Jazzing Up Arab American Fiction: Diana Abu Jaber’s Arabian Jazz

الموضوعات

ادب

الملخص

Drawing on theories of musicalization, intermediality, travelling theory, and cultural identity, this thesis examines the intermedial play of music and literature, especially in jazz fiction. Therefore, it examines one of the first contemporary Arab American novels, Diana Abu Jaber’s Arabian Jazz, in relation to jazz music. Arabian Jazz as a literary text theorises for itself and highlights its own singularity with its inspiration that stems from the aesthetics and ethos of jazz. While jazz has often been read as a distinctly African American form of expression, this thesis does not seek to appropriate its historical weight, but rather to trace Arabian Jazz’s unique jazz aesthetic strategies— blue note, swing, non-linearity, improvisation, and repetition. Therefore, these aesthetic practices paved the way for an epistemological lens through which certain cultural concepts are selected from jazz to travel from one cultural concept (African American) to another (Arab American) to open a site articulating Arab American identity as an ongoing negotiation of cultural dissonance. This reading is not a universal model for interpreting Arab American fiction, specifically Arabian Jazz. Instead, it is an experience of reading a novel that itself plays with genre, time, and language. Previous research about Arabian Jazz are Hind El-Hajj and Sirène Harb’s “Straddling the Personal and the Political: Gendered Memory in Diana Abu-Jaber’s “Arabian Jazz,” Michelle Hartman’s “This Sweet / Sweet Music: Jazz, Sam Cooke, and Reading Arab American Literary Identities, and Steven Salaita’s “Cresent Moons, Jazz Music, and Feral Ethnicity,” to mention a few. However, almost all these studies highlight themes related to postcolonial studies, such as home, migration, hybrid identity, and gender issues. Therefore, this thesis is trying to examine and critique Arabian Jazz as a literary text, not only as a mere representation of the culture in which it was written. Thus, this thesis emphasises the aesthetic and musical strategies that inform Arabian Jazz narrative. It is only Mazen Naous, in the second chapter of his book Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel, titled “Blue Notes and Accented Rhythms,” who directly engages with the aesthetic appearance of jazz music in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz. It is worth mentioning that this thesis owes much to Naous’s work and benefits from it, particularly in its own second chapter, which builds upon and extends his insights. In this regard, jazz is read not only as a metaphor but as a mode of writing, a narrative improvisation that disrupts linear time and stable identities. By drawing on Warner Wolf’s intermediality and intermedial resonance between music and text, this thesis also considers how jazz functions as a cultural palimpsest, inscribing Arab and African American experiences into shared yet unresolved harmonies. Ultimately, this thesis attempts to read Arabian Jazz through sonic and aesthetic intertexts that complement rather than oppose each other. However, my interest goes beyond word and music interactions. It extends to analysing the musical-textual relation, which has not been sufficiently theorised in current academic discourses surrounding contemporary Arab American literature.

روابط وملفات

التعريف والنوع

رقم الوثيقة

026353ca-a999-40b8-b689-11101b2cce7d

رقم العقد

0

نوع الوسائط

Crawler

نوع المحتوى

الرسائل العلمية

صيغة المصدر

رسائل ماجيستير

نوع الملف

pdf text

أسماء الملفات

026353ca-a999-40b8-b689-11101b2cce7d_1.pdf

بيانات النشر

ألقاب المؤلفين

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اللغة

English

المصدر والدورية

اسم المصدر

Jazzing Up Arab American Fiction: Diana Abu Jaber’s Arabian Jazz

المحتوى والصفحات

عدد الصفحات

0

إشراف وإعداد

الإشراف

Walid Hamarneh

الإعداد

Razan Aleassa

الاقتباسات الببليوغرافية