Fractures and Fusions of the Arab American Experience
Panel 028, sponsored byArab American Studies Association (AASA), 2013 Annual Meeting
On Friday, October 11 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
The Arab American Studies Association (AASA) is proud to sponsor the panel entitled "Fractures and Fusions of Arab American Experience." The papers on this panel highlight the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches used within Arab American Studies as well as the multiple ways in which Arab Americans find convergence and solidarity with multiple others, which in the process ruptures the seeming neatness of the very concept of Arab American. Three papers analyze cultural products -- poetry, novels, and film. One paper compares two novels written by Arab Americans and demonstrates the ways in which cultural plurality is expressed through the weaving of Arabic literary modes and tropes and multiple intersecting landscapes into their narratives. A second paper explores the ways in which Arab American poetry written in response to the "Arab Spring" is more appropriately viewed as Arab literature in the English language, and thus part of World literature, rather than simply ethnic literature produced from the margins of American society. A third paper discusses the ways in which mainstream American films and mainstream Egyptian films produce a double-layered process of otherness for Arab Americans, with the former representing them as a threat and the latter critiquing their Americanization, seeking to draw Arab Americans' allegiance to the Arab World. The remaining two papers are based on empirical studies of Arab American identities and social activism. One author interrogates the use of "Middle Eastern" as a primary identity category within Arab American Christian communities, finding its still limited but increasing attraction lying in its ability to set aside religious, cultural, or linguistic differences, something appealing to Arab World minority groups. The final paper, utilizing analyses of field research and discursive texts, addresses Arab American activists engaged in the "Occupy" movement, showing how they worked within this movement to establish networks of solidarity with the Arab uprisings, thus transnationalizing their activism while working within the limitations and constraints of American political culture.
In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt remarks: “Great writers are … specialists in cultural exchange. … They take symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and move them to another, augmenting their emotional force, altering their significance, linking them with other materials taken from a different one, changing their place in a larger social design” (245). Greenblatt’s description of “great writers” applies especially well to transnational and so-called ethnic writers in the United States. In this paper, I look at how Arab American writers Laila Halaby and Alia Yunis incorporate different oral storytelling traditions from the Arab world within American narrative contexts. In the process, I examine the ways in which each writer offers contrasting views of the limits and possibilities for Arab American cultural expression. While Halaby offers a bleak narrative of cross-cultural anxiety that links the devouring threat of “ghouls” of Arab fairy tales to the alluring promise of happiness in the United States, Yunis offers a redemptive narrative that draws on the life-sustaining potential of Scheherazadian modes of storytelling to accommodate a century of Arab American presence and multiple ways of belonging in the United States.
In addressing the contrast between Halaby’s and Yunis’s treatments of cultural mobility, transnational belonging, and Arab American experiences, this paper positions itself in alignment with Steven Salaita’s call for an “emphasis on plurality [as] the only plausible way to discuss Arab Americans” (1). It also participates in a type of transnational and multicultural analysis from a position that looks at what Ella Shohat has called the “liminal zone of exile” (312) between and across multiple, sometimes divergent, often intersecting landscapes and signposts of identification and cultural expression.
Important studies on Arab American identity and anti-Arab sentiment in the United States have proliferated since 9/11, but to date there have been few comparative studies on how Arab American identity is constructed at crossroads of US-Arab socio-cultural and geopolitical encounters. As a response to the call by scholars in the fields of American studies and migration studies to locate the United States in a transnational space and define the experience of its migrants beyond the restrains of the nation-state, I propose to interrogate US-Arab discursive terrains to examine popular understandings of the Arab American image in the United States and the Arab world.
Towards that end, I plan to compare dominant patterns of representation in Hollywood and Egyptian cinemas to illustrate how the popular image of Arab Americans is forced to undergo a double-layered process of otherness. While Hollywood films such as Black Sunday (1977), Wrong is Right (1982), True Lies (1994), The Siege (1998), and Fatwa (2006) articulate Arabness as a threat and define Arab Americans as cultural others, Egyptian films such as Hallo Amreeka (1998), el-?Akhar (1999), Tayeh fi Amrika (2002), Iskindiriyya…New York (2004), and ?Asal Iswid (2010) advance a critique of Americanization and promote “el-Ghorba” (alienation) rhetoric as a nostalgic means to mark Arab Americans’ cultural allegiance to the Arab world. By conducting such an analysis, I plan to unpack certain American and Arabic polarizing narratives responsible for mediating cultural otherness of Arab Americans to contribute to current conversations around cultural citizenship in Arab American studies.
Geopolitical configurations and global ideological constructs inform and mold some Arab American self-identifications. While the pan-Arab paradigm has competed with national and village or city-based affiliations since the 1960s, the regional moniker Middle Eastern as an identity is relatively new for Arab Americans. “Middle Eastern” was coined in imperial war plans and geographic imaginings that defined the region in relation to Europe. Despite these shady beginnings, the term is beginning to become more popular among Arab Americans. Since Christians – practicing, non-practicing or secular – and secular Muslims are not attracted by the concept of the umma and pan-Islamic identifications and as pan-Arabism wanes, Middle Eastern offers a way out. “Middle Easterners” discards the Arab linguistic and cultural identity in favor of geography. Minorities such as Copts, Maronites, Assyrians and Chaldeans (to name a few) can relate to the term, but its definition remains problematic. How far east does the Middle East go? If Iranians, Turks and Israelis are included, what exactly does it mean to be Middle Eastern? Without shared cultural, linguistic and ethnic space, is the term devoid of real in-group meaning? Using data from interviews with Arab American Christians and experiences from ethnographic fieldwork in the Washington DC metro area, I will explore who uses this term and ask how the use of this term intersects with other self-identifications– namely gender, religion, nationality and even racial identifications.
