Identity, self, selfhood, subjectivity. In our globalizing, interdependent, and endlessly mutating world with its sporadically changing geopolitical realities, these terms seem to circulate with increasing frequency, performing as symbolic “anchors” that define and contextualize our existence and assign unique qualities to our lives. How do we define who we are and how do others define us? How often do we choose a single attribute – such as ethnicity, language, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on – to articulate our selfhood? What methods do we as individuals use to cope with our hybrid, perplexing, twisted subjectivities? In what ways do our personal identities relate to various cultural, societal, and ideological processes surrounding us in particular moments in time?

In the context of these questions, autobiographical discourse becomes particularly relevant and important: it creates a space where individual selfrepresentation merges with different modes of collective identity circulating in the autobiographer's environment. But if life-writing in Western literatures initiated a vast body of critical research, Arab autobiographical discourse – in particular its recent developments – remains largely unexplored. I argue that an inquiry into the ways and methods by which personal identity is constructed in recent autobiographical production by Arab authors offers a personalized insight into the cardinal changes that have occurred in Arab sociocultural zones in the last one hundred years – because, using the words of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “people tell stories of their lives through the cultural scripts available to them, and they are governed by cultural strictures about self-presentation in public” (Smith and Watson 2001: 42).

Although Arab autobiographical discourse has always been an interesting and culturally rich phenomenon, in recent decades it has gone through crucial transformations in both form and method. While numerous new autobiographical genres and subgenres mushroomed in different parts of the Arab world (including various innovative literary works in both prose and poetry, cinematic autobiographies, personal cyber-writing, and other unorthodox forms), authors also began to articulate their personal selfhood using diverse thematic angles. Many chose to reveal split, ruptured, and hybrid subjectivities; cultural constructs of gendered identities; sexual identities and, in more general terms, the autobiographical subject's physicality; and other identity markers that have very rarely been considered in earlier works of the genre.