Racial categorization has been a contentious subject for Arabs in the United States navigating the racial politics of everyday life. Scholars like Sarah Gualtieri and Evelyn Al Sultany have studied how Arab American racializations have been negotiated through a multitude of legal channels and popular culture. My paper looks at another site of racial production, the university, and the particular position of migrant scholars in the institutionalization of knowledge about Arabs, and the Arab world, and race. I ask: how have global projects of race, and connections between universities, produced a particular type of U.S. Orientalism, and how does that relate to racial formations of Arabs in the United States? To answer these questions, my paper focuses on the critical period interwar period, when the United States government began an effort to garner expertise on the region known as the “Near East.” After Woodrow Wilson announced his “14 points,” a racialized vision of colonized peoples’ fitness for self-government, questions surrounding both the potential for modernization and the racial origins of people from the Near East became linked and interdependent. My paper traces how American scholars circulating between elite American universities and the American University of Beirut produced racial knowledge which revealed the “true race” of the Lebanese, and positioned them as the most advanced peoples in the Near East. I then track the careers of the Lebanese students who studied under these scholars, and used the science produced at their alma mater to write histories of Arab peoples both for burgeoning Near East Studies programs in the United States and popular consumption. Their works used scientific discourse on Syrian and Lebanese racial supremacy in their explanations of history, creating a hierarchy between Levantine Arabs and those from the Arabian Peninsula. I pay particular attention to the scholar Philip Hitti, and his seminal History of the Arabs,. Using archives from the American University of Beirut, Princeton, University of Chicago, and published anthropological articles, my paper uncovers how American imperialism in the Middle East produced an elite Syrio-Lebanese population which justified its position through racial science. By focusing on this circulation of knowledge, my paper sheds light on the global production of race, the role of the university as a producer of race, and the ramifications of legacies of imperialism on the articulation of Arabness in the United States.

Since the 1990s, Coptic Orthodox Christians have immigrated to the United States from Egypt in greater frequency, through the Diversity Visa (or Green Card Lottery), asylum, and family reunification. After the Arab Spring, mainstream and Christian media sources as well as Copts viewed this migration as a response to the increase in attacks against Middle Eastern Christians. ISIS’s specific targeting of the Copts since 2015 coincided with an increasing transnational interest in the plight of Christians globally. The Trump administration has focused policy on aiding persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and Copts have contributed to the imaginary of such initiatives. The language of persecution and extinction shapes discourse and policy of American political and religious leaders, and such leaders have argued that the United States is the only hope for “saving” Middle Eastern Christians from complete decimation. My paper analyzes how American concerns with Islamic terrorism and policies oriented toward such concerns have impacted upon the Coptic community in both Egypt and the United States. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork between the village of Bahjura, Upper Egypt and the New York-New Jersey area, I explore how new waves of Coptic migration to the U.S., post-Arab Spring, have helped to spur advocacy efforts on the plight of Middle Eastern Christians from American politicians and evangelical organizations. Renewed Western efforts to “save” Middle Eastern Christians has furthered the post-Cold War remapping of the world into a civilizational battle between Christianity and Islam. For this theo-political project’s success, intra-Christian doctrinal and theological difference has been reconciled or ignored for the sake of shared political goals. The embrace of Copts by Christian conservatives and the U.S. state has in turn placed them in a fraught, contradiction-laden predicament: in these developing geopolitical contexts, the death and decimation of Middle Eastern Christians by revolution, war, and upheaval are constructed as exemplary of the danger of Muslims and Islam globally. Thus, while Coptic racial difference—as a Middle Eastern community—places them into vectors of solidarity with other people of color, and with those communities who have been targets of the post-9/11 racial infrastructure, Copts have been compelled to distance themselves from such communities by American religious and political forces whose support hinges on their special status as Middle Eastern Christian victims of Islamic violence.

Although US Ethnic Studies has long appreciated the constructedness of ethnic and racial categories, there has been less attention to the dynamic constructedness of "minorities," indigeneity and diaspora from and within the MENA region. Rather than naturalize these categories, this paper considers legal, cultural and epistemic attempts to absorb MENA peoples within hegemonic racial formations that include whiteness and latinidad/mestizaje in the Americas, Soviet "national minorities," as well as national frames in the Middle East. Placed within a long genealogy of displacement, forced conversion and assimilation as key techniques of social engineering, this paper models what is gained through a transnational methodology that simultaneously maps MENA diasporic populations across several sites. Putting multiple imperial systems and subjects in conversation better exposes the process of turning subjects into citizens through race as a core facet of twentieth century statecraft, as well as MENA diasporic populations practicing a politics of refusal that resists this coercion, to explode the national frame.

This paper examines how racialization colonizes and colonization racializes in the contemporary settler colonial context of Turtle Island/North America for youth cultivating a relationship to Palestine. Through a critical performance ethnography of a youth dabke group in Canada, my research asks: what does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land on another stolen land? In this paper, I unpack how the entwined processes of racialization and colonization shape Muslim diasporic and transnational sensibilities regarding identity, embodiment, and place. In unpacking processes of racialization, I also unpack the social construction of settlerhood such that Muslim youth subjectivity is shaped by political processes of Othering that offer the youth citizenship as neoliberal, multicultural settler subjects. I argue that those racialized as Muslim are in a double bind, accepted in the settler state and nation insofar as they play the part of the neoliberal multicultural settler subject while simultaneously recognizing that Canada is a settler project similar to Israel. In this empirical study, I engaged in a critical performance ethnography where youth learn the folk dance as a means of linking to Palestinian identity. For 24 months, I explored what stories the youth had of their relationship to Canada (Turtle Island), what stories they had of their relationship to Palestine, and what stories they had of their relationship to doing dabke. I examined how those shifted and expressed themselves during my study in a variety of settings. Those settings included studio practices and rehearsals, performances, festivals, and social settings. I find that the youth take up dabke not just as a dance but as a form of self-making that situates how their bodies are positioned in and respond to the world. For the youth involved in the group, dabke functions as a stomping proclamation of Palestine, transgressing boundaries of political belonging and exile in ways that link to and supersede speech or other political action. At the same time, dabke functions as a way to gain acceptance for their Palestinian identity as part of a multicultural settler state whose legitimacy is being challenged by its own Indigenous people. In tracking how dabke is taken up as a cultural practice by Muslim youth, my study traces how Muslim youth seeking out a relationship with Palestine are negotiating with a specific technique of political Otherness, the neoliberal multicultural settler subject, enacted through cultural processes that both reproduce and reconfigure symbolic elements.