Arab American Literature
Gendered Memory in Abinader and Abu-Jaber
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11638614 |
|---|---|
| Authors | S E Cherif (Institut Superieur de Gestion, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 207-228 |
| Publication date | 2003-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3595307 |
| OpenAlex | W2064100300 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
With Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon, published in 1991, and Arabian Jazz, published in 1993, Elmaz Abinader and Diana Abu-Jaber have respectively contributed to the genre of the journey to the past, recurrently adopted in contemporary minority group writings and meant to res~ore that past for the assertion of a ,distinctive ethnic self.Through memoir and fiction, ,l~ .. two women writers explore the transfonnative power of narration and interfere to break the confining construction of Arabness which rests on a combination of socio-historical factors and contemporary political events~ I In fact, in the case of Arab Americans, the Arab~Israeli struggle and its impact upon the Jewish American population in particular and the US population at large has contributed to shaping general public opinion in a way that maintains and reinforces the already existing negative stereotypes of the Arab as the mysterious and inferior 'other,' constructed over a long practice of the Orientalist mode of representation.Together, the two sets of factors shape negatively the present experience of Arab Americans in the United States, making the restoration of the past an appealing alternative.But in addition to asserting their ethnicity in a hostile, imageruled environment, Arab American women must also voice their femaleness.Their experience of self is strongly gendered on account of the serious limitations for women that the journey to the past leads them to (dis)/(un)cover.The articulation of the self
Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.24 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2026 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |