UCLA

This dissertation explores the ways in which some Arab women’s autobiographies radically depart from normative conventions of traditional autobiography both in the Western and the Arab-Islamic tradition(s) that insist on linearity and progressive temporality as foundations of autobiographical narration which promote masculinist and colonialist notions of the individuated, self-willed subject. I read these Arab women’s autobiographies’ formal innovations as interventions into the autobiographical form because they challenge narrow concepts of subjectivity. I explore the ways in which Arab women’s cultural production redefines the very idea of the political sphere, and I argue that they enact new definitions of agential subjects. By highlighting linearity as a concept adopted and deconstructed in Arab women’s life-writing, my project analyzes texts that illustrate: how life narration can orient an alternative textual trajectory informed by subverting the genealogical family line; how autobiographies can be transformed from life narratives into theoretical frameworks that provide an analysis of lines of power through Muslim women’s sense of spatiality and embodiment; and, how autobiographies can disrupt the straight line of narrating the history of the postcolonial nation by providing a fragmented re-collected narration of Arab political commitment. Arab women autobiographies subvert these normative conventions by instantiating alternative temporalities of hesitation, interruption, repetition, and circularity, and by organizing autobiographical narratives around spatiality rather than linear temporality.