Re-thinking the Stereotypes and Violence Against Arabs and Arab Americans in El Guindi’s Back of the Throat and Shamieh’s The Black Eyed

Mohammad Almostafa

Abstract


This article explores two contemporary Arab American dramatists’ challenging attitudes towards the enacting dynamics of violence that have existed in either their native or host societies in the context of Shamieh’s The Black Eyed (2008) and El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2006). Both dramatists actively engage in addressing the ways, enabling factors, and agencies through which various forms of violence operate against Arab and Muslim (Americans), and dramatize them to carve an intellectual space in the American mainstream to express their own reflections on the causes of this phenomenon and its negative consequences, the intersection between violence and injustice, and the necessity of breaking the silence of those people who suffer from colonial subjugation, imperialist hegemony, racism, invisibility, prejudice, and hostility.


Keywords


Stereotypes; Violence; Hegemonic discourse; Resistance; Self-representaion

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/n

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