Open AccessNegotiating Identity Across Boundaries Arab-American: An Identity in the Making
Author(s) -
Ghia Osseiran
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
al-raida
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2226-4841
pISSN - 0259-9953
DOI - 10.32380/alrj.v0i0.187
Subject(s) - identity (music) , subjectivity , essentialism , negotiation , gender studies , ambivalence , sociology , brick , ethnic group , aesthetics , history , art , anthropology , psychoanalysis , psychology , epistemology , philosophy , archaeology , social science
“Once I claimed a past, spoke my history, told my name, the walls of incomprehension and hostility rose, brick by brick: unfunny ‘ethnic’ jokes, jibes about terrorists and Kalashnikovs, about veiled women and camels … Searching for images of my Arab self in American culture I found only unrecognizable stereotypes,” says Lisa Suhair Majaj (1994, p. 67), depicting her experience of what it is like to be a Palestinian living in the US. This paper strives to shed light on precisely this search for the self in the “Other,” focusing on the discursive formation of an anti-essentialist Arab-American subjectivity entrenched in the Arab-American experience, through a close analysis of the delineation of the individual and communal selves in the works of three Arab-American writers: Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, and Diana Abu-Jaber.