When describing her travels to Jordan, Indigenous author LeAnn Howe reflects on the connection between Arabs and Indigenous Americans when she states, “The fact that Arabs identify with Indians and not John Wayne isn’t surprising” (LOC 2289). Howe mentions several times that, during her year in Jordan, she was not only physically mistaken for an Arab but that actually she identifies, as a Choctaw author, with them. She senses an affinity in the relationships between herself as an Indigenous person and Arabs in relation to America, an affinity which stems from both groups having been “enemies of the United States.” Images of “Arabs in keffiyehs fighting the US military” have “replaced images of Plains Indians fighting the US Cavalry” (LOC 2289). Both groups are as fashioned as an enemy other but, in that depiction, they find a kinship. Jordanian author Tayseer Sboul mirrors Howe’s sentiment in his short story “The Red Indian,” which follows a Jordanian boy’s relationship with American Western films, his desire to identify with the white American cowboys, and his ultimate change of heart so as to conclude that he is “a Red Indian” (Sboul 58). The boy in the story fights his father, who longs to be ‘white,’ and comes to realize the impossibility of identifying with those who demean as violent and animalistic both the Indigenous peoples in their movies. In both texts, the performance of Indigenous and Bedouin identities does and does not conform to conventional expectations. Both are relational, both are “others” defined through and by a dominant community, and yet this relationality forms the basis for possible resistance. Goffman’s theories of identity performance, combined with Cresswell and de Certeau’s works on tactics and mobility, reveal a situated performance of the self though the image of the other. An analysis of Jordanian Tayseer Sboul’s short story “The Red Indian,” shows that oppressive relationality can be replaced by unexpected global alliances, like the parallel Sboul draws between Bedouin and Jordanian performances and the imaginary of the American frontier. “The Red Indian” explicitly connects Indigenous identity and the medium of film, tracing the ways in which Native Americans specifically are represented in film and how that representation defines expectations and possible identifications with characters in films for Jordanian viewers.

This paper examines how two contemporary Arab-American novels, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014) and Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History (2016), negotiate concepts and experiences of home and belonging before and after migration, whether forcible or voluntary, from home(s) of origin in the Arab world to new ones in the United States of America. Set in two different time periods, the 16th century in The Moor’s Account and the turn of the 21st century in The Angel of History, the two novels represent the legacies of modern imperial and neo-imperial formations of national belonging that are rooted in predetermined territorial, racialized, gendered, and ethnicized identities. I argue that the novels disrupt these traditional and concretized boundaries of belonging whether in the formerly colonized Arab home of origin or in its new counterpart in the United States by creatively crossing their dividing lines. The paper explores the complex migrant processes of exchange, transfer, translation, and hybridization and how they reshape the traditional categories of race, gender, and ethnicity, and thereby the immigrant’s sense of belonging at national/transnational intersections.

From 1953 to 1963, Danish archaeologist Peter V. Glob led a series of expeditions to the Middle East, especially Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. Famously interdisciplinary, Glob’s expeditionary team included not just archaeologists, anthropologists, and assyriologists, but also painters, poets, photographers, and filmmakers. Indeed, the crew shot thousands of photographs and hundreds of hours of footage, some of which was made into films, books, and exhibits only much later, sometimes as late as the 1990s. The expeditionary footage from Bahrain (taken between 1953 and 1959), for example, eventually became DILMUN, a documentary released in 1967. The footage from Kuwait (shot between 1958 and 1963) became HER ER KUWAIT (Here Is Kuwait), released in 1968. The films themselves are hybrids of several genres: part expeditionary film, part educational film, part industrial film for the oil companies, part flag-waving commercial for the Gulf state depicted. While BEDUINER (1962), a documentary about Qatar's Bedouin tribes, hews most closely to its original scientific footage, DILMUN and HER ER KUWAIT drift more toward travelogue. How do we explain these films in relation to the scientific mission, the needs of the host countries, and the Danish context? This paper argues that these films neatly, even poetically express the conflicting forces shaping a "global Middle East." As they try to pay attention to their scientific task, their vision is also split between the Gulf states' emerging nationhood and Denmark's own nationalistic investment in exploration. The confusion of genres expresses the variety of contradictory demands imposed on the films and filmmakers from not only the sponsoring countries and corporations, but also the expectations of the Danish audience. Each Gulf state latched upon the expeditions themselves as opportunities for nation-building, yet the finished films have an uneasy legacy within each state’s own national tale. Qatar, for example, is currently building a national museum, but BEDUINER’s role in the current national narrative, although undeniable (as the only extant footage of Bedouins), is still undecided and debated. This paper draws upon archival sources and original analysis of the films, as well as published scholarship, to explain the often-fraught relationship between film, nation, and science in the Middle East. While the paper specifically explores this relationship, its findings also speak to broader debates about the challenges of nation-building, the (re)construction of history and myth, and the influence of the external world on the Arab states of the Gulf.

This paper examines how Qur’anic stories are reflected upon, reshaped, and deployed in Sandow Birk’s "American Qur’an". Specifically, I will examine the presentation of the Annunciation to Maryam, in the stories of Surat Al ‘Imran and Surat Maryam. In his introduction to the work, Birk explains that since Muslims assert that the Qur’an is for all times and for all places, he wants to look at it as a 21st Century American artist. I am interested in what Birk brings to or takes away from the Qur’anic text in his illustrations. I will also analyze the writing of the text, which Birk describes as an American graffiti-style. I will compare the illustrations and writing to the Qur’anic text. For example, in the illustrations on the pages when Maryam is told that she will have child, and she is told of his characteristics, we see a woman getting an ultrasound. By drawing our attention to the idea of a woman “seeing” what her baby looks like in utero, Birk draws a parallel to Maryam hearing a description of her child, before he is even born (3:45-51). Rather than searching for sources or trying to glean historical information from the Qur’anic text, I approach the Qur’an as a literary, religious and oral text that deliberately affects people, as expressed in art and literature. This paper is informed by the scholarship of Titus Burckhardt, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Marcus Fraser on Islamic art. Through its analysis of Birk’s "American Qur’an", this paper does four main things: it develops a terminology of Qur’anic art; it argues that we can look at Qur’anic art as interpretation and as reader response; it analyzes how this art reflects back on the Qur’anic text; and it examines how art adds to and takes away from Qur’anic polysemy by cementing its meanings in various ways.