“Homeland America, bismillah”

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_1058
dc.title	“Homeland America, bismillah”. Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and the Dissonance of Nationhood
dc.contributor.author	Cariello Marta
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/il-tolomeo/2017/1/homeland-america-bismillah/
dc.description.abstract	Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, follows the protagonist, Khadra, in her journey ‘back home’, to the State of Indiana, where she grew up and where she ran away from, in search of herself, her identity, and a less ‘dissonant’ existence first in her native Syria, then in Eastern US. Her personal and intimate search becomes an exploration into the multilayered and intricate articulations of the Islamic faith, of its positionings inside the US, and its negotiations with US nationhood. Kahf’s is a work of fiction that is also a (sometimes quite explicit) dissertation on Islam, the Muslim-American community, issues of inclusion, exclusion, identity, whiteness, and the national narrative of the US vis-à-vis the Ku Klux Klan, 9-11, Orientalism and patriarchy. This article looks at Kahf’s novel in the light of a critical discourse emerging in Arab-American fiction in relation to the boundaries and predicaments of US nationhood. In particular, the analysis will focus on Mohja Kahf’s poetics of dissonance that challenges dominant narratives of American national identity and its exclusionary cultural politics.
dc.relation.ispartof	Il Tolomeo
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 19 \| December 2017
dc.issued	2017-12-21
dc.dateAccepted	2017-09-15
dc.dateSubmitted	2017-07-13
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2499-5975
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-19-17-14
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Arab-American literature
dc.subject	Arab-American literature
dc.subject	Diasporic women writers
dc.subject	Diasporic women writers
dc.subject	Feminism
dc.subject	Feminism
dc.subject	Islam
dc.subject	Islam
dc.subject	Nationhood
dc.subject	Nationhood

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and the Dissonance of Nationhood

Marta Cariello Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Italia

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abstract

Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, follows the protagonist, Khadra, in her journey ‘back home’, to the State of Indiana, where she grew up and where she ran away from, in search of herself, her identity, and a less ‘dissonant’ existence first in her native Syria, then in Eastern US. Her personal and intimate search becomes an exploration into the multilayered and intricate articulations of the Islamic faith, of its positionings inside the US, and its negotiations with US nationhood. Kahf’s is a work of fiction that is also a (sometimes quite explicit) dissertation on Islam, the Muslim-American community, issues of inclusion, exclusion, identity, whiteness, and the national narrative of the US vis-à-vis the Ku Klux Klan, 9-11, Orientalism and patriarchy. This article looks at Kahf’s novel in the light of a critical discourse emerging in Arab-American fiction in relation to the boundaries and predicaments of US nationhood. In particular, the analysis will focus on Mohja Kahf’s poetics of dissonance that challenges dominant narratives of American national identity and its exclusionary cultural politics.

Published

Dec. 21, 2017

Accepted

Sept. 15, 2017

Submitted

July 13, 2017

Language

Keywords: Islam • Nationhood • Feminism • Arab-American literature • Diasporic women writers

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-19-17-14

Copyright: © 2017 Marta Cariello. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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