Nations worldwide are experiencing increased social conflict and unrest resulting from the contradictions of globalization, migration, and nationalism. Contemporary France offers a particularly vivid example of these tensions. A multicultural, multi-ethnic society, France promotes both universal human rights and assimilationist policies designed to acculturate minorities regardless of their desires. Such contradictions are explicit in reference to contemporary North African, Pied-Noir, and Harki populations. In addition to varied forms of protest, resistance, and dialog, these minorities use civic and cultural associations – or social clubs – to create spaces for expression of their culture. Some are explicitly constructed as windows into their minority culture for outsiders, others provide these communities a safe venue in which to enact and (re)define their culture and identity sheltered from racist and discriminatory influences. In both cases, they must communicate their beliefs about minority and shared culture, history, and identity, whether their audience is composed of members of the minority community or French society more generally. Though it is often said that associations exist through their members, many also have a physical presence. Associations may own or use an entire building, suite, or office. In other cases, they may share office space part-time, use private residences, or have no fixed point on the geography of the city. Beyond their own walls, some sponsor monuments, museum displays, or traveling exhibitions. The spaces, offices, and buildings in which associations host their activities make nonverbal statements about the associations and their participants and set the scene for how their actions are understood and interpreted. The materials they chose to accompany their activities also influence how those acts are received in society, in ways not always under the control of the association members themselves. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork with Pied-Noir, North African, and Harki cultural associations in two mid-sized French cities, this presentation analyses how such attempts at communication are both circumscribed and fostered by the material culture these associations inhabit and employ.

Since December 2010, events in Tunisia have influenced politics across the Arab world. The overthrow of long-ruling autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali inspired similar demands for revolution throughout the region. The drafting of a democratic constitution and free, competitive elections for parliament and president demonstrate the liberalizing possibilities for other Arab states. However, the winds of political change haven’t only blown eastward from Tunis. This paper investigates the impact of regional variables on political developments in Tunisia since 2011, with a focus on the transnational role of Islamism. Drawing on the regional systems literature, we argue that the permeability of Arab states to ideological debates, security challenges, resource flows, and contestation over the role of Islamism across the Arab world have contributed to the particular contours of Tunisia’s ongoing political transition. The paper analyzes several milestones in Tunisian democratization: the election of the Constituent Assembly in 2011, the drafting and vote for the new constitution, and the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2014. Local issues, including employment, national historical context, and individual political personalities, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain the electoral and constitutional outcomes. Only by incorporating the effects of transnational variables, especially the vacillating fortunes of Islamist movements and the attendant issues of security and resource flows across the Arab regional system, can a full picture of Tunisia’s transition be gained. Research for this paper includes the use of public opinion surveys, campaign literature, and personal interviews with politicians, journalists and academics to analyze the lines of causation in Tunisia’s constitutional and electoral outcomes. We find that the permeability of the Arab regional system creates varying constraints and opportunities for Tunisian political actors, and influences citizens’ views on party competition, democratic values, and public policy. This study seeks to contribute to the literature emphasizing the interrelationship of domestic politics and foreign policy in the Arab world by investigating the causal effects of transnational variables on democratic institution building.

Having piqued the interest of Middle East studies academia, scholarship on the social history of Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine has gone a long way toward dismantling what the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict has positioned as bifurcated, i.e. Arab and Jewish identities. There remains though, a difficulty in fully extracting the Arab Jewish identity lying between these positions. Rather, Arab Jewish identity is situated as something of a relic of the past, existing in theory, but not in contemporary lived experience. After exemplifying such a reality, what I hope to do in this paper, is render Arab Jewish identity more contemporary through a specific example and theoretical underpinning. Given her potential as an Arab Jewish archetype, it is worthwhile to explore the intellectual output of scholar, poet and author of Iraqi descent, Haviva Pedaya. It is possible that the reflexive myopicism and capitulation to political Zionism's clout, that obscures Arab Jewish identity in the present, is due to a lack of theoretical basis that can accommodate an identity so historically rich, but seemingly contemporarily numerously fraught as the Arab Jewish. Thus, due to the measurable good it has done for other marginalized identities, intersectionality theory, in consort with examples of Pedaya's poetry, prose, and public statements in both English and Hebrew, will be used, to demonstrate that beyond existing so measurably in the past, the Arab Jew is something contemporary. What allows intersectionality to be so capable of extracting the Arab Jew from becoming an historical artifact and why this fact matters so much in the present, is how intersectionality makes possible identity as a coalition. This means that while identities are engendered by acknowledging multiple and intersecting sameness and differences, which can be exclusionary, coalitional identification renders this never exclusive. What this could mean is the visibility of an Arab Jewish identity that is contemporary and numerously constituted, rather than the partial language and racial constitutions of the past. Pedaya embodies at least three notions of sameness and difference vis-à-vis Israeli society, that make her an intersectional subject: her religiosity, her existence as part of Israel's 'Eastern' cultural minority given her ethnicity as well as mystical and Andalusian proclivities and the fact that her gender performance is female.

The aesthetics of poetry offer a critical means of identifying and tracing circuits of exchange and influence that traverse spatial and ideological boundaries. In particular, Muslim American poetry as it has evolved functions in ways that enhance the transnational experience and, as I demonstrate in this essay, reflects a critical negotiation and bridging of geographical, national, historical and cultural divides. A better understanding of the transnational poetics of Muslim American poetry, using the framework offered by Jahan Ramazani in A Transnational Poetics, serves to broaden the scope and significance of Muslim American literature as a subgenre. After addressing the need to study Muslim American literature, this essay highlights how Muslim American poets specifically function as passeurs between cultures and histories, across spatial and temporal divides. Sanjay Subrahmanyam illustrates the role of stranger and alien, go-between or passeur in Three Ways to Be Alien; while his work focuses on the form of narrative, his theoretical conception of historical agency is nonetheless applicable to the poetic form. I will be applying Subrahmanyam’s examination of the tensions between history (macro) and biography (micro) as well as the function of transcultural go-betweens alongside Ramazani’s transnational poetics to my analysis of Muslim American poetry. Further, I explore how this poetry functions as a bridge – between the lyric self or subject and various social and political cultural formations – operating within a framework of micro- and macro-histories. I specifically explore these transnational and transcultural mediations within the poetry of two Muslim American poets, Kashmiri American Agha Shahid Ali and Syrian American Mohja Kahf, paying some attention to the interplay of echoes and differences in the works of the two poets as they engage with Muslim cultures, histories and societies. By bringing together Kahf and Ali in this discussion, I also hope to illustrate via scholarship the necessary border crossings and inherent transnationalism that are characteristic of Muslim American poetry. As I examine the collective selfhood that is narrated by Kahf and Ali, I delve deeper into the broader influence of Muslim civilization and culture that we find in these works. Beyond their ability to draw on relevant themes of exile and alienation, Kahf and Ali’s poetic personae ultimately serve as recorders of the transnational circuits that color and define their cultural memories and affective histories.

This paper examines how Brooklyn Heights (2010) and Chicago (2007) depict complex facets of Arab migrant experience in the US, especially in contemporary times. Through narrating a multiplicity of migrant trajectories, both texts pertain to racialized and gendered formulations of identity, cultural belonging and exchange, and national and transnational social and political activism. On the one hand, Brooklyn Heights underscores the interactions of its main character, Hind, a displaced single mother and a Bedouin from Egypt, with similarly struggling Arab and non-Arab immigrants in New York City. Hind’s constant roaming of the streets of NYC to connect with other immigrants may seem neither eventful nor consequential; however, I argue that it constitutes a catalyst for community building and exhibits the migrant community’s unyielding ethos toward survival. Her narration paints a vivid and dynamic picture of the immigrants’ inner world of contradictions ensuing from the gap between their former and new lives, their hopes for self-fulfillment and despair, and their memory and forgetting. Chicago, on the other hand, delves into a circle of Egyptian and American intellectuals and researchers at the University of Illinois, and takes a grandiose approach to disclosing the long standing differences and disjunctions between East and West, tradition and modernity, and national and transnational belonging. I argue that Chicago undertakes literary strategies that reflect its characters’ impulses to change and revolution in opposition to existing hegemonic and authoritarian systems; yet, its configurations of the spirit of change are premised on and restricted to traditional, masculine, and intellectual identities. The paper aims to read what I call “the social activism” in Brooklyn Heights in relation to “the political activism” in Chicago. It also compares the two novelistic stances toward contemporary Arab poetics, as represented in their main characters’ poetic attitudes: i.e. Hind’s aspirations in creative writing (in Heights) and Naji’s poeticism in relation to his scientific pursuits (in Chicago).