Acting Across Diaspora: Transnational Spaces and Voices in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

Abstract

In The Arsonists’ City (2021), Arab American novelist Hala Alyan casts a piercing spotlight on how diasporic and transnational voices are burdened with cultural ambivalences, negative stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations. This paper shows how Hollywood cinema does not help the protagonist, Mazna, to remodel her diasporic identity to be a successful actress. A Syrian actress who has emigrated from Syria to Lebanon and then to the USA to achieve her dream and identity, Mazna’s life turns upside down when Hollywood forces her to take on negative terrorist, sexualized and culturally insensitive roles in films. As this article discusses, Alyan uncovers how these roles dehumanize and trample the Arab races and cultures. It is in this sense that the diasporic novelist draws attention to Hollywood’s negative stereotypes, prejudices and injustices in relation to the representation of an Arab actress in Hollywood cinema. In being thus represented, Mazna is exploited and humiliated when she is forced to perform in naïve and trivial scenes in American movies. Alyan explores Mazna’s diasporic journey as an exterior space over which political, religious and cultural dilemmas conglomerate. Consequently, Alyan opens up spaces based upon cross-cultural tolerance, acceptance, living with difference and valuing religious and cultural diversity.