Open Access
American Research Journal of English and Literature
ISSN (Online): 2378-9026
DOI: 10.46568/arjel
THE “ARAB-ORIENTAL” IN POST-9/11 AMERICA: A READING OF LAILA HALABY’S ONCE IN A PROMISED LAND
Abstract
The Orientalist psychology has been persistently shaped by an ideological demarcation between Westerners and Arab-Orientals; “the former are (in no
particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things” (Said, p. 49).
The Orientalist perspective has remained ingrained in the Western mind across the decades, persistently shaping the colonialist ideology in an era of mass
migration. The latter decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a rapid upsurge in the migration of Arabs, a major part of whom settled in the United States.
The continuous upsurge in the Arab migration and settlement was concurrent with the growing spur of racism, which forms the basis of the victimization of the
Arab-American populace. In this regard,Steven Salaita (an eminent critic of Islamophobia and a spokesperson for the “Anti-Arab Racism” in the USA) observes,
“The origin of American racism is a combination of European colonial values and interaction with Blacks and Indians” (p. 5). In the light of the above statement,
this paper aims to study Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land (2007) from an orientalist perspective, and locate the traces of Islamophobia that had
victimized the Muslim immigrants in America after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
