Diasporic Voices: Cultural Dislocation and Search for Home in Diana Abu-Jabers’s Arabian Jazz and Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan

Abstract

This paper is concerned with literary and postcolonial facets of resistance and identity negotiation as concepts through which to approach representations of postcolonial conflicts in contemporary Arab-American women’s writings. These concepts operate at various levels of narratives and open new ways for remembering, narrating, and reading experiences via problematizing the discourses of Arab women’s experiences in diaspora. This paper aims to posit negotiation as a concept of writing and reading which actively engages events, discourses which implies pluralistic conception of social, political, and cultural agency. More specifically, the study explores the ways in which novelists descending from Arab origins, Diana Abu-Jaber and Laila Halaby, deploy negotiation and resistance as tools for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in postcolonial narratives to escape hegemonization. It is a reflection on the notion of hybrid identities and varied cultural provenance of non-native writings. Through its negotiated and interdisciplinary approach to narratives of alienation along with multi-consciousness of identity, this paper does not only engage with multiple discourses derived from postcolonial studies. It also intervenes into the conceptions of nation, memory, and accountability.