Sand Niggers, Small Shops, and Uncle Sam: Cultural Negotiation in the Fiction of Joseph Geha and Diana Abu-Jaber

Abstract

This essay will examine the emergence of Arab American literature as it relates to the sudden visibility of this community in the political and cultural topogra phy of the United States.1 Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship has analyzed the growth and makeup of domestic Arab life, in the process crystallizing the designation Arab American, if not the boundaries surrounding such a broad term. Arab Americans have been active socially and politically throughout the twentieth century,2 but after 1967 emphasis on cultural preser vation and political activity not simply as American citizens but as Arab citi zens of America has led to some recognition of an Arab entity by mainstream America. Accompanying this activity has been a body of literature, examined by scholars such as Lisa Suhair Majaj, Evelyn Shakir, Joanna Kadi, Munir Akash, and Khaled Mattawa, as specifically Arab American. Where text specific analyses exist, however, they tend to deal more with poetry than fic tion, perhaps simply because up to this point the available poetry is more ex tensive. I seek to fill a gap in Arab American literary scholarship by focusing on two works of fiction, Joseph Geha's Through and Through: Toledo Stories (1990) and Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz (1993).3 I have chosen these two texts for practical, theoretical, and aesthetic rea sons. Although continuous Arab artistic expression existed in the United States throughout the twentieth century, Through and Through brought before the public important Active depictions of the Arab American community that de mand interrogation in relation to that community in particular and to Ameri can Studies in general. Arabian Jazz constituted at the time the most