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356258

Deconstructing Borders: Arab American Immigrants and Body Politics in Mohja Kahf’s <i>The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf</i>

Article

Last updated: 24 Dec 2024

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Abstract

The present article contextualizes Mohja Kahf's 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and a few of her selected writings within a historical perspective. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, gender and border studies, I argue that the Syrian American novelist, poet and activist Mohja Kahf (1967- ) locates woman's body, labeled as ‘Muslim' by the West, at the crux of her works to interrogate body politics and negotiate gender and rights. Depicting the life of Arab American immigrants from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahf delineates the macro and micro politics hegemonizing that body, subverted by its agency and counter-hegemonic voice. Taking Indianapolis, the city at the crossroads, as her space of departure that witnesses her coming of age, in her narrative, Kahf deconstructs temporal, spatial, cultural, and gender borders, creating a liberating transcultural/transnational path. Written at the intersection of history and fiction, the stories of Muslim women's bodies as cultural products are stories of power relations that are anchored in patriarchal, colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial discourses. Through the Muslim woman's body, Kahf creates awareness of the threatening role of knowledge production embodied by such discourses as the real terror that has colonized minds and constructed borders. Appropriating selected Western feminist tactics, intertwined with the Muslim feminist concept of “mujadila," Kahf introduces a protagonist who embarks on a journey of consecutive conflict with all discourses of othering, silencing, negation and appropriation through a constant process of re-visioning, deciphering, healing, and re-inscribing of Muslim women's bodies.

DOI

10.21608/cse.2024.286994.1162

Keywords

Mohja Kahf, Body Politics, borders, Muslim woman, Gender

Authors

First Name

Pervine

Last Name

Elrefaei

MiddleName

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Affiliation

Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University

Email

pervine_refaei@yahoo.com

City

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Orcid

-

Volume

2024

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

47584

Issue Date

2024-07-01

Receive Date

2024-05-03

Publish Date

2024-07-01

Page Start

58

Page End

75

Print ISSN

0575-1624

Online ISSN

2682-2504

Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/article_356258.html

Detail API

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=356258

Order

6

Type

Original Article

Type Code

738

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Cairo Studies in English

Publication Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Deconstructing Borders: Arab American Immigrants and Body Politics in Mohja Kahf’s <i>The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf</i>

Details

Type

Article

Created At

24 Dec 2024