This paper emerges from research conducted in 2011 when I interviewed 93 Arab American [mostly Muslim] transnational teenagers who were attending high school in their parents’ “homelands.” Contrary to my expectations, and to the findings of my prior research, Arab American youth reported having overwhelmingly negative views of what these places would be like prior to living in them. These “homeland imaginings” run in the opposite direction of that proposed by diaspora theorists, who largely speak of “collective memories, visions, or myths” of an imagined “ideal home” {Safran, 1991: 83-84] and positive, even romantic, imaginary constructions, even if “forced dispersal and (…) subsequent unhappiness” (Cohen 1997: 26) are part of the narrative. This paper will report and discuss the homeland imaginings articulated by 43 Palestinian American teenagers (ages 16-18) who were raised in the United States but living in the West Bank on an extended sojourn to their parents’ homeland. It then speculates on the reasons for the negative homeland constructions of youth in diaspora. Components of the proposed explanation include the power of the American and Arabic media – which show largely violent or negative representations that are reinforced in school-based and other social encounters ¬– to influence the homeland imaginings of young Palestinian Americans, and, the relatively diminished influence of family and ethnic community (which in decades prior was positive and inspiring) on these constructions. These latter changes are in turn explained by a number of global and historic factors, including the demise of the PLO and the rise of religion and global media. In the end, global media, especially television that is based in the Arab World — because it is watched and favored by their parents and understood by children in diaspora to accurately portray Palestinian reality — plays the most significant role in the construction of the homeland imaginaries of Palestinian American youth. The outcome is far short of ideal, positive, or romantic. This “problem” however, tends to be resolved upon having lived experiences in the homeland.

This paper will focus on transnational activities to highlight how identity among Arab Americans is achieved through social relations that foster a sense of being both an in-group and out-group member. Specifically, it will demonstrate how identity parameters emerge as exchanges between the United States and Lebanon produce situations that foster a sense of inclusiveness as well as make apparent stark differences between the two cultures. After providing an overview of recent immigration from Lebanon and the Arab world using the New Immigrant Survey, two specific cases that involve transnational social relations between Americans and Lebanese will be analyzed: a resident-emigrant youth camp, and driving in Lebanon. The youth camp activities highlight the enactment of strong ties, and the case of driving draws attention to the case of negligible ties. Both situations illustrate interchanges in transnational activities that make salient dimensions of identity. Analyses also consider the ways in which American values and world views represent a potential resource, but are challenged in some contexts. Each illustrates that both: 1) places where social relations happen, and 2) the people engaged in interactions, combine to create new opportunities for theorizing identity that is political as well as social.

The historic meeting of AAUG in 1968, the year after the June War, also took place coincidentally in the same year as the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, which resulted in the 1969 conviction of the Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan. Strangely, the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan did little to inhibit the political activism. Arab American activism in solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation in the period between 1967 and 1982 was also conditioned by the broader movements of political action on US campuses and in US inner cities, which were sites of intense political contestation in opposition to US racism and Vietnam War. Some of this work emerged from a the rising generation of students shaped by antiwar activism who became especially interested in the Middle East during the 1970s, and published in the AAUG journal Arab Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Palestine Studies, and Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Crosshatched by political events in the Middle East and transformations taking place in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s, Arab American activism was complicated by the unique social positioning of Arabs in the US as both white and racially other that on the one hand contributed to the mainstreaming of many Americans of Arab descent, and on the one hand produced the possibility of coalitions on Palestinian solidarity with Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native American activists. This paper offers an initial attempt to periodize Arab American activism in support of Palestine with particular emphasis on the years from 1967 to 1982. This paper follows the model offered by Fredric Jameson in his essay, “Periodizing the 60s,” which does not argue for “some omnipresent and uniform shared style or way of thinking and acting, but rather as the sharing of a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible, but always within that situation's structural limits” (178). I want to propose that Arab American activism in solidarity with Palestinians in the long decade of the 1970s took various forms in response to the objective conditions that were characterized simultaneously by the residual effects of US radical politics of the 1960s and by the emerging conditions in the Middle East punctuated as they were by the 1973 War, the Civil War in Lebanon, the Camp David Accords and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The relationship between filmic representation and cultural politics is important to understanding the Palestinian diaspora’s relationship to Palestinian national identity. The rise of Palestinian-American representations in the Palestinian cinematic movement indicates a shift toward queer and feminist politics in diaspora that complicate and challenge the discourse on Palestinian national identity, its representation in film, and the role of cinema in the struggle for Palestinian justice. This paper examines the Boston Palestine Film Festival (BPFF) as a site where Palestinian-American cultural politics are contested and affirmed through a community engagement with narrative film. Since the birth of the Palestinian cinematic movement in the 1980s, narrative film has become a powerful site for the construction and affirmation of Palestinian national identity. In turn, the production of Palestine Film Festivals in diaspora serves to affirm transnational Palestinian communities while also complicating the scholarly conceptions of Palestinian national identity. Using Gayatri Gopinath’s theory of “queer diaspora” as an analytic, this paper will explore the ways in which Palestine film festivals constitute a site where diasporic and transnational Palestinian identity politics are constructed, contested, and mobilized. Qualitative ethnographic interview data will be analyzed—in conjunction with visual and discursive analysis of the films referenced by interviewees—in order to explore how diasporic Palestinians in the US understand themselves in terms of Palestinian national identity through their engagements with Palestinian cinema and film festivals.

Hisham Sharabi was a Palestinian intellectual whose life exemplified transnationalism. Though he spent his earliest years in pre-nakbah Palestine, for most of his life he traversed the Middle East and the US in search of educational advancement and political enlightenment. This paper argues that Sharabi was part of a politicized intellectual generation of Arab-American migrants who were spurred into action by the Arab-Israeli conflict and a shared experience of exile. It examines how transnational politics played out in the life of a man who helped found some of the most of the important pro-Palestinian political organizations in the post-1967 era, including the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) and the National Association of Arab-Americans (NAAA). These organizations differed in terms of their ideology and methods, but both advocated for justice in America, the Middle East, and the greater Third World based on the transnational perspectives of their members. Using Sharabi’s memoirs and various organizations’ papers, I trace the development of his political ideology and activism. Just as Sharabi was never satisfied with any single movement or method, he never found one place to call home. The tensions of exile and his disenchantment with political structures in the US and the Arab world pushed him to continually question the concept of the nation and civilization-based identities. Thus, my paper will analyze how Sharabi could transform from being an ardent nationalist in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party into someone who later wrote, “Today, what concerns me is not a set of abstractions, but the life of the suffering, the exploited, and the enslaved."1 1. Sharabi, Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual (Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2008), 51.