Creating Space of Identification: The Arab-American Rhizomic Search of Visibility.

Abstract

Arab-American literature is an emerging literature that is searching a space of recognition and the present article reads it in light of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of 'Minor literature' in an attempt to create a space for its identification. This article examines the rhizomic nature of the Arab-American search of recognition. Moreover, it explores how Arab-American women writings are explained in terms of the political events in the Arab world. They are producing literature from a cramped space building a connection between the exiled, refugee and immigrant selves and the extended social, cultural and political relations seeking new possibilities of life. A literature that frees up language and creatively deterritorializes it from its dominated usage to provide unique modes of expressions that is countering the prevailing cultural and sociopolitical norms integrating the private and the collective, the personal and the political and creating an assemblage of enunciation. In particular, Etel Adnan's poem In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), is investigated as representing a minor use of a major language and supporting the argument that Arab-American literature is minor literature.