Investigating diasporic identities in the Arab-American autobiographies of Leila Ahmed and Edward Said: a Socio-cognitive approach

Abstract

This study investigates diasporic identity in Arab– American autobiographies. It particularly tackles the question of diasporic identity representation and its impact on the projection of individual self-perception in accordance with the different social contexts and ideological leaning; it aims at explaining how different social contexts, that the authors encounter and experience, affect their own identity. The study employs insights from autoethnography and socio-cognitive inquiries to examine two Arab- American memoirs; Leila Ahmed’s (1999) “A Border Passage” and Edward Said’s (1999) “Out of Place”. The research adopts the “Interpretive Autoethnography” approach, postulated by Denzin (2014), to engage with the question of self-perception and identity representation through an analysis of the self- writings of the authors. The study also adopts van Dijk’s (2016) Socio-cognitive discourse studies framework to analyze the authors’ language to reflect their self-perception, and by extension, identity. Received: 06 November 2022 Accepted: 15 March 2023Published: 01 May 2023

Keywords

• arab diaspora, arab- american identity, memoirs and autobiographies, self-writings, autoethnography, socio-cognitive linguistics