Abstract

This article proposes an alternative analytical model to examine the shifting devaluation of racialized, classed, and gendered lives in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home. As the novel depicts powerful instances of nonnormative practices, it lends itself to new analytical approaches for understanding the relationship between power, normativity, and value in Arab American fiction. The intellectual and political frameworks that inform this reading of the novel draw on Arab and Arab American feminisms, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique. This emphasis marks a shift from existing criticism in proposing to interpret the characters' experiences, not as struggles of identity and belonging but as tense processes of gendered and classed racialization, self-representation, and political determination. In doing so, the discussion moves toward a critique of coercive practices that render Arab and Arab American lives in the United States vulnerable to threats of violence/exploitation in the context of neoliberalism.

Highlights

  • This article proposes an alternative analytical model to examine the shifting devaluation of racialized, classed, and gendered lives in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home

  • A quick survey of Arab American literary criticism in the late 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century reveals a collective sense of urgency in the identification and representation of a multitude of Arab American experiences within the fabric of the United States

  • The art that results is Arab-American because it arises from the experience of Arab-Americans–personal or public, “ethnic” or not

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Summary

Introduction

This article proposes an alternative analytical model to examine the shifting devaluation of racialized, classed, and gendered lives in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home. Probing the racialization of Arabs in the United States and examining processes of self-representation intersect in that they reveal forms of interaction between (broadly speaking) external and internal structures of power.

Results
Conclusion
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