From Orientalism to Disrupting Whiteness: The Development of Arab American Crime/ Detective Fiction by Diana Abu- Jaber and Laila Lalami

Despite the abundance of scholarship on the historical emergence of Arab American literature in general, there is a lack of research on the emergence and the development of Arab American crime/detective fiction in particular. Diana Abu- Jaber’s Origin, despite its publication in 2007, has been understudied and classified as a thriller or a popular genre, henceirrelevant to academic study or the three waves that inspired Arab American writings. Recent edited collections namely Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture: A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010), and A History of American Crime Fiction (2017) exclude Arab American fiction. Similarly, the genre of The Other Americans by Laila Lalami has not received much attention by literary critics since the book’s publication in 2019. In this paper, I read Abu-Jaber’s Origin as a first attempt by an Arab American woman to write crime fiction that conforms to both third wave Arab American writing and the tradition of American crime fiction set by Edgar Allen Poe with the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), a genre later developed by Lalami in The Other Americans to align with American crime fiction by writers of color. The goal of this paper, however, is not to trace the development of American crime fiction—that traditionally features a detective and a murder mystery and solely functions to evoke pleasure in readers not to restore social justice—but to explore how both novels align or depart from Arab Americans literature waves and American crime fiction tradition.