Representations of Arab-American identities in the works of Diana Abu Jaber

This thesis has aimed to illustrate the transnational identity beings/becomings of Arab American protagonists in the American mainstream culture, whose mental and/or physical journeys to the homeland and host land in terms of Bakhtin's heteroglot, Deleuze & Guattari's rhizomatic and Edward Said's Orientalist consciousness revealing the discourse of misplacement/displacement in three selected novels of Diana Abu-Jaber. The first chapter elaborates on the Arab American literary scene identity formation by addressing the development of Arab American literature and emergent literary genres through anthologies and selected publishing. Secondly, defining the theories of transnationalism, diaspora, Bakhtin's heteroglot consciousness, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of rhizome and Edward Said's Orientalism was aimed to examine the infrastructure of the transnational being and becoming and the consciousness of dual belonging, its reflection in the discourse and sensibility of the Arab, American and Arab-American to provide the reader with a better understanding of the Arab American characters of the novels and of our era. Thirdly, these theories are applied to scrutinize the identity crisis of the protagonists in Diana Abu-Jaber's books of Arabian Jazz, Crescent and The Language of Baklava. This study argues that the protagonists in the three novels eventually learn how to negotiate their two selves, one American and the other Arab, through dialogic relationships, heteroglot consciousness of their hybridity and awareness of their rhizomatic existences.