‘We have much identity’: contesting the claimed hybrid identity in Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the second half of the 20th century, the notions of hybrid, hyphenated and transcultural identity have found urgent currency for scholars interested in the Arab Anglophone literary movement. Several books and anthologies have situated Arab Anglophone writers within diaspora and multicultural studies (e.g.). In particular, the fascination of Western academia has augmented comfortable diffusion and propagation of writers and critics endorsing these concepts. Whilst representing trans-cultural and hybrid identities is of immense importance when assiduously addressing issues of diaspora, migration, exilic consciousness, and dislocation, it has also become a ‘survival’ strategy for some ‘minority’ writers. The article challenges the claim that Arab Anglophone women writers’ depiction of hybrid identity is an expression of their lamentable state of affairs. It rather argues that those writers espouse strategic construction of hybridized identity to serve extrinsic aims related to recognition, canonization, and readership. This depiction is thus closer to an ‘essentialist practice’ than to a trans-cultural hybrid identity construction.