Ensiyeh Darzinejad; Leyla Baradaran Jamili
Volume 14, Issue 18 , June 2018, , Pages 59-85
Abstract
Leila Aboulala (1964 -) is a Sudanese-Egyptian Muslim novelist who lives in the Scottish diaspora. She is one of the emigrant Muslim women writers who try to initiate a new discourse in their literary works. In her diasporic discourse she challenges the depiction of the identity of Muslim women as innate, ...
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Leila Aboulala (1964 -) is a Sudanese-Egyptian Muslim novelist who lives in the Scottish diaspora. She is one of the emigrant Muslim women writers who try to initiate a new discourse in their literary works. In her diasporic discourse she challenges the depiction of the identity of Muslim women as innate, timeless, and static and represents the subjectivity of her female protagonists as performative. In this respect the subjectivity of Muslim woman is a "doing" rather than a "being" and each step she takes makes her approach the Islamic subjectivity or deviate from it. The theories of William Safran, James Clifford, and Homi K. Bhabha are consulted to delineate diaspora an its capacity for discourse formation. Judith Butler's performative theory is used to investigate the performativity of subjectivity of the Muslim women in Aboulela's novels. The performativity of language and cultural practices like sartorial practices, culinary preferences, and religious rituals are the pivotal points of this article.