2. Circular Hybridity: Reconciling Identity and Place in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home

Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2009) is a Bildungsroman which follows its protagonist through the Arabic-speaking world and to the United States, offering along the way a complex perspective on the transnational configuration of home and identity. This paper illuminates how Jarrar's coming-of-age novel negotiates home and identity in relation to concepts such as (anti)nostalgia, borders, and hybridity. Drawing on Doreen Massey's (1990) theory of “places as processes,” or places as spaces which are defined by personal experiences and social relations, A Map of Home offers what Carol Fadda—Conrey calls an “antinostalgic” stance on the Arab homeland. Antinostalgia is used to reflect on conditions of war and occupation, dispossession, and intergenerational traumas. Spotlighting the trope of blended or obscured physical and cultural borders, this paper contends that A Map of Home champions hybridity, in the terms of Jarrar's protagonist, as “circular”—in continuous motion/transformation yet paradoxically whole. Hybridity in the novel is detected in linguistic idiosyncracies within the Arabic language as well as heterogenous renditions of practicing Islam in the homeland and beyond. In the end, Jarrar's novel illustrates how personal experiences are what define a place as home. Home, therefore, can be everywhere and nowhere all at once.