Traditionally, historical scholarship concerning the first wave of 'Syrian' migrants in the United States (migrants coming from the Ottoman provinces of Greater Syria from the late 1880s until 1924) has detailed a process of swift assimilation, describing the period in which Syrian Americans struggled to be legally considered 'white' in naturalization cases as a blip on an otherwise smooth road to social integration and economic success in their new country. Recent Arab American studies scholarship has challenged this traditional characterization of early Arab migration in the United States as being a linear path of assimilation into whiteness and reframes Arab American racial formation during this period as one of liminality and "inbetween-ness". Building upon this understanding of early Arab American racial formation as a shifting and unstable process, this paper aims to understand how the imperatives of gendered roles and sexual behavior (and equally the challenges to those imperatives) were mutually constitutive with processes of racial formation. The common profession of Syrian migrants in this period--pack peddling--has had a central place in these Arab American historical narratives as being the key to the "success" of their integration into U.S. society. However, pack peddling also provided space for migrants away from their families and communities in the United States, and has been cited as venue in which non-traditional living arrangements between women were observed. Drawing on Nayan Shah's theory of itinerant migrant areas of the early twentieth century as "spatial borderlands" characterized by "disorder, conflict, and murky social and sexual ties," my research traces the documentation and policing of travel routes, transit hubs, lodging houses, and entertainment and leisure venues of pack peddling life for potential non-normative gendered and sexual practices, as well as the links between that non-normativity and racialization. Sources include published histories and narrative accounts of pack peddling, as well as police and court records of the locales through which peddlers traveled. Finally, this paper asks how this new reading of pack peddling can challenge dominant narratives of the early Arab immigrant assimilation story, suggesting that these border spaces of early Arab American history were complex sites of social encounter that reveal how gender and sexual normativity are inextricable from whiteness and the process of assimilation.

In light of the recent publishing trend of Middle Eastern women's memoirs, which so often depict a confrontation with American culture, writers have been capturing the fragility of their position in American society while adopting the form of testimonial literature. In my talk, I will be focusing on the modes of self-representation in Middle Eastern women's personal narratives, paying careful attention to the narrative strategies that Arab American authors use to negotiate art and meaning within memoir. In so doing, I will determine how in autobiographical writing, the authors via their female protagonists, are sharing their experiences of traversing cultural borders and creating a complicated view of ethnic American cultural identity. I am invested in asking: why memoir, and what are the ways in which authors are reformulating and expanding the genre? In parodying the memoir genre, Arab American writer, Rabih Alameddine, creates a complex narrative framing to disrupt the convention of memoir in his fictional memoir, _I, the Divine_. Though a man, the author creates a fictional memoir from the perspective of a Lebanese American woman, Sarah Nour El-Din, who attempts to write her life story in a series of first chapters. Alameddine draws attention to the difficulty of succinctly and chronologically writing one's life story in an autobiographical work, while also engaging the literary form of memoir. In creating a fictional memoir, the author adopts the form of writing so fashionable for contemporary Arab American writers, yet resists rendering his protagonist as a transparent native informant and cultural guide for American readers. While the fictional memoir uncovers the politics of autobiographical writing, autobiographical fictions or "autobiofictions," such as Mohja Kahf's first novel, allows for the author to incorporate autobiographical elements her fictional work. Though her novel _?Girl in the Tangerine Scarf_ is a fictional bildungsroman about the life of Syrian American, Khadra Shamy, it bears autobiographical resemblance to Kahf. By using fiction, she is able to delve into sensitive and somewhat taboo issues surrounding her Muslim community while discussing American politics without having to claim testimonial authenticity. Thus, in my talk, I investigate how two Arab American writers manipulate the convention of autobiographical writing by intentionally blurring the lines of fiction and nonfiction.

(The paper is part of an ongoing dissertation project) Arab American writing has undergone an enormous expansion during the past three decades. Especially the genre of autobiography has emerged as a dominant means for Arab Americans to negotiate their identities. In addition to gaining a voice in the literary field, however, Arab Americans have also become more visible in the American public due to their involuntary media presence. Especially foreign political conflicts in the Middle East and the advent of international terrorism in the wake of 9/11 have fostered stereotypical images of Arabs in the public eye. Media images thus form the discursive context in which Arab American authors memorize and write their lives. My paper investigates the interrelated link between mass mediated discourse and Arab American life writing by drawing on the theory of framing. I follow the definition of framing as the process of selecting certain aspects of perceived reality in order to instill them with salience and to provide a particular evaluation pattern. Media frames thus constitute interpretative schemata which can be compared to narrative frameworks in literary writing. To delineate the interactive framing process working through social and literary discourse, I develop an integrated framing model by focussing on a set of issue frames including politics, ethnicity, religion and gender. Within the developed theoretical framework, I first trace the nature and transformation of dominant media frames of Arabs and Arab Americans in the past three decades by drawing on empirical framing studies. The interactive functioning of framed discourse and its impact on memory recollection and construction is then provided by a close-reading analysis of life narratives by Arab Americans. Works to be discussed include Children of the Roojme (Abinader 1991), West of Kabul, East of New York (Ansary 2003), and Angeleno Days (Orfalea 2009). Due to its interdisciplinary theoretical approach and methodology, (Re-)Framing the Arab seeks to open up novel research paths to the study of autobiographical writing in general and to a deeper understanding of Arab American identity negotiation in particular. Whereas literary critics in the past have mostly disregarded the impact of mass mediated discourse on the self-creation of Arab American authors, this paper develops a consistent framework to link the fields of empirical media studies and literary analysis. It thus provides a theoretical ground on which to discuss the complex entanglement of public discourse and personal memory (re-)construction in the modern media age.

In my paper, I would like to explore Muslim narratives of self outside the Middle East post-9/11, focusing on the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and the novel The Road from Damascus. I would like to examine their responses to the constructions of Islam that emerged after the attacks. While there is a long history of negative images of Islam and Muslims, after 9/11, constructions of Islam as homogenous, static, and permanently an "other" have become highly problematic because they can be deployed so easily and have serious consequences. It is in this context, I will trace how Islam as a construction--more than as a faith--is challenged, reconsidered, and reconstructed by Muslim writers. Both novels elucidate the way in which the novel, as a genre, can be utilized as a medium for the contemporary Muslim to negotiate a narrative of self in a globalized world. Specifically, I will argue that the novel, as illustrated in these two works, has become an important space to dismantle and reformulate discussions on identity and offer insight into the way language, religion, and resistance are deployed in a medium with increasing currency. With the September 11th attacks functioning as a defining moment, both of these novels respond to different, and sometimes competing, constructions of Islam that have emerged in the global discourse. These two novels, the first situated in the United States and the latter in the United Kingdom, engage themes that resonate with the experiences of those who face exclusion (intergroup and intragroup)and revolve around questions of representation in the contemporary setting where globalization has brought different cultural worldviews into contact, at times producing dialogue and constructive exchange and at other times leading to discernible violence, engendering a more pronounced sense of alienation and exclusion. I will address how these two novels are able to challenge the concept of boundaries to demonstrate the interconnectedness implied when we construct our narratives of self. Both novels express the ways in which what differentiates between people binds them through a process of recognition, to borrow from Judith Butler. Focusing on these two novels, I will examine how Muslim writers, responded to 9/11 by negotiating and constructing narratives of self that counter those that have been constructed for and against them.