Representation of Post-9/11 America and Demystification of the American Dream: Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land
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Arab American literature tends to focus on the attacks of 9/11 and the effect of the War on Terror by elucidating the social impact on Arab and Muslim Americans and their communities: Islamophobia, Arabophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim policies and discrimination, and racial and religious profiling. Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) interacts with these problems that Arab Americans are facing. The novel depicts how Jassim and Salwa Haddad—a Palestinian couple from Jordan—are afflicted by the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. However, instead of depicting the Arab American couple’s affiliation with other Arabs or Arab Americans after 9/11, Halaby interweaves Jassim and Salwa, who once achieved the American Dream, with those who have been excluded from the American Dream for much longer: women who are victims of domestic violence, members of broken families, adolescents affected by the drug trade, or those disadvantaged by class stratification. In this essay, analyzing Jassim and Salwa’s relationship with the underprivileged Americans, I will examine how the areligious, apolitical, and assimilated Arab Americans’ downfall demystifies the American Dream, reveals the Dream’s limits and contradictions, and provides an internal critique of post-9/11 America.
Abstract
Arab American literature tends to focus on the attacks of 9/11 and the effect of the War on Terror by elucidating the social impact on Arab and Muslim Americans and their communities: Islamophobia, Arabophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim policies and discrimination, and racial and religious profiling. Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) interacts with these problems that Arab Americans are facing. The novel depicts how Jassim and Salwa Haddad—a Palestinian couple from Jordan—are afflicted by the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. However, instead of depicting the Arab American couple’s affiliation with other Arabs or Arab Americans after 9/11, Halaby interweaves Jassim and Salwa, who once achieved the American Dream, with those who have been excluded from the American Dream for much longer: women who are victims of domestic violence, members of broken families, adolescents affected by the drug trade, or those disadvantaged by class stratification. In this essay, analyzing Jassim and Salwa’s relationship with the underprivileged Americans, I will examine how the areligious, apolitical, and assimilated Arab Americans’ downfall demystifies the American Dream, reveals the Dream’s limits and contradictions, and provides an internal critique of post-9/11 America.
참고문헌 (15)
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