Arab-American autobiography and the reinvention of identity: two Egyptian negotiations

This article examines two Anglophone autobiographies by Egyptian immigrants in the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey (1999). The two texts are read as Egyptian negotiations of Arab-American identity in the U.S., in the context of modern Egyptian history and Western perceptions of Arabs, Islam, and Middle Eastern politics. The two texts display radically different strategies of negotiating identity that reflect divergent currents in American cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century.