Beyond Orientalist Binaries: Remembering Dismembered Selves in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Fencing with the King
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55544/ijrah.6.3.39Keywords:
Collective memory, Contemporary Arab-American literature, Forgetting, Identity, Sites of memoryAbstract
While it has become customary to read Arab-American literature through the lens of Orientalist discourse, little attention is paid to the progress that some American novelists of Middle Eastern descent have made in going beyond the binary opposition grounded on East/West divisions. This paper examines Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel, Fencing with the King (2022), from a threefold interdisciplinary perspective through which memory is negotiated as a determinant of identity. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of social frameworks of memory, Paul Ricœur’s theorization of memory and forgetfulness, and Pierre Nora’s notion of sites of memory, the study highlights how the main character, in particular, revisits the narrative of her extended family to renarrate the self and promote multicultural social politics. Doing so, the research underscores the extent to which Diana Abu-Jaber has succeeded in transcending the frames of East/West power dynamics, all while demonstrating how literature operates as an effective medium that refracts the recuperation of human voices marginalized by sociocultural collective amnesia.
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