Related Papers
Arab Studies Quarterly
Mirroring Hybridity: The use of Arab Folk Tradition in Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Alia Yunis's The Night Counter
Reem Hilal
This article explores the way in which Laila Halaby in Once in a Promised Land and Alia Yunis in The Night Counter utilize the Arab folk tradition in novels on Arab and Muslim American experience to counter the dominant narrative that simultaneously erases their extensive history in the United States and juxtaposes it with a forced visibility that is marked by Otherness, threat, and distrust. The article argues that by using folkloric figures and storytelling structures, Halaby and Yunis reverse the positionality of these communities by marking the multiple cultural signifiers that inform their stories in order to construct a palimpsest that reinscribes Arab and Muslim American experiences within narratives that perceive them as problems. As such, the Arab folk tradition emerges as a significant mode in the cultural memory of Arab and Muslim Americans, and the American literary fabric more broadly, and takes on a new meaning in this context.
Middle East : Topics & Arguments
No More “Eloquent Silence”: Narratives of Occupation, Civil War, and Intifada Write Everyday Violence and Challenge Trauma Theory
2018 •
Nora Parr
Discourse on trauma has re-emerged in an era where media and mobility bring it to global doorsteps. Frameworks for understanding trauma remain dictated by thinking that emerged from Europe’s “great wars” and American deployment to Vietnam. This framework—which sees trauma and the terrible as “out of time” or “other” to a perceived normal daily experience—has formed what critics call the “empire of trauma.” This empire limits how war, violence, and the terrible can be talked about and understood as part of (or not part of) contemporary life. Looking at two trauma narratives, Taḥta shams al-ḍuḥā (2004) by Ibrahim Nasrallah and Bāʾ mithl Baīt... mthl Baīrūt (1997; Trans B as in Beirut, 2008) by Iman Humaydan, the paper gives short readings that disrupt what has emerged as a binary of trauma theory. It shows how repetition and open endings turn everyday/trauma into everyday trauma, then goes on to explore how the novels develop language and generic structures so that they hold—rather th...
Cartographies of identities : resistance, diaspora, and trans-cultural dialogue in the works of Arab British and Arab American women writers
2011 •
Yousef Awad
The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of themore nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among ArabBritish women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue andcross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their ArabAmerican counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resiststereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popularculture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arabimmigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looksat how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir?s My Name is Salma and Arab Americannovelist Diana Abu-Jaber?s Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light ofthe precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and inthe United States. Chapter Two e...
Human suffering in colonial contexts: reflections from Palestine
Nadera Shalhoub
This article investigates the ways in which European colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism evicted the Palestinians from humanity, and how contemporary global racial politics and the emerging “trauma genre” continue to silence and distort their collective suffering and resistance. Specifically, my analysis is inspired by interview material I gathered of experiences of death and dying in East Jerusalem. Drawing from the Israeli legal term “present–absentee”, I suggest that spaces of death under Israeli settler colonialism constitute sites of denial and nonrecognition of Palestinian humanity. The denial of Palestinians’ collective history and continuous suffering has positioned Palestinians as outside of history, time and geography, and therefore as outside of humanity and modernity. This paper argues that individualized psychological readings silence the multidimensional histories of being and surviving in the homeland. Furthermore, the individualizing “trauma genre” inadequately interprets Palestinian suffering when compounded with the interlocking power of colonialism and global racial logics. As such, it conceals the political struggle and social resistance of Palestinians under the Israeli colonial regime.
Issues Related to Arab Folklore with reference to Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, a post 9/11 novel
2016 •
Mubarak Altwaiji
This paper focuses on cultural and political perspectives that have impacted Arabic folklore and influenced transmission of folk elements. This study reviews a series of studies carried out by eminent scholars of folk literature concerning the impact of political events on national identity construction to measure how national collective memory reacts to external factors in order to maintain and recall folk elements. This strategy of maintaining national folklore and using it as a resistance strategy to the hostile post 9/11 America is employed in Laila Halaby's novel Once in a Promised Land in which Halaby, an Arab immigrant, intertwines tales from Arabic folklore with narratives and use them both as cultural therapy for Arab immigrants who become exposed to racial discrimination and physical assault in America and as component of building Arab identity. This was made possible in the novel by incorporating very short folktales relevant to issues faced by Arab immigrants.
Arab Women Writers as Revolutionary Orators and Catalytic Agents
Safaa Abdel Nasser
Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck...
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Arab Women Writers as Revolutionary Orators and Catalytic Agents of Emancipation
2014 •
Safaa Nasser
Studies in The Literary Imagination
The Forgotten Victims of 9/11: Cultural Othering in Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2017 •
Elena María Ortells Montón
Literature Interpretation Theory
Race, Risk, and Fiction in the War on Terror: Laila Halaby, Gayle Brandeis, and Michael Cunningham
2010 •
Georgiana Banita
Commitment and beyond. Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s. ed. by Friederike Pannewick, Georges Khalil together with Yvonne Albers
Friederike Pannewick, Yvonne Albers
