This session, thus, aims to focus on Arab families in the diaspora and how societal pressures affect their family lives. Presenters explore the family lives of Arabs in North America in relevant texts from historical, literary, and cultural angles. The presenters will address the timely but neglected topic in current academia regarding exiled individuals from Arab countries to the USA. They explore Arab American identity across generations through different genres, such as the autobiography, the novel and testimonies.
Scholars such as Edward Said, Leila Ahmed, Moustafa Bayoumi, and many others highlight themes of migration, inclusion and exclusion of Arab Americans in their new homes/families. Their works show how they negotiate dual societal and familial pressures. Touria Khannous explores Edward Said’s autobiography, Out of Place (1999). Khannous depicts how the domestic space in Said’s memoir reflects the political and cultural dislocations that shaped his public life. Deploying Said’s theory of "contrapuntal" reading, she examines how familial and linguistic tensions contribute to his enduring feeling of being "out of place." The father's strict authoritarianism mirrors larger colonial structures, making the family a miniature representation of imperial power dynamics. Farah Siddiqui in her presentation titled “The Emotional Labor of Hyphenated Identity in Lena Mahmoud’s Amreekiya” explores the dilemma and of Arab American children born out of wedlock to Arab fathers and American mothers and the societal tensions. Feroza Jussawalla “Family Dynamics in Mohja Kahf’s Diasporic Arab American Family,” explores The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf as a Syrian American memoir of growing up conflicted in Indianapolis, Indiana. Questions of identity, belonging, race, and culture are all explored through the eyes of a young protagonist who is trying to balance family politics between a religious mother and a more outgoing Westernised father. Jussawalla explores the notion that the children going to the Dawah Center as described by Mohja Kahf are taught that Americans have broken families and divorces. Kahf, as the narrator, explores her own family dynamics in the light of this teaching. Ibtisam Abujad explores in her “ Transgressing Colonial Power through Undocumented Family Unification During the Muslim Ban “the suffering of Muslim families under such laws. Abujad explores how the restricted immigration from several Muslim-majority countries reinforces racial hierarchies and exclusionary policies. She uses testimonies to illustrate how undocumented family reunification emerged as a form of resistance, challenging state-imposed separations and asserting the right to mobility beyond legal frameworks.
This online- or possibly hybrid panel of four speakers will operate within the allotted time frame giving each speaker minutes to present. We will have a fifteen-twenty minutes of discussion at the end of the panel.
I have solicited abstracts from scholars working on different areas, and genres related to Arab American literature. We start with presenting on more established scholars in the field, such as Edward Said to more contemporary ones such as the Syrian American Mohja Kahf and the Palestinian American Lena Mahmoud to more pressing topics such as testimonies from Muslim Americans. My ultimate goal is to get these papers published in a volume. Thanks to the MLA, my panel on “Muslim Women Speaking out Persistently” (2021) materialised into a special issue of Women Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, soon to be a book. I have been in touch with an interested publisher regarding this project.