Writing the Young Diasporic Muslim Female: A Study in Creating Culturally Sustaining Narratives

This doctoral dissertation begins with the central research question: How might the act of writing a creative literary text both capture the lived experience of an adolescent diasporic Muslim female and critique the social conditions that aggravate her marginalization? To answer it, I wrote THE LAST STORY, a young adult novel, with a female diasporic main character of Muslim origin living in a speculative and divided world. As I wrote, I kept thorough journal entries about the creative, critical choices being made. Accordingly, while the novel itself does not make up the dissertation, it is the main data source in what is, essentially, an autoethnographic (Ellis Bocher, 2000) project. Because I have composed a reflexive written piece about the process of writing and the context in which it happened, the result of this research project in the form of this thesis is what Richardson (2000) terms “a writing story.” My theoretical framework encompasses philosophies of narrative and utilizes Bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005) as a guiding principle. Creative Analytical Practices (CAP) (Richardson, 1999) autoethnography and Cooper and White’s (2012) five contexts of qualitative inquiry serve as conceptual framework to methodologically structure the thesis. Stimulus for the work is guided by the development of a social imagination within the creative writing field, attempting to do so by taking up what Greene (2000) describes as “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society” (p. 5). It hopes to contribute to the discourse around the inclusion of culturally sustaining materials (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris, 2012) in the English language and literature classroom through the Decolonizing Praxis of Narrative (DPN) method, which I developed from the writing and inquiry process.Ph.D