Dispute in the Diaspora: Metaphor and Contradiction in Twenty-First-Century Arab American Family Dramas.

This article examines early twenty-first-century Arab American family dramas, focusing on Betty Shamieh's *Roar* (2005) and Yussef El Guindi's *Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith* (2009), as allegories for the complexities of Arab diasporic identity and experience in the United States. It situates these plays within the historical context of Arab American migration, racialization, and systemic bias, highlighting how they explore intra-communal conflicts shaped by differing relationships to homeland, host nation, and community. Both plays use family dynamics to reveal tensions between individual and collective identities amid acculturation pressures and anti-Arab discrimination, with *Roar* presenting a more fractured and uncertain outlook, while *Ten Acrobats* offers a hopeful vision of pluralistic acceptance. The article argues that such dramas serve as sites of negotiation and critique, challenging exclusionary notions of Americanness and fostering a nuanced understanding of Arab American hybridity and transnationalism.