| Abstract | This thesis explores Arab-American authorship and the specific literary and authorial strategies that these writers use to navigate and narrativize issues of transnationalism, cultural hybridization, and identities in motion. I hypothesize that Arab-American authorship is characterized by its propensity to engage with and actively promote hybrid identification strategies and transcultural dialogues, postulating that Arab-American writers actively integrate and adapt multiple spatial and cross-cultural identities through their collective and creative practice of restorying. To this end, my thesis explores Arab-American authorship and its construction of intercultural and hybrid forms of self-production in two principal types of literary production: autobiographies / autoethnographies and folk-epics. By studying how narratives of Arab-American cultural identity and selfness are constructed within these literary genres, I hope to delineate a poetics of the more nascent Arab-American literature which foregrounds and advocates for multicultural hybridity and multimodality. |
