On Arab American Literature

This issue of MELUS contains eight papers, three interviews, an introduction and sixteen book reviews. Three of the papers discuss the two novels by Diana Abu-Jaber: Arabian Jazz (1993) and Crescent (2003). One paper discusses Edward Said's autobiography Out of Place (1999). The remaining papers deal with different aspects of Arab American literature in the United States. Samaa Abdurraqib's paper (pp. 55–70) on the hijab and other issues in immigrant Muslim literature sits uncomfortably within this volume of essays (one of the novels it discusses is a memoir by the Afghan writer Maryam Qudrat Aseel). The subjects of the three interviews are Suheir Hammad, Khaled Mattawa and Diana Abu-Jaber. The interviews differ in flavour. The one with Suheir Hammad preserves the flow of oral speech, which makes it extremely interesting but hard to follow. The interview with Khaled Mattawa was conducted electronically. Diana Abu-Jaber's interview is a textualised record of a face-to-face interview. These interviews add a personal voice to the volume under review.

Greg Orfalea's paper (pp. 115–33) is an intelligent reflection on the Arab American novel by an Arab American novelist, pioneering anthologist and teacher of creative writing. In it he reflects on the range of criteria that can be used to determine the identity of a literary work as an Arab-American piece of literature; he reaches the inevitable conclusion that the allocation of a literary work to a water-tight or exclusivist category of ethnic or national classification cannot be conducted without doing the work concerned a lot of injustice. Keith Feldman's paper (pp. 33–53) provides important historical background on the ethnic status of the Arab-Americans in the US whose racial whiteness was constructed through legal means. Although this status was beneficial to the early Arab immigrants, allowing them the full rights of citizenship, it has later come to be seen as a handicap by some Arab-Americans who argue that their community would be better served if it were to be classified as an ethnic community. Tanyss Ludescher paper (pp. 93–114) offers an over view of the development of Arab literature in the US from a literature that was mainly written in Arabic and angled in relation to the literature in the countries of origin, to an Arab American literature that has become increasingly recognised as something with a life of its own. This and Feldman's papers would be very useful on any introductory course on Arab American literature.

Michelle Hartman's paper (pp. 145–65) pursues some of the above themes on the racialisation of the Arabs in America in the context of her study of how jazz as a literary trope provides the Arab-Americans with a cultural symbol that can offer a racially marked sense of belonging to America. She comments on how the evolution of Arab ethnicity in the US passed from 'being not white', to being 'not quite white' to 'becoming white', and how this sense of 'becoming [legally] white' is a 'probationary whiteness'. The use of African American music, and jazz in particular, by Diana Abu-Jaber, Etel Adnan and Suheir Hammad in their literary works is shown to be an attempt to mediate an ethnic identity for the Arabs that is in socio-political terms closer to the experience of the non-white communities in the US than it is to the members of the white community to whom the Arab Americans belong.

Pauline Kaldas's paper raises the important issue of the responsibility of the writer to his or her community in a host culture, the American culture in this case, that is quick to stereotype and stigmatise. She does this by studying Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Arabian Jazz as an example. The novel...