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

ABSTRACT

Since the second half of the 20^th 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. 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Anglophone Arab women writers
• hybrid-transcultural identity
• essentialised
• identity
• strategic essentialism

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. These concepts have dominated the nomenclature adopted by critics to describe some Arab Anglophone literary trends. For example, we have Lindsey Moore’s, Wail Hassan’s and Clair Chambers’s (hybrid literature); Deleuze and Guattari’s (minor and borderland literatures); Geoffrey Nash’s (Third World subaltern writers).