Narratives of Arab Anglophone Women and the Articulation of a Major Discourse in a Minor Literature

Dalal Sarnou

doi:10.2478/ipcj-2014-0005

Authors

Dalal Sarnou Université Abdelhamid Ibn Badis Site de Kharouba

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/ipcj-2014-0005

Keywords:

Arab Anglophone literature, Arab Anglophone women’s narratives, minor literature, de-territorialization, re-territorialization, Diaspora, cultural translation, home

Abstract

“It is important to stress that a variety of positions with respect to feminism, nation, religion and identity are to be found in Anglophone Arab women’s writings. This being the case, it is doubtful whether, in discussing this literary production, much mileage is to be extracted from over emphasis of the notion of its being a conduit of ‘Third World subaltern women.’” (Nash 35) Building on Geoffrey Nash’s statement and reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of minor literature and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderland(s), we will discuss in this paper how the writings of Arab Anglophone women are specific minor and borderland narratives within minor literature(s) through a tentative (re)localization of Arab women’s English literature into distinct and various categories. By referring to various bestselling English works produced by Arab British and Arab American women authors, our aim is to establish a New taxonomy that may fit the specificity of these works.

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Author Biography

Dalal Sarnou, Université Abdelhamid Ibn Badis Site de Kharouba

Dalal Sarnou is a university lecturer of English literature (at the English Department, Mostaganem University), a poet and an academic researcher specialized in the fields of Arab Anglophone narratives, postcolonial studies, Orientalism, feminine writings, Feminist critical discourse analysis, and Arab women’s writings. She has already published two academic papers on contemporary Arab women writers, and has published a series of poems. Her MA dissertation was also published by the Lambert Publishing. Now, she is working on the perception of the diasporic consciousness in the works of Arab women writers of the Diaspora, and on the literary specificity of their discourse.

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