Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation argues that contemporary exiled Arab American women memoirists—Leila Ahmed, Etel Adnan, and Mona Hajjar Halaby—turn life writing into a decolonial instrument, wielding the memoir as both refuge and rebellion. It contends that exile and nostalgia, often perceived as sites of loss, offer instead a generative vantage point from which to reconstruct selfhood. Moving beyond nostalgia as a paralyzing sentiment, this project critically interrogates nostalgia through a postcolonial and gendered lens—an insurgent practice that repurposes memory to dismantle imperial and patriarchal scripts.
Through the close reading of three memoirs, the dissertation traces a trajectory of decolonial strategies. The first chapter examines Etel Adnan’s work as a poetics of metaphysical exile, where she inhabits a realm similar to Lacanian Imaginary to unbind herself from colonial constructs of home and language. The second chapter analyzes Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage as an enactment of disruptive nostalgia—a method of excavating and reassembling cultural fragments to author a self beyond the colonial script of Arabness. The final chapter turns to Mona Hajjar Halaby, for whom return is not an endpoint but an ongoing intergenerational practice of (re)construction; sustained through the gendered diasporic labor of transforming her mother’s letters into a public counter-archive.
Integrating frameworks from Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and other critical scholars, this project reveals the memoir as a critical technology of selfhood. These memoirists appropriate language itself—through catachresis, multilingualism, and archival curation—to refuse colonial interpellation and assert a right to self-narration. In doing so, they expose the memoir as both sanctuary and weapon: a site where exile’s fractures become fertile ground for creative reconstruction. Overall, this dissertation proposes a new taxonomy of resistance, positioning these works not merely as personal testimonies, but as decolonial blueprints that transform displacement into a continuous, generative act of (re)construction.
Date
12-5-2025
Recommended Citation
Al-Selwady, Maye N., "Beyond Nostalgia: Reinventing Home Within the Ruins of Exile in Arab Women’s Memoirs" (2025). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 6967.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/6967
Committee Chair
Christopher Rovee