Negotiating the third space in the arab american fiction of Diana Abu-Jaber and Laila Halaby

Resumen

This dissertation studies the heterogeneous nature of the Arab American experience in the United States of America through the selection of four novels by the contemporary Arab American writers Diana Abu-Jaber and Laila Halaby. It focuses on these novelists’ de-construction of the essentialized frameworks of their community’s subjectivity and the negotiation of an Arab American Third Space within the context of multiethnic America. The thesis intends to focus on the complexity in the themes and concerns addressed by this literature in order to reveal its maturation as a crucial medium for Arab Americans’ creative self-representation in their pursuit of consolidating their sense of belonging to the American community while at the same time emphasizing their links with their Arab heritage. The first chapter provides a historical and literary framework for the whole dissertation, as it studies the Arab American literary tradition in relation to the history of Arab presence in the United States starting from the beginning of the twentieth-century to the present. Chapter two is a theoretical framework which defines Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space, as developed in his book The Location of Culture (1994), in order to redefine it afterwards in terms of the Arab American discourse. Chapter three studies the construction of female Arab American identities, highlighting the multilayered and the heterogeneous nature of this subjectivity through the analysis of Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz and Halaby’s West of the Jordan. The fourth chapter deals with the creative strategies used by Abu-Jaber in Crescent (2003) to resist essentialist misrepresentations of Arabs in America. Finally, the last chapter of this dissertation studies Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007), which is one of the first Arab American fictional works to address the September 11 terrorist attacks and their direct consequences on the lives of many Arabs and Arab Americans in the United States.