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Carol Fadda-Conrey (2014) points out that Arab American literature emerged remarkably in the early years of the 21st century, accompanying various political events and turmoil in either the USA or the Arab world, particularly the Middle East. One of the key aspects of this ethnic literature is the manifestation of the Arab national identity and the call for unity and solidarity among kin Arab communities, whether locally or across borders. This paper, as such, by taking Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent (2003) as an example of the Arab American fiction produced in the contemporary era, examines the components of nationalism as expressed from afar – long-distance nationalism. This type of national propensity has received little attention in contemporary literary studies. In addition to using critical and analytical approaches to the novel, this paper basically relies on a socioconceptual framework based on the perspectives of prominent theorists and critics, such as Carol Fadda-Conrey, Nina Glick Shiller, Gabriella Elgenius, and Tololyan Khachig, to name a few. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arab-American women's literature has emerged noticeably in the early years of the 21st century. The social and political atmosphere in post-9/11 America encouraged the growth of such literature and brought it to international attention. This diasporic literature functions as a means of discussing the Orientalist discourse that circumscribes Arab American identity and its effects in determining their position in the wider American society. As such, this article investigates the extent to which Edward Said's discourse of Orientalism is employed by Mohja Kahf in her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) to project the stereotypes and misrepresentations that confine the identity of Arab and Muslim characters in the US society. This article suggests that post-9/11 Arab American fiction serves as a literary reference to such stereotype-based discourse in the contemporary era. The arguments in this article, while employing an analytical and critical approach to the novel, are outlined within postcolonial and Orientalist theoretical frameworks based on arguments of prominent critics and scholars such as Peter Morey, Edward Said, and Jack Shaheen, to name just a few. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]