Writing Arab-American Identity Post 9/11

The stark realization faced by many Arab-Americans post-9/11 was that their heretofore relative anonymity and even invisibility among the ranks of US communities was being replaced by blanket representations that often portrayed them in a derogatory light. Such representations were and still are in large part induced by the limited and binary rhetoric (you are either with us or against us, patriotic vs. unpatriotic) that characterized a stricken and angry post-9/11 US public. Even before September 2001, Arab-Americans often found themselves being compromised as “members of a demonized community,” which has been used to explain why “Arab-American writers in the United States have, of necessity, tended to address communal concerns more than individual ones” (Mattawa and Akash, 1999, p. xii). Such a communal focus in the works of Arab-American writers has not abated in the wake of 9/11, but has been widened and transformed to incorporate and attest to the diversity of such a community