In this book, my goal has been to formulate a methodological approach to recent developments in the Arab autobiographical genre across different media and modes of identity. Rather than classifying works according to their geographical origin, the authors’ gender, or linguistic composition (for instance, fushā versus colloquial, works written in Arabic versus English-language works by Arab authors), my typology categorizes the narratives by modes of autobiographical transmission; that is, thematic or form-based frameworks that dictate particular articulations of selfhood. Modes, or categories, chosen for this study are intentionally general and universal – nationalist, corporeal, multicultural, cinematic, and cyber – which suggests possibilities for comparison with autobiographical works produced in other cultures. I have pointed out in the Introduction that the list of categories is in no way complete and could certainly be extended in a number of ways. Moreover, this same method could be applied to a more historically and geographically specific categorization, such as autobiographical narratives of war or religious life-writing, among other possibilities.

Diverse autobiographical forms continue to mushroom and develop throughout the Arab world, and most of them are yet to be explored. Twitter, Facebook, graffiti and other forms of street art, performative art, painting, photography, artistic installations, graphic novels – these newly emerged and emerging genres of cultural expression offer modes of self-representation, remarkable in their newness, and ones that often challenge the conventional preconceptions of selfhood. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the negotiations of personal identity in textual, cinematic, and cyber narratives give an insight into larger extratextual cultural and societal processes. Therefore, unveiling and studying the new and nontraditional developments of Arab autobiographical discourse would help us to better understand the internal workings of Arab society at large.

The range of autobiographical works discussed in the previous chapters illustrates the incredible internal diversity within Arab self-referential discourse. However, one may notice a number of elements that continue to recur in the works under study and that perhaps indicate some common tendencies within contemporary Arab autobiographical production. One such element is the continued emphasis on the collective.