Mirroring Hybridity: The Use of Arab Folk Tradition in Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Alia Yunis's The Night Counter
Author(s)
Hilal, Reem M.
Date Issued
September 1, 2020
Abstract
This article explores the way in which Laila Halaby in Once in a Promised Land and Alia Yunis is in The Night Counter utilize the Arab folk tradition in novels on Arab and Muslim American experience to counter the dominant narrative that simultaneously erases their extensive history in the United States and juxtaposes it with a forced visibility that is marked by Otherness, threat, and distrust. The article argues that by using folkloric figures and storytelling structures, Halaby and Yunis reverse the positionality of these communities by marking the multiple cultural signifiers that inform their stories in order to construct a palimpsest that reinscribes Arab and Muslim American experiences within narratives that perceive them as problems. As such, the Arab folk tradition emerges as a significant mode in the cultural memory of Arab and Muslim Americans, and the American literary fabric more broadly, and takes on a new meaning in this context.
Journal
Arab Studies Quarterly
Department
World Languages and Cultures
Citation
Reem M. Hilal. Mirroring Hybridity: The use of Arab Folk Tradition in Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Alia Yunis's The Night Counter. Arab Studies Quarterly. Vol. 42(4):251-271. DOI: 10.13169/arabstudquar.42.4.0251
Publisher
Pluto Journals
Version of Article
Published article
DOI
10.13169/arabstudquar.42.4.0251
ISSN
0271-3519
2043-6920
Rights
© 2020 The Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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