Crossing the Division of the Hyphen: Arab and African American Women's Memoirs as Interracial Testimonials

Abstract

After decades of attempting to fit the qualification of the hyphenated types of literature, many literary voices of women from various ethnic backgrounds are trying to unshackle their writings from the confinement of the hyphen. The interracial reading of African American and Arab American women memoirs suggests a correlation between the two as race and gender testimonials. It also detects parallel attempts of their writers to coexist in a wider literary space that offers tranquility with the past and resists the negative value of the hyphen as a classification.