عنوان

Secularism narratives and Arab American fiction

Number

TL47843

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Secularism narratives and Arab American fiction

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Danielle Aberle Haque

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

McCullough, Kate

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Cornell University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2014

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

166

Text of Note

Committee members: Anker, Elizabeth; Brady, Mary Pat

Text of Note

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-12616-7

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Discipline of degree

English

Body granting the degree

Cornell University

Text preceding or following the note

2014

Text of Note

"Secularism Narratives and Arab American Fiction" focuses on contemporary fiction's challenge to the liberal political construction of minority religious practices and community life as incompatible with modernity, progress, and secularism. U.S. secularism is not simply the absence of religion from the public sphere, but is underwritten by a particularly U.S. Protestant conception of religion that has historically shaped assumptions about what it means to be both religious and secular in the United States. Looking to Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, Ninar Esber, Mouir Fatmi, and Hasan Elahi, I explore immigrant narratives that work outside religious/secular binaries; rather than operating unequivocally within the terms of religious categorizations, contemporary writers often recast those terms and respond to the secularism narrative by scrambling the terms of the religious/secular binary through lived, embodied religious experience. These works dispute the dominant United States narrative of secularism and its claim to be universal and progressive; rather, they reveal how prohibitory secularism enforces an exclusionary citizenry through racialized immigration policies, Islamaphobic political rhetoric and popular culture, and the promotion of specific economic forms and ideologies worldwide. I argue that secularism is entangled with global ideologies of human rights, but also with the particularly United States legal discourses of privacy and property. Moreover, by elucidating the relationship between generic forms and the secular conventions that inform them, I uncover how these texts work to restructure and resist secular narratives of modernization and, by doing so, create the potential for more inclusive secularisms.

Comparative literature; Islamic Studies; American literature; Religion; Narratives; Politics; Immigrants; Rhetoric; Word order; Fiction; Ideology

Subject Term

Language, literature and linguistics;Social sciences;Arab American literature;Digital art;Islam and secularism;Islamaphobia;Modernity and progress;Political rhetoric and popular culture;Privacy and property discourses

Nalbantoglu, Huseyin Cahit

McCullough, Kate

Subdivision

English

Cornell University

Call Number

1561543460; 3583155

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y