Narrating the Self among Arab Americans: A Bridging Discourse between Arab Tradition and American Culture

摘要

This article expounds the nature of Arab American identity through an exploration of discourses and practices related to traveling and movement at global and local levels, with a particular emphasis on personal narratives of both men and women of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Travel is dealt with here in its broad meaning and connotes migratory travel, and immigration. It also indicates traveling back and forth between the homeland and new land. Despite the fact that cross-cultural studies of travel are scant, population movements and transnational migration are currently the focus of broad academic debates and surround such issues as transnational cultural relations, the renovation of migrants' social cosmologies,1 and the dynamics of identity reconstruction (Axel, 2004; Clifford, 1988; Cohn, 1987; Coutin, 2003; el-Aswad, 2004, 2006a; Euben, 2006; Hall, 1990, 1992; Julian, 2004; Kaplan, 1996; Kennedy & Danks, 2001; Mintz, 1998; Tsing, 2000).