Arab Literary Representations of London: Cross-Cultural Romances as Social Spaces in Dabbagh’s Out of It and Jarrar’s Dreams of Water

Abstract

This paper investigates the literary representation of London as a site of cross-cultural romance by analyzing the effects of romantic relations between Arab women and white men on their identities in the works of Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It (2011) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s Dreams of Water (2006). It aims at examining the city of London as a convenient testing ground for whether Arab women characters could mingle and cohabit with white men as a coping strategy in the Metropolis. As this paper shows, the Metropolis helps Arab women to navigate a sense of identity in these cross-cultural romances. It is within the multi-ethnic and multicultural spaces of Metropolitan London that new intimate possibilities between Arab women and white men begin to emerge, revising and interrogating long-established racial and cultural barriers and boundaries. In other words, this is an attempt to examine how these cross-cultural romances serve to tighten the rift between the two cultures and decode the city’s different spaces. Therefore, the article argues that London’s multiple spaces appear to be a prominent factor in the construction of a social space in which cultural identity can be reconstructed and redefined.