AustLit

This paper argues that since 9/11, the way Arabs are portrayed in Young Adult fiction has become focused on race and ethnic politics in ways that highlight various political agendas fundamentally concerned with 'ethnic loyalties'. Jo Lampert discusses two Young Adult novels, including Australian-born-Muslim, Rhanda Abdel Fattah's text, Does My Head Look Big in This?, by drawing upon postcolonial theories of border crossing and hybridity to look at how representations of Arab-Australian (and Arab-American) identities have shifted since the events of September 11th, 2001. The analysis looks specifically at young Arab-women and how they negotiate questions of identity, positioned as they are in between the 'us and them' dichotomy which underpins racist discourse. The novels discussed are seen to engage with the complexities of Arab-Muslim identity in Western texts by looking at positive ways to embrace mutliple, or hybrid identites.