Coming of Age in the Solitude of the Lost Land: Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home

Hawwa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 268-288
Author(s):  
Marta Cariello
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Arab American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
A Site

This contribution analyzes Palestinian-American Randa Jarrar’s semi-autobiographical novelA Map of Home(2008). The novel is read through various, overlapping lenses: the use of the semi-autobiographical form and the related challenge, brought about by the woman migrant writer, to the genre itself of autobiography and its relevance to individual and collective identity formation, the deconstruction of fixed, universal subjectivity and the challenge that exile narratives bring to the narration of nations, the specific positionality of the author that brings into play not only Arab and Arab-American identity construction but more specifically the narration of the Palestinian people. Finally, aMap of Homeappears as a site for Jarrar to produce a specific articulation of an Arab, Arab-American and Palestinian self through a female genealogy of agency.

scholarly journals Making History Usable: Al-Andalus as a Site of Identity Construction in Arab American Women’s Narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
Al-Jayikh Ali Kareem
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Ethnic Literature ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

AbstractIn ethnic literature, the historical and cultural past constantly haunt the present, producing contemporary narratives which emphasize how the heritage plays an essential role in preserving ethnic identity. From a trans-historical perspective, Arab American women’s narratives tend to turn the history of Al-Andalus (Medieval Moorish Spain) into cultural memory as a way of coping with the threats to their existence in the United States, particularly post-9/11, as well as of resisting the hegemonic culture. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Al-Andalus is intended to be seen as a construct of cultural memory and how this site of memory has the power to reshape individual and collective identity.

scholarly journals Surviving in between worlds of Laila “Halaby’s West of the Jordan”

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Safia Al-Shameri ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Arab American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Era

“West of the Jordan” was published in 2003, a period when the Arab American movement was coming to a new era in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was a time when scholars/writers began deconstructing the concept of Arab and Arab American identity to highlight the diversity of the community by taking into account internal differences, especially in areas such as gender, class, and sexuality. I intend to add to this body of work by setting “West of the Jordan” against Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical concept of nepantla (Borderlands; In-betweenness), seen here as an identity formation framework. Anzaldúa’s theorization of nepantla has stressed the instability of identity categories through movement betwixt and between identity and transformative ethics of change. Thus, the novel’s formulations and reformulations of ethnic, gender, and other categories should be understood as a way of criticizing these categories ’essentialist nature (even if some of the characters in the novel fail to formulate a constructive liberatory alternative to the essentialisms it attacks/aims to eradicate). In this context, the heroines ’actions succeed in destabilizing the categories ’ideological power and manage to show the shallowness of such delineations.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aristocratic Culture ◽  
Modern Form

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

Daʿwa, Dynasty, and Destiny in the Arab Gulf

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 935-954
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Integrative Framework ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Arab Gulf ◽  
A Site

AbstractThis article considers the question of collective identity formation in the Arab Gulf by looking at the distinctive ways in which the genealogies of the dominant kinship collective of the United Arab Emirates, the Banī Yās confederation, have been represented by that country's cultural and heritage-making institutions. I look comparatively at two high profile, state-sponsored, Emirati genealogical projects, one a site, and the other a text, and investigate their significance from a historical and ethnographic perspective. I find that the relatively weak religious gravity of the United Arab Emirates allows for unorthodox representations of kinship at the national level, that women do not necessarily buy into these representations yet contribute in their own ways to a kinship nationalist discourse, and that genealogy is nonetheless a particularly fraught idiom for binding together an ethnically heterogeneous society like the Emirates. Approaching the public representation of genealogies through an integrative framework, this article sheds light on important themes in modern Emirati and broader Gulf social and political life, including the complicated place of religious norms in a newly fashioned Muslim nation, the influence of gender on conceptions of kinship and nationhood, and the challenge ethnic heterogeneity poses to an Arab ethno-national project.

scholarly journals Voice and Silence in Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. BB102-BB118
Author(s):  
Helma Van Lierop-Debrauwer
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Voice And Silence

In 2014, the American writer Jacqueline Woodson published Brown Girl Dreaming, the story of her childhood in free verse, which was classified as young adult literature. Most US reviewers characterized and appreciated the book both as a human rights narrative of a young brown girl’s coming of age against the socio-political background of racism and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of the 1960s, and as a personal history of her development as a writer. In this article the major focus will be on how Brown Girl Dreaming as both a political memoir and an autobiographical narrative of identity formation is fleshed out. On the basis of my analysis of these two plot lines, I will further argue that its categorization as young adult literature disguises that the novel addresses a dual audience of adult and young readers. In my argumentation related to the political and personal character of the novel, as well as in my discussion of the crossover potential of Brown Girl Dreaming, I will focus on the presence of voice and silence.

scholarly journals Exile and the Disabled Body in Randa Jarrar’s “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie”

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Shahd Alshammari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Body ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Transgenerational Trauma ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Mind

This paper seeks to analyse the notion of exile as one of paradox, of being both within and without, as a disconnect between the mind and body. Edward Said has noted that exile is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. Said’s suggestion of a mind/body split gives us room to consider the sense of self as already in-between, as the exiled ‘I’ attempts to find a home within a new land and a new body. Exile from one’s own homeland is also exile from one’s body in Arab-American author’s Randa Jarrar’s latest novel Him, Me, and Muhamad Ali (2016). The collection of stories moves away from reclamatory approaches to ethnic identity and examines the characters’ trajectories of selfhood through a gendered, racialized, and embodied image. Disability features as a site of tension, a site of interrogation of Zelwa’s (the protagonist) sense of self. It is a peculiar coming-of-age narrative in the sense that it is an anti-Bildungsroman, a probe into bodies that fail to be integrated, assimilated, or acclimated to American culture, while also failing to maintain their association with an Arab collective identity. Jarrar’s text underscores and redefines the “I” of the Arab immigrant exploring transgenerational trauma and reclaiming her identity through celebrating the body.

scholarly journals 'I am someone who's supposed to be me': The identity of a (post)human subject in Don DeLillo's 'Zero K'

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Nataša Milojević
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Material World ◽  
Embodied Consciousness ◽  
A Site

The isolated space which the protagonists of Don DeLillo's novel Zero K inhabit proves to be a site where the (re)configuration of human evolution takes place, therefore providing the grounds for the analysis of the concepts of both human and posthuman subject. The analysis of the novel in reference to the posthuman theories, which prove to be as divergent and multiple as the posthuman subject itself, serves to examine the essence of the posthuman subject's identity formation, given that the plot portrays two different conceptions of the modern human subject. The examination of the relevance of technology in the interaction between humans and machines serves to corroborate the claim that the technologically generated isolation of cryonically suspended subjects does not necessarily imply the birth of a posthuman subject. Given that its roots can be traced within the Cartesian tradition, the transhumanist vision portrayed in the novel reconstructs the hierarchically structured framework. The posthuman thought, therefore, emerges out of the interconnected, unremitted game generated by the never-ending quest for the image of a unified self. The aforementioned posthuman thought, however, does not arise from the amalgamation of the material world and a genderless, bodiless, numb statue, but it emanates as a blend of materiality and a dynamic, intertwined, embodied consciousness.

scholarly journals Becoming the ‘Baddest’: Masculine Trajectories of Gang Violence in Medellín

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADAM BAIRD
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Gang Violence ◽  
Gang Members ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Site ◽  
Practical Logic

AbstractDrawing upon 40 life-history interviews with gang members in Medellín, Colombia, this paper argues that many young men join gangs to emulate and reproduce ‘successful’ local male identities. The accumulation by the gang of ‘masculine capital’, the material and symbolic signifiers of manhood, and the accompanying stylistic and timely displays of this capital, means that youths often perceive gangs to be spaces of male success. This drives the social reproduction of gangs. Once in the gang, the youths become increasingly ‘bad’, using violence to defend the gang's interests in exchange for masculine capital. Gang leaders, colloquially known asdurosor ‘hard men’, tend to be themás malos, the ‘baddest’. The ‘ganging process’ should not be understood in terms of aberrant youth behaviour; rather there is practical logic to joining the gang as a site of identity formation for aspirational young men who are coming of age when conditions of structural exclusion conspire against them.

scholarly journals The Power of Recipes: Culinary Practice as a Strategy to Deconstruct Arab-American Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Ishak Berrebbah
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Arab American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Arab American Literature ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Cultural Component ◽  
Analytical Approaches

AbstractCrescent (2003) is an example of the kind of Arab-American literature that has emerged noticeably in the early years of the 21st century. It signifies a hypothesis that culinary practice is an essential cultural component for diasporic figures to define their identities, especially in a multi-cultural society. These figures embrace such component to strategically define themselves and assert their belonging and affiliation to their original homelands. This paper, as such, examines the extent to which Arab-American characters in the novel, namely Sirine and Han, consider culinary practice as a key tool to understanding their identity, locate themselves in a multi-cultural society, and re-discover their true belonging. The study of this novel shows that culinary practices, as indicated in the narratives, deconstruct Arab-American identity through various dimensions, including memory, nostalgia, hybridity, and essentialism. In addition to employing critical and analytical approaches to the novel, this paper relies on a socio-cultural conceptual framework based on perspectives of prominent critics and theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Brinda Mehta, Dallen Timothy, and Stuart Hall, to name a few.

Workplace Identity Construction: An Intersectional-Identity-Cultural Lens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lize A. E. Booysen
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Control Regulation ◽  
Workplace Identity

With the development of an integrated cross-disciplinary framework to study workplace identity construction, the current theoretical discussion on workplace identity construction is extended—first, by focusing on intersectionality as theoretical lens and methodology in our thinking about workplace identity, highlighting the significance of an individual’s intersections of social locations in the workplace embedded in socio-historical and political contexts, and second, by focusing on the influence of national culture and societal landscapes as important macro contextual factors, adding a super-group level and a cross-cultural perspective on how individuals navigate their identities at work. Using an intersectional-identity-cultural conceptualization of workplace identity formation elucidates the personal, social identity, sub-group, group, and super group level of influences on identity formation. It focuses on the interplay between individual, relational, collective, and group identity, and emphasizes social identity as the bridge between personal identity and group identity. It highlights the multiplicity, simultaneity, cross cutting, intersecting, as well as differing prominence and power differences of social identities based on differing contexts. It illustrates the relatively stable yet fluid nature of individual (intra-personal and core) identity as it adapts to the environment, and the constant changing, co-constructed, negotiated, and re-negotiated nature of relational (inter-personal), collective identity (social identity) as it gets produced and re-produced, shaped and reshaped by both internal and external forces, embedded in socio-historical-political workplace contexts. Understanding the interplay of the micro-level, individual (agency), relational, and collective identity levels (social construction), nested in the meso level structures of domination, and group dynamics in the workplace (control regulation/political) in its macro level societal landscape context (additional control regulation) will help us to understand the cognitive sense-making processes individuals engage in when constructing workplace identities. This understanding can help to create spaces where non-normative individuals can resist, disrupt, withdraw, or refuse to enact the limited accepted identities and can create alternative discourse or identity possibilities.

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