Subject Area: Arab-American Studies

Postmodernist Arab American Novels, Poetry, and Theory: Comparative Readings of Six Works Conversing with Egyptian and Chicana Literature

El-Meligi, Eman
2015 1-4955-0291-0 208 pages
This book, on Postmodernist Arab American literature, offers comparative readings informed by theories and approaches by Foucault, Gramsci, Baudrillard, Said, Gilbert and Gubar, Lyotard, Genette, Deleuze and Guttari, Hutcheon, as well as Saldivar, Villa and Anzaldua.

“Living Theory: A Comparative Reading of Feminist-Postcolonial Resonances in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999) and Postmodernist Reflections in Ihab Hassan’s Out of Egypt” (1986), studies the two autobiographies as an embodiment and reflection of critical and literary theory. “The Text and the World: Foucauldian and Gramscian Resonances in Historiographic Metafictional Prison Narratives,” offers a comparative reading of Sinan Antoon’sI’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody and the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Woman’s Prison. “The Arabian Nights as a Postmodern Arab American Counternarrative,” offers a comparative reading of “Rhizome,” “Thick Description” and Minority Discourse in Jack Marshall’s The Arabian Nights (1986) and Moha Kahf’s E-Mails from Sheherazad (2003). “Technique as Culture in Postmodern Ethnic American novel,” offers a feminist cultural reading of “Barrio-Logos” of the “Nueva Mestiza” in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, reading Arab American borderland novel genre within the discursive framework of Chicana critical and cultural theory.

The hermeneutical counternarrative offered by the above writers is a very practical and reflexive one that is told in an exaggeratedly rhetorical or oratorical manner, even when politics, history, dictatorship, exile and imperialism are always lurking at the background. With their nomadic body without organs, Arab American writers have voiced and contextualized their minority discourse. This has been mainly done through technique, acting as culture and embodying the rhizome troupe, elucidating the assemblage of nomadic identities in constant formation and flux.