Gender negotiation of space in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans and Susan Muaddi Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the gendering of space and the entailed dismantlement of the passivity associated with Arab women in Lalami’s The Other Americans (2019) and Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile (2007). Drawing on transnational feminism, this article critically examines the agency of the second generation of Arab American females in the space of the diaspora in their claiming of and entitlement to the public space. They are different from their mothers who seek to perpetuate the discursive division and the dual dichotomy of the public space which is that of men, and the private domestic which is that of women, even after their migratory journeys. The submissiveness and passivity that are linked to Arab women are revisited and brought to question as Arab female migrants in the novels negotiate space as independent agents in total oblivion to the biased and ideological division. Their heterogeneous and dissimilar subjectivities, negotiations, and experiences answer back the othering rhetoric which represents them as being isomorphic.