| This dissertation examines the representation of diasporic identity and consciousness in Arab diasporic narratives from Canada and the United States. With a focus on the genre of fiction, the primary works under consideration are contemporary novels by Arab Canadian and Arab American writers: Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War (1998), Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game (2006), Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land (2007), Marwan Hassan's The Confusion of Stones (1989), Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2008), Mohja Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Frances Khirallah Noble's The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy (2007), and Patricia Sarrafian Ward's The Bullet Collection (2003). These writers deploy innovative and experimental narrative strategies for representing the influence of mobility and displacement on notions of identity, home, and belonging as they are nuanced by such diverse historical contexts as the Palestinian Occupation, the Lebanese Civil War, and the events of September 11, 2001. These historical forces, as this study contends, not only help constitute the heterogeneity, difference, and plurality of Arab diasporic experiences and identities, but also profoundly shape historical and cultural continuity for Arab migrants.;On the basis of the relationship between the Levant territories of the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan), their respective colonial histories, and post-World War II migration, this study highlights three major Arab diasporic collectivities; Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian, as well as their pre- and post- 9/11 struggles with social and political integration.;This study proposes that the interaction between colonial legacy, exile and migration, and Arab racialization prior to and after 9/11 has come to permeate Arab consciousness, giving way to what I refer to as a "crisis of Arab diasporic consciousness." The diasporic novelists under examination represent Arab diasporic identity as a unique condition of psychic fragmentation. At the same time, the works in question highlight the ways in which Arab diasporic subjects counter the sense of 'otherness' and multiple forms of exclusion that grounds their estrangement in the diaspora. These works illustrate that Arab diasporic individuals and communities reconstitute themselves as transnationals, who maintain multiple attachments that bind the homeland society to new places of settlement, and in doing so, create new forms of belonging.;This study draws on several intersecting theoretical models---postcolonial and diaspora studies, trauma theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory---to conceptualize the ways in which various Arab hybrid subjects (gendered, queer, exilic) reconstitute identity through the interplay between home and memory. In situating these diverse migrant perspectives within these theoretical frameworks, this project further explores the layered relationships that inform the multiple attachments and identifications of Arab diasporic individuals and collectivities.;In situating the Arab-Canadian and Arab-American diasporic communities not only in cross-cultural, but also postcolonial, transnational, transborder, and trans-ethnic networks, this dissertation proposes that this body of writing casts a new outlook on homogenizing and Orientalist formulations of 'Arabness', bringing to light the heterogeneity of Arab identity and Arab diasporic collectivities. |
