Introduction

Abstract

In the presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2003, Amy Kaplan underlined the necessity of reconceptualizing national identity in American Studies in light of a newer understanding of the United States and Americanness as relational concepts, constructed nationally within the geographical boundaries of the United States and transnationally outside of that space. This creates the possibility of the formation of problematic, sometimes paradoxical affiliations and identifications, which I call non-national, and through its lens I examine narratives by Arab-American, Chicana, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, and Cuban-American women writers. This study problematizes essen-tial concepts that are imminent to the formation of the nation: national consciousness, national time, national space, and national belonging in texts by Diana Abu-Jaber (The Language of Baklava, 2005), Laila Halaby (West of the Jordan, 2003), Pauline Kaldas (The Time between Places: Stories that Weave In and Out of Egypt and America, 2010), Alia Yunis (The Night Counter, 2009), Bapsi Sidhwa (An American Brat, 2006), Cherríe Moraga (The Last Generation, 1993), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake, 2003), and Cristina Garcia (The Agüero Sisters, 1997).

The transnational turn in American Studies has been crucial in decentering the tenacious model of the nation as the basic unit of knowledge production. It traces alternative spaces and modes of belonging to collectivities not subsumed by the nationstate… and it reconceives immigration as multidirectional movements.

—Amy Kaplan, 11-12