Lisa Marchi, "Scompigliare le carte della letteratura arabo-americana: Un’analisi di gender/genre" ACOMA, XXV (Spring/Summer 2018), 14, 2018, pp. 91-110.
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This essay surveys the origin and developments of Arab-American literature, taking into consideration the intricacy of the gender/genre pair. Drawing on Judith Butler’s provocative text Gender Trouble and Precarious Life, the essay disturbs the linear and progressive representation of the history of Arab presence in the US and its ensuing literature. Arab-American historians, novelists, poets, and playwrights, the author argues, have attempted to, and most of the time succeeded in, making visible subjectivities and personal histories that would have otherwise remained outside the frame of representation. By bending well-established gender norms with fixed genre prescriptions, they have managed to inaugurate and reinforce intercultural, interracial, and transnational alliances, to shake dogmas, thus opening up spaces of contestation, recognition, and liberation that are not only locally but also globally relevant.
