Arabian Nights in America: Hybrid Form and Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent

Abstract

ABSTRACT Diana Abu-Jaber's 2003 novel, Crescent, examines the complex position of Arabs and Arab Americans living in the United States with respect to notions of identity by creating a complex hybrid text. Crescent offers characters who face different forms of exile and have to work through fractured, destabilized identities to create for themselves new identities that account for and embrace their hyphenated, hybrid positions. The novel does so using a narrative that creatively combines what initially looks like a rather conventional version of the Western born novel form with a storytelling form deriving from the infamous The Thousand and One Nights, often referred to as the Arabian Nights and historically associated with the East.