An Oriental Version of Otherness: English-Speaking Writers of the Arab Diaspora
An Oriental Version of Otherness: English-Speaking Writers of the Arab Diaspora

Summary/Abstract: Our purpose has been to draw on the representation of otherness by selected writers of the Arab American diaspora, with a stress on tworepresentative authors of this community: Gibran Khalil Gibran and EdwardSaid. Viewed from a postcolonial perspective, most of the writers considered for our analysis have written as a response to the artificial East/West dichotomy, almost defying their assumed hyphenated identity. If the African slave Omar IbnSaid first wrote in Arabic, Edward Said preferred to write his books in English,Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote both in English and Arabic, while the Egyptianwriter Ahdaf Soueif – educated in England and Egypt, writes in English andArabic. In the cultural and geographical space of the United States, the ArabAmerican immigrant experience mirrors that of other ethnic groups, and it isdemonstrated in their literatures

• Details
• Contents