Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies

By Amira Jarmakani

Both a summative description of the field and an exploration of new directions, this multidisciplinary reader addresses issues central to the fields of Arab American, US Muslim, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) American studies. Taking a broad conception of the Americas, this collection simultaneously registers and critically reflects upon major themes in the field, including diaspora, migration, empire, race and racialization, securitization, and global South solidarity. The collection will be essential reading for scholars in Arab/SWANA American studies, Asian American studies, and race, ethnicity, and Indigenous studies, now and well into the future.

Contributors include:
Evelyn Alsultany, Carol W. N. Fadda, Hisham D. Aidi, Nadine Naber, Therí Pickens, Steven Salaita, Ella Shohat and Sarah M.A. Gualtieri.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780815655220

Book preview

Part One

Arab American Legibility and the Question of Naming

. . . a girl knocked,

wanted to see the Arab.

I said we didn’t have one.

After that, my father told me who he was,

Shihab—shooting star—

a good name, borrowed from the sky.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, Blood

These simple yet powerful lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Blood (1994) capture some of the paradoxes of Arab American identity and its legibility in US contexts. Nye’s discovery of her good Arabic name is prompted by an inquisitive and intrusive knock on the door of her family home, an incident that illustrates both the xenophobic curiosity and the invasive surveillance that can frame Arab American life. Shihab, the family name, means shooting star and connects the poet to her Arab blood. Yet the name also denotes something brilliant and difficult to discern, implying that it can be uncovered only by language or through storytelling (After that, my father told me who he was). To be Arab American, Nye’s poem suggests, is to be something treasured that no one can take away from you—like a shooting star or your name—but also invisible, illegible without translation, and, additionally, somehow suspect in the eyes of others.

The cluster of paradoxes in Nye’s poem are directly addressed in the essays we have gathered in this opening part of the reader. Rather than ask, Who are Arab Americans?—a question that is addressed in almost every introduction to studies by and about Arab Americans—we ask: How do Arabs become legible in the Americas? What concepts have Arab Americans utilized to frame their individual and group identities? Who does this category include, exclude, make visible, or obscure? How does it manifest differently in different parts of the Americas? What names does it take, and what are some of the contradictions and pressures, both internal to Arab communities and external to them, that inform attitudes toward the category Arab American? How do matters of race, class, religion, ability, gender, and sexuality contribute to particular ways of marking Arab Americanness in specific national or social contexts? These questions allow us to explore the naturalization of the category Arab American and to foreground conversations that discuss the underlying ideological and political processes involved in demanding legibility through identity categories and discourses on racialization.

Nye’s poem was included in Joe Kadi’s groundbreaking collection Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American & Arab-Canadian Feminists (1994). In the introduction to that book, which is included as chapter 1 in this reader, Kadi identifies two related themes that would prove central to Arab American scholarship—namely, the question of invisibility and the problem of naming. Maintaining that Arabs are the Most Invisible of the Invisibles (p. 56), Kadi emphasizes the importance of naming as a means for gaining visibility, declaring: Names are critical for a personal and communal sense of affirmation (p. 55). Yet as Kadi also acknowledges, names can also set a group apart from others who share similar experiences, and in that sense they are problematic. Even as a name makes one group identity visible, in this case Arab Americans, it necessarily excludes persons such as Turks, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, and Imazighen, among others, who hail from Arabic-speaking regions and don’t fit neatly or comfortably into the limits inscribed by the category. In posing the question of how Arabs have become legible in the Americas, this part of the reader surveys the scholarly conversations about visibility and its paradoxes while also considering the struggles for naming and recognition, particularly in relation to both the limits and the possibilities of the category Arab American.

Striving for Visibility

The need to map out or make visible a distinct Arab American experience is reiterated in texts produced throughout the late 1980s and up to the early 2000s. Gregory Orfalea, for example, explains the impetus for his book Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (1988) as a desire to fill a gap. It began to nag me, he says, that there were no available volumes about Arab Americans (4). More than ten years later, Michael Suleiman remarks: There is still a dearth of information. . . . Much of the available literature on Arabs in America has not found its way into the main body of scholarship (1999c, [xi]). What was available, Kadi reminds us, is a social construction of ‘the Arabs’ that has cast us as enemy, other, fanatical terrorist, crazy Muslim. If we are women, we can add to that list veiled Woman and exotic whore (p. 54). Barbara Nimri Aziz remarks that the accounts about Arabs simply get it wrong. We are really not how others write us. At best we are invisible (2004, xii). In response to this perceived invisibility and misrepresentation, Elmaz Abinader envisions her characters [as] tiny warriors against the massive media machine that does not see them at all (2004, 113). As these declarations demonstrate, the category Arab American can function as an assertion of presence and dignity in the face of invisibility, misrepresentation, and erasure.

The drive to become visible is unquestionably a political act that directly engages with the impacts of erasure on actual lives. Therese Saliba, for example, notes that the absent Arab woman trope has been deployed within the U.S. media both as a resonant and as an efficient signifier of so-called Western cultural superiority over the Arab world (1994, 126). The connection between political aims and exclusionary invisibility is also addressed by Helen Hatab Samhan (1987), who argues that anti-Arab racism is essentially a form of political racism that refuses to see Arab viewpoints, particularly when it comes to US foreign policy toward Arabs and Israel. James Zogby and Helen Samhan (1987) also note that Arab baiting is a strategy used to smear political opponents and exclude Arabs from political participation. Noura Erakat highlights this point in describing the silencing of dissent she experienced as a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, where attempts to suppress her activism and political views on Palestine made her not just feel invisible; [she] felt erased (2011, 179). To become visible is to be heard, made legible, named; in essence, it demands political recognition. To be denied a voice, to be rendered invisible and illegible, is to be denied participation in civic and political life as well as in scholarship, as we discuss in the introduction to this book.

Paradoxes of Visibility

At the same time that Arab Americans continue to experience exclusionary forms of invisibility, they nonetheless face punishing hypervisibility manifested in practices of heightened scrutiny, surveillance, and exclusion (Cainkar 2018; Hagopian 2004; Jamal and Naber 2008; Volpp 2003). This hypervisibility is demonstrated, for example, in the long-standing FBI surveillance of Arab communities in the United States, in decades of hate-crime victimization, and in the more recent so-called Muslim ban, which aimed to bar the entrance of persons from a number of predominantly Arab and Muslim-majority countries to the United States, issues we take up in greater detail in part five. Practices of hypersecuritization and the crude representations on which they rely also contribute to messy amalgamations and misinterpretations of Arab Americans. As the expression Muslim ban suggests, these practices are often accompanied by a conflation of the category Arab with the category Muslim in spite of the facts that not all Arabs are Muslims and the majority of Muslims are not Arab. This conflation of Arabs with Muslims is a point that a number of scholars have addressed (Cainkar 2018; Hagopian 2004; Jamal and Naber 2008). As these conflations demonstrate, visibility alone does not rectify dominant and obscuring narratives about Arabs, Muslims, and Arab Americans.

The problems of both hypervisibility and invisibility—including the conflation of Arabs and Muslims, heightened surveillance of anyone perceived to be such, and the struggle for Arab American legibility in mainstream contexts—shape what could be described as a paradox of visibility for Arab Americans. In Ambiguous Insiders: An Investigation of Arab American Invisibility (2000), the anthropologist Nadine Naber identifies four paradoxes that Arab Americans face in the United States. One has to do with Arab American positioning within the US racial/ethnic classification system— namely, the paradox . . . that Arab Americans are racialized according to religion (Islam) rather than biology (phenotype) (37). The other paradoxes are that Arab Americans are a complex, diverse community, but are represented as a monolith in popular North American media images, that Arab Americans are simultaneously racialized as whites and as non-whites, and that the religious forms of identity that Arab immigrants bring to the US intersect with racial forms of identity that structure US society (37). These paradoxes reveal that the interplay between invisibility and hypervisibility also has to do with external processes of racialization, which we discuss in more detail in part three, and that struggles for legibility can be double-edged.

In fact, as Amira Jarmakani (2011) reminds us, invisibility can also serve as a means for expressing complexity and resisting conformity to preconceived paradigms of legibility and ways of being. In an excerpt that we include as chapter 6 in part one, Jarmakani focuses on perceptions of Arab femininity and proposes strategic uses of invisibility, whereby Arab and Arab American ciswomen, trans, and nonbinary people who are doubly silenced by the very categories that claim to give them voice can instead mobilize [the politics of invisibility], thereby reinventing and transforming that invisibility into a tool with which they can create transformative and liberatory futures (pp. 107, 112). Arab Americans, Jarmakani reminds us, have the power to resist and disidentify (Muñoz 1999) with hegemonic perceptions of them and can ideally move past the false binary of visibility/hypervisibility to create supple and flexible frameworks of meaning.

Naming and Recognition

Concomitant with the question of visibility is the question of names with which we opened this discussion. Although Arabic-speaking communities have established their presence in the Americas since the 1880s, the term Arab American gained saliency only relatively recently. Research by Gregory Orfalea (1989), Sarah M. A. Gualtieri (2009), and Hani Bawardi (2014) reveals that usage of the term Arab American can be traced back to the 1940s, particularly as it was used by US citizens of Arab background who wished to influence American policy on Palestine. Prior to this period, Arabic-speaking groups were referred to by others as Asians, ‘other Asians,’ Turks from Asia, Syrians, Caucasians, white, black, or ‘colored’ (Suleiman 1999b, 12). Michael Suleiman attributes the absence of an Arab American identity in the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s to several causes, one of which is that the main bond of solidarity among [Arabic-speaking people] at that time was based on familial, sectarian, and village- or region-oriented factors (1999b, 12). Another contributing factor was the difficulty of fitting into US racial classifications, an issue that persists to this day. We take up this matter in greater detail in part three, where we discuss the paradox of being racially classified as white by the US government at the same time as being subjected to discrimination, harassment, assault, surveillance, and exclusionary practices based on a wide range of signifiers, including religion, phenotype, dress, name, and language use (Cainkar 2018; Gualtieri 2009; Haney López 2006; Jamal 2008; Naber 2008; Samhan 1999; Zopf 2017).

In Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and other places in Central and South America, Arabic-speaking peoples and their descendants were and in some cases continue to be labeled turco (Alfaro-Velcamp 2007; Civantos 2013; Karam 2013). This designation at once (1) marks the fact that initial arrivals of migrants from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) came to the Spanish-speaking Americas during the period of the Ottoman Empire and (2) consolidates a set of stereotypes about Arabs as economically shrewd and culturally backward that frames general perceptions of them in those regions.¹ For example, John Tofik Karam, whose work we excerpt in part three, explains: "Turco (Turk) has served as a general designation for ‘Middle Easterner’ in Brazil for more than a century. He adds: Coined by late nineteenth- century Brazilian elites to denigrate Syrian and Lebanese immigrants as economic pariahs, the term of difference today continues to attribute an alleged shrewdness to Brazilians of Middle Eastern origin" (2013, 80). Christina Civantos, whose work we include in part two, demonstrates that the term turco in Argentina was initially used as shorthand for the stereotype of the wily Levantine peddler. To this day, Civantos notes, "‘turco’ usually carries a derogatory connotation linked to the antisemitism of the first half of the twentieth century and to a second wave of anti-Arab sentiment that arose at the end of the 1980s" (2013, 111). Neither the Spanish equivalent of Arab American nor an alternate identity-consolidating term yet exists in Mexico, Central America, and South America, which no doubt also has to do with the common imperialist and US-centric conflation of the United States with America.

Arab Americans’ responses to the question of naming have been varied and complex. In the United States, Arab Americans have engaged with both the counterhegemonic discourse of race, illustrated by increasing self-identification as people of color, and with the more assimilationist discourse of multiculturalism, which tends to uphold nationalist mythologies about racial and ethnic harmony. Such nationalist mythologies also operate in the Americas more broadly. For example, Karam has shown how Arab Brazilians have responded to the pejorative connotations of the appellation turcos by reproducing "nationalist notions of ‘mixture’ (mestiçagem) and ‘racial democracy’ (democracia racial) in Brazil" (2013, 80), thereby contributing to the national mythology of racial harmony through mixture. In contrast, Arab Argentines, Civantos reveals in chapter 9 of this reader, adopted the nationalist figure of the Argentine gaucho, simultaneously embracing an orientalist narrative about the figure’s Andalusian origins and a nationalist narrative about the figure as "the product of mestizaje—of the mixture of Spanish and indigenous elements (p. 147, citing Richard Slatta). Debates surrounding the ultimately unsuccessful effort to create the category Middle East and North Africa" (MENA) on the 2020 US Census (see Beydoun 2016; Buchanan, Marks, and Álvarez Figueroa 2016; Kayyali 2013), which we take up in more detail in part three, demonstrate that efforts to become legible to the state are inevitably fraught with the opposing forces of political recognition versus co-optation and even rejection. These various responses reveal naming to be both necessary and overwrought; it can function as a means toward political inclusion at the same time that it draws its own boundaries for exclusion. This consequence is effected not only by internally limiting the group to those who identify with the named category but also by providing the state with more tools to manage the named group.

The Shaping of a Category

During the 1960s, a number of factors coalesced to forge the increasing adoption of an Arab American identity: Arab nationalism; the Israeli–Arab War of 1967 and subsequent Israeli military occupations of Arab territories; the US civil rights movement; internationalist women’s, workers’, and Third World alliances; and anticolonial rights movements more globally. As Gualtieri and Homsi Vinson note, the writings of Evelyn Shakir and Etel Adnan offer insights into the embrace of the category Arab American (2018, vii). Evelyn Shakir, for example, remarks that even though she and others in her community knew themselves as "bint and ibn Arab (literally, daughter or son of an Arab—in other words, an Arab), she and other second- and third-generation US-born children of immigrants from what was formerly called Greater Syria" publicly added the label Arab as a political statement after the Israeli–Arab War of 1967 (1997, 1). Etel Adnan, however, emphasizes her location in the United States and the student movements on US campuses as pivotal in her embrace of both an Arab and American identity. In Lebanon, she remarks, she had a kind of fluid identity that made her wonder: Was I Greek, Ottoman, Arab, almost French? However, she adds: It was in Berkeley that . . . I became what I was, I became an Arab at the same time that I was becoming an American. . . . This world became a reality, in all its interplay of local identities and transnational solidarities (2004, 56–57). As the remarks by both Shakir and Adnan illustrate, the designation Arab American is not just reactive to political exigency but also proactive and deployed strategically to assert an emerging sense of shared cultural, political, legal, and social identity for Arabs in the United States.

A number of scholars have argued that the development of an Arab American identity was crystallized in the formation of the Association of Arab American University Graduates in 1967 (Joseph 1999; Khan 2017 and chapter 35 in this reader; Pennock 2017; Suleiman 1999a; Terry 1999), discussed in the introduction to this reader. Responses to this crystallization, manifested by the Arab American organizations that arose after the 1960s, typically envision a break from articulations of identity at the turn of the twentieth century, a period generally associated with a mahjar or emigrant group identity. Recent scholarship, however, helps us tease out the continuities between these time periods as well as the differences between them. Members of the mahjar attempted to influence US policies toward Arab countries, in particular Palestine (Bawardi 2014; Ghareeb and Tutunji 2016; Hassan 2011); they engaged in transnational political activism and philanthropy (Balloffet 2017; Fahrenthold 2013); and they formed benevolent, cultural, and literary associations. They also spoke in Arabic and for the most part identified themselves by their places of origin. For example, while some associations of the period such as the Partido Patriótico Árabe (Hizb al-Watani al-‘Arabi) in Buenos Aires highlighted a pan-Arab political stance, others such as al- Nadi al-Homsi ([City of] Homs Club) in São Paulo and the Syrian Ladies Aid Society of New York highlighted—as evident in their chosen names—parochial or regional affiliations. Similarly, the newspaper Kawkab Amirka (Star [planet] of America), which was published between 1892 and 1908, espoused the aim of bringing its eastern and western readers into closer and more intimate relations (qtd. in Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies 2015). However, the newspaper was published largely in Arabic, with only some articles in English, and it identified its primary audience as Ottoman subjects scattered throughout Europe, North and South America (qtd. in Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies 2015). The writers who joined the Pen League (al-Rabitath al-Qalamiyya), an association first established in 1916 and then resurrected in New York City in 1920— including among its members Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Naimy, and Kahlil Gibran (Jubran Khalil Jubran)—came to be known as writers of the mahjar—that is, writers abroad, and their literary contributions, scholars agree, exerted a strong influence on the development of a modern literary style that broke away from classical Arabic forms and contributed to the Arab literary renaissance movement, or al-Nahda (El-Ariss 2018; Hassan 2011; Kayyali 2005; Ludescher 2006; Shakir 1997). Similarly, ‘Afifa Karam, who was born in Amshit, Lebanon, and lived in Louisiana, produced three novels in Arabic and contributed to a transnational feminist Arab movement through her contributions to the magazine al-Huda (Guidance) between 1897 and 1924 as well as to Majallat al-‘alam al-jadid al-nisa’iyya (The New World: A Ladies Magazine), the earliest Arabic-language women’s magazine published in the Americas (Ghurayyib n.d.; Gualtieri 2020, 284; Saylor 2015). Notwithstanding the contrasts in the tenor and aims between the associations that arose at the turn of the twentieth century and those of the 1960s and after, the adoption of the term Arab American as category and identity signals—in line with the earlier associations—the importance of maintaining transnational ties to the homelands and the key role of language in the connection to homelands.

The essays we have compiled for this opening part of the reader offer ways of understanding how there is nothing natural or complete about the category Arab American. It excludes, for example, ethnic minorities from Arab countries and SWANA at large (e.g., Kurds, Imazighen) and may figuratively obscure religious identifications (Christian, Jewish, Baha’i) not popularly invoked by the term Arab because of its imagined conflation with Islam. For example, as Shohat’s (2017) work on the splitting of the category Arab from the category Jew elucidates, the former is not only conflated with Islam but also distanced from Judaism, occluding shared if complex histories of interaction and cultural production. Kyla Wazana Tompkins also addresses this point when she notes that Arab Jewish identity is often rendered invisible, in part from the occlusion of Arab Jewish history from mainstream Jewish history and in part because there are almost no Jews left in Arab countries, but also because it is almost impossible to conceive of non-Muslim Arab subjects within the public sphere today, inflected as it is by anti-Arab hysteria (2011, 129). It is important to emphasize that the category Arab American is in itself ecumenical in that it makes no claims about religious identity. Given that most Arab states are Muslim majority and elide distinctions between Arab ethnicity and national/political identity (where Arab is not only a marker of a shared culture and language but also a designation of citizenship in a group of nation-states), then it becomes understandable that the categories Arab and Arab American would be in a state of constant revision and reinvention. Indeed, if the category Arab American appears to occlude the experiences of certain groups, such as Arab Jews, it also subsumes groups who contest or reject it. For example, L. J. Mahoul (1994) writes about her Maronite Christian Lebanese family’s resistance to the label Arab and their insistence on a Lebanese Maronite identity instead, a stance that is echoed by many other Lebanese Christians, as Randa Kayyali (2018) has shown. Similarly, in The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora (2019), Yasmeen Hanoosh has shown how many Iraqi Chaldeans also distinguish themselves from other Arabs and Arab Americans through their identification with their religious affiliation. Not only does the category Arab American elide distinctions among religious groups who come from what are now Arab nation-states, but it also obscures the presence of large numbers of non-Arab ethnic and linguistic communities, among them Armenians, Kurds, Turkomen, and Imazighen, who are citizens of Arab countries. Discussions of Arabs and Arab Americans, therefore, must remain cognizant of these elisions, conflations, and distinctions among individuals who are either left out or nonconsensually subsumed within them.

Recipes for Mapping an Intersectional and Transnational Field

As the conversations about naming and legibility (including the paradoxes of visibility and hypervisibility) demonstrate, the category Arab American has at times operated in rigid, limited, and exclusionary ways. Scholarship in the field has also at times (and perhaps unwittingly) upheld unspoken hegemonies—for example, through reifying the implicit whiteness of the category Arab American and through contributing to the US-centrism of the category. The essays selected for this part aim to expand and complicate ways of seeing (after Berger 1972) the category. They build on narratives that endeavored to define and lay claim to the category Arab American in the 1980s and early 2000s. These works include Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (1985) by Alixa Naff; Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (1988) by Gregory Orfalea; The Development of Arab-American Identity (1994) edited by Ernest McCarus; Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States (1997) by Evelyn Shakir; Arabs in America: Building a New Future (1999) edited by Michael Suleiman; and, more recently, The Arab Americans (2005) by Randa Kayyali and Becoming Arab American (2016) by Louise Cainkar, which articulates how transnational Arab American youth define the term. The discussions in these edited collections, monographs, and essays offer important interventions in defining the category Arab American by filling in gaps and silences about Arab American history and experiences. Addressing the category-defining question mentioned earlier, Who are Arab Americans?, they laid important groundwork for exploring the themes of visibility/invisibility, religion and ethnicity, race and racialization, diaspora and mobility, multiculturalism, orientalism and representation, solidarities, empire, and self-definition. The essays we include in this part collectively build on as well as revise these earlier debates about legibility, naming, and