupy. Influenced by the heterogeneous experiences of immigration and settlement in their host countries these writers have adopted different strategies to express their hybrid identities. This study demonstrates that Arab women writers are carving out a niche for themselves in the early twenty-first century Anglophone literary scene.