National Literatures, Borders and Arab-American Diaspora Fiction

Abstract

Literary texts are understood within bounded frameworks, principally within national borders. As Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha demonstrated, print culture gave shape to nations, and literary canons were seen to “narrate the nation.” But what happens to our “bordered” classification system when texts emerge from migrant or diaspora writers ? One approach has been to label these works with a hyphen that bridges two national spaces, such as an Arab-American fiction. But does this hyphen take our analytical strategies beyond the border or does it merely reinforce the bordering analytical practices that underpin the work of literary criticism ? This paper will address these questions by focusing on contemporary Arab-American fiction. It will provide an overview of how Arab-American literature has been assessed as Arab or American, or a combination of both. It will demonstrate that the hyphen ironically reinforces borders by reproducing the idea of national literatures. To escape the boundaries imposed by national labels, this paper will argue that it is necessary to contextualise the work of Arab-American writers within a diasporic frame.