Hybridity of Narrative Identity in Post-Arab Spring Novels

This paper examines the contemporary Arab novels that followed the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, where identity becomes a significant concern in the story, which invites readers to question fixed definitions of identity and take a journey toward fragmentation and diaspora. The paper investigates the narration strategies that reshape the identities portrayed, where the changing characters represent a kind of exile and internal alienation that transcends the ethnographic connotation in a way that makes it impossible for the stability of identity, its integration, and the determination of whatever belongs to it, by inventing multiple masks with self-invention, which is constantly changing in its allegiances and is less defined in its ego assertion. By blurring the line between assimilating and presenting the multifaceted self, identity undergoes complete dissolution and becomes exposed to shocks and pressures. It allows us to observe the manifestation of the ego’s relationship with the other through various narrative and aesthetic expressions. We can understand to what extent the narrative discourse succeeds in representing all these identities and how to explain beyond the meaning of the post-Arab Spring novels. This research seeks to reveal the dynamics of self-identity that becomes symbolic for the entire society while being in cultural confrontation between ethnic or religious identities in a way that raises questions about the repercussions of narrative discourse for representation and expression. In addition, by opening the historical record, having a close look at the past, and emphasizing the hybrid identity of the city and the characters within a mixed narrative system, this study aims to develop the traditional survival strategies of the characters as an act of resistance to the violence of the present and attempt to extrapolate future hybrid identities.