Rereading value and normativity in contemporary Arab American literature : Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian jazz and Randa Jarrar’s A map of home

Abstract

This project proposes an alternative analytical model to examine the uneven and shifting devaluation of racialized, classed, and gendered lives in Diana Abu Jaber's Arabian Jazz and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home. As both novels depict powerful instances of nonnormative practices, they lend themselves to new analytical approaches for understanding the relationship between power, normativity, respectability, and value in Arab American fiction. The intellectual and political frameworks that inform this reading of Arabian Jazz and A Map of Home draw on Arab and Arab American feminisms, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique. This emphasis marks a shift from existing criticism in proposing to interpret the characters’ experiences, not as struggles of identity and belonging, but as tense processes of gendered and classed racialization, self-representation and political determination. In doing so, the discussion moves towards a critique of norms and coercive practices that render Arabs and Arab American lives in the United States vulnerable to threats of violence and exploitation in the context of neoliberalism.