Denied Citizenry and the Postnational Imaginary

Arab-American and Muslim-American Literary Responses to 9/11

Abstract

This paper documents the emergence of a new sub-genre of U.S. literature, encompassing narratives focusing on the social and cultural backlash on Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This body of literature, produced by a new generation of authors of Middle Eastern descent writing in as well as outside the U.S., engages the problematic construction of the Middle Eastern (often summarily stereotyped as “Arab,” “Islamic” or “Muslim”) in the U.S. as disidentified citizen in the age of the War on Terror. In so doing – and more importantly – this new sub-genre calls for an urgent revision of notions of national literature, as it reflects new modes of diasporic citizenry in U.S. society and its representation in the new century. Deeply confronting conflicting notions of denied citizenry and exclusion in post 9/11 U.S., recent works by Mohsin Hamid, H.M. Naqvi and Moustafa Bayoumi (among others) bring to the foreground the emergence of what I call, after Donald Pease, a Postnational Imaginary, and engage literary studies to reassess the role of the postcolonial in twenty-first century American Studies as a scholarly discipline.