Content area
Full Text
Against the orthodox definitions of nationalism and belonging, which are based on singular understanding of citizenship, many Arab American immigrants and subsequent generations of writers carve out new transnational modes of belonging that have challenged and displaced the old forms of essentialist assimilation. Judith Butler warns against the danger of the nation-state because, as a polity, it aims at “periodic expulsion and dispossession of its national minorities in order to gain a legitimating ground for itself” (33). We thus explore the politics and aesthetics of negotiating essen-tialist assimilation in The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly (2007) by Susan Muaddi Darraj, an Arab American writer and critic. Specifically, this paper centers on how immigrant mothers enact their transnational visions by adhering to their cultural authenticity, embracing traditional practices of reading coffee cups, hanging blue stones, and policing their US born daughters. Also, we look at how their subsequent generations unsettle the binary categorization of Arab versus American by challenging and/or extending their ancestral cultural practices and traditional values on one hand, and by rejecting the singular and monolithic understanding of nation-state assimilation and citizenship on the other hand.1
Several books and anthologies have situated Arab American writers within ethnic and multicultural studies in the United States.2 They have occupied a position in the US academy, destabilizing essentialist discourses that implicate or suspect immigrants who originally hail from Arab countries. Wail Hassan argues that Anglophonic literature, burgeoned in the 1990s, complicates simplistic and celebratory stories of assimilation and offers nuanced representations of the Arab Anglophone immigrants who are transnationally and simultaneously associated with both their Arabic heritage and the place in which they live. Michelle Hartman states that Arab American literature centers on family (grandmothers), food (grape leaves), and culture (Khalil Gibran) as motifs for self-identification. While Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (1988) provided a platform for Arab American writers to present themselves and break away from the politics of marginalization and invisibility, Food for Our Grandmothers: Arab American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (1994) re-routed a trajectory towards Arab American feminism by establishing Arab American and Canadian voices that question political, cultural, and historical factors that have contributed to their invisibility and isolation. Post-Gibran Anthology of New Arab American Writing...