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Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11

Aydogdu, Zeynep
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1557191593344128

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Comparative Studies.
My project, Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11, interrogates the enduring notion of America as the promised land of freedom and social mobility in the narratives of Muslim immigrant women. Informed by the critical theories of minority discourse, U.S. borders studies, and postcolonial scholarship, I argue that autobiography and fiction by Muslim American women writers indicate an ideological flexibility, demonstrating a spectrum of discursive negotiations and stances that strategically claim secular, religious, modern, feminist, capitalist, transnational, and multiracial identities that altogether challenge the hegemonic and binary configurations of the figure of “the Muslim” and reformulate the terms of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. I read these strategies in three different writings: Selma Ekrem’s autobiography Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1930), Mohja Kahf’s novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), and Leila Halaby’s novel Once in A Promised Land (2007). Collectively, these texts articulate and address anxieties about the presumed “incommensurability” of Muslim/Middle Eastern identity with the imaginary ideal of normative Anglo-American modern society, and they offer a unique ethnic, religious, and cross-racial perspective that challenges dominant U.S. conceptions of the minority difference and exclusion. My project contributes to the theorizing of transnational minority literature in a context that goes beyond the simplistic framework of minor to major anti-hegemonic discourse. While I discuss these texts as counternarratives to hegemonic articulations of citizenship and exclusionary discourses of American identity, I also focus on minor-to-minor sensibilities, paying attention to the ways in which literature offers a space for articulations of cross-ethnic alliances, solidarities, and tensions amongst immigrants and other racialized minorities. Furthermore, this study represents the first book-length exploration of Muslim identity in the writings of Turkish and Arab immigrant women, groups that have not been studied together by scholars in the burgeoning field of Muslim immigrant literature. In this regard, my dissertation responds to the critical need in the nascent fields of Muslim American studies and Critical Muslim studies for comparative work that transcend the singular emphasis on the category of “Arab American.” It also interrogates the textual engagement of Turkish and Arab writers with differentially racialized and marginalized groups in the U.S. and their formulation of a distinct minority discourse with all the variety and complexity in them.
Nina Berman (Committee Co-Chair)
Pranav Jani (Committee Co-Chair)
Theresa Delgadillo (Committee Member)
263 p.
American Literature; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Islamic Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Near Eastern Studies
Immigrant literature; immigrant autobiography; immigrant fiction; Muslim writing; Muslim womens writing; Muslim womens literature; racialization of Islam; minor literature; minority discourse; Arab American; Arab American literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Aydogdu, Z. (2019). Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1557191593344128

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Aydogdu, Zeynep. Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1557191593344128.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Aydogdu, Zeynep. "Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1557191593344128

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1557191593344128
140
© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.