Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

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Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics

Steven Salaita

ARAB AMERICAN LITERARY FICTIONS, CULTURES, AND POLITICS

© Steven Salaita, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7620–8 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7620–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Content s

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Searching Diversities: Observations of an Arab Ex-Student

1

1 Problems of Inclusion: Arab American Studies and Ambiguous States of Being

17

2 The Internationalization of the Nation: The Uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American Fiction

51

3 Honesty Lost: The Strange Circumstances of Love, Death, and Norma Khouri

87

4 Escaping Inadequate Spaces: Anti-Arab Racism and Liberating Fictions

109

Conclusion Multicultural and Monocultural Disjunctions

143

Notes

155

Bibliography

181

Index

193

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Preface

I start with a confession: I have always been suspicious of the monograph. This isn’t to say that I have problems with it as a genre, for it is an excellent means for scholars to present complex and specialized information to other scholars, who will then transmit that information to students and society at large (the author of the monograph, of course, himself or herself usually does these things, as well). I also like the system in which scholars can find the means to communicate research findings free of crude market fluctuations and demographic trends (although these considerations increasingly are affecting academic publishing). Scholarly monographs have played an important role in making at least rudimentary sense of a chaotic world. My suspicion about them arises mainly from stylistic considerations. Since I have no experience in the social and biological sciences, let me limit my complaint to my own field, English Studies. Few things are as exciting to me as peeling off the plastic film of a newly arrived book dealing with subject matter in which I hold an interest. As sad as that excitement must sound to nonacademics, I imagine it is true of many, if not most, of my colleagues across the disciplines. I love reclining with a freshly packed argeela (hookah) and a new book, skimming its back-cover endorsements and acknowledgments, then turning to the first page, a blue pen at the ready to mark enlightening passages, or to write marginal script alongside those with which I disagree. This experience is particularly rewarding if the author has stated points with succinct candor and uncanny clarity. The best books I read inevitably end up draped in blue ink and capitol “Q”s throughout their margins, signaling that I need to quote what I found to be an illuminating formulation. The worst ones are filled with question marks that seem almost desperate in their oversized and sometimes repetitive construction. The books I take to, I realized after many years of reading, are those that combine the classic techniques of essay writing with the austerity of the monograph. They manage to be erudite but accessible,

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PREFACE

nuanced but sensible, friendly but unflinchingly rigorous. Although I question whether I am always successful, this is the type of scholarship I like to produce (all of us, after all, develop personal styles through the age-old medium of plagiarism). I am growing experienced as a scholar, and therefore do not retain much of the idealistic naiveté of English graduate students and junior scholars, who often believe that something in print written by a “big name” must be worthwhile even if it elicited disappointment upon completion or was not even completed, in which case self-blame supersedes honest reaction. I don’t hold any romanticized notions of “dumbing down” scholarship for the sake of total accessibility,1 but neither do I think a doctorate and a reputation are license to obscure good argumentation within clichéd jargon and pompous neologisms. I will try to avoid such tendencies in Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics and combine the open-ended reflectivity of essay writing with the research-motivated agenda of scholarship. The result will be, I hope, a book that undermines overconfident analysis and raises useful questions, and a book that students and professors will both find worth reading. It is a good time to write about Arab Americans. I offer this sentence on the one hand as a literal observation: it is, after yet another brutal winter, a beautiful spring day in Wisconsin, and I can hear the long-absent sound of robins and cardinals chirping amid the clickclack of the plastic keyboard. It is, in fact, a good time to do lots of activities, but I have found nothing as sobering and captivating as transforming a white computer screen into a jumble of black text that, when edited, assumes some cohesiveness as an idea or proposition— or, when I am lucky, a challenge. And it is a good time to write about anything; the best topic in my mind happens to be the ethnic community in which I grew up and to which I am happily dedicated. On the other hand, I offer the sentence as a tenuous methodological proposition. It houses an observation that requires some historical and sociopolitical analysis. The observation is temporally ambiguous and thus worthy of clarification, one that can be filled with thousands of material examples working within particular ethnic traditions and attempting to seek truth and generate meaning. It is an observation, in short, that might coerce somebody into a book-length deliberation. As a result of my continuous mental perambulations through the conceptual terrain of Arab American culture and society these past few months, I have finally fallen victim to the strange human tendency to complexify simplicities and then seek simple answers to intellectual complexities. I have coerced myself into a book-length deliberation.

PREFACE

ix

Why is it a good time to write about Arab Americans? This book will comprise the long answer; let me commence in unraveling the long answer by providing the short one. Arab Americans, for the first time in our history in the United States, are being analyzed widely and systematically as a discrete ethnic community integral to the coalescence of an imagined American cultural polity. I emphasize the adverbs widely and systematically because it is important to recognize that Arab Americans (and others) have been analyzing ourselves as a discrete ethnic community for over a century. Only recently, though, has the analysis become widespread and systematic, a change in sensibility that will be assessed at length in this book. It is the right moment, then, to organize the variegated analyses of Arab Americans within one broad study, however incomplete that study will end up being. It is also a good time to write about Arab Americans because Arab Americans, for reasons closely related to the emergence of widespread and systematic analysis, are generating a fair amount of interest in both popular and academic circles in the United States. The downside of this generally positive interest is the stereotyped or otherwise reductionist discussion of Arab Americans arising from certain scholars and media commentators (the latter certainly hold more guilt on this front).2 One of the purposes of this book is to complicate such overconfident—at times dishonest—approaches by highlighting the communal diversities any effective analyst of Arab America must invariably confront. I consider it imperative, in any event, to produce arguments that do not reduce Arab Americans to political metonymy. Sporadic academic discussion of devising an Arab American Studies is another reason it is a good time to write about Arab Americans. Throughout this book, I will synthesize the positive and negative dimensions of this possibility and explore some philosophical and curricular questions associated with ethnic area studies. Though I am a supporter of such a thing called Arab American Studies (in whatever form it might actually develop), I am also an unceasing advocate of interethnic studies, a sensibility owing, I imagine, partly to my formal training in Native American Studies and partly to my own cultural multiplicity (American, Jordanian Bedouin, Palestinian, Hispanic, Arab American, Appalachian—given the emphasis many Americans now place on the categorization of identity, I could probably extend this list considerably, as could most writers, a fact that plays more than a peripheral role in debates over the probity of ethnic area studies). I will argue that a desire to construct an Arab American Studies and a focus on integrating Arab Americans into political and intellectual

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collaboration with other ethnic minorities are far from mutually exclusive goals; they are in fact manifestations of a comparable desire, and should be conjoined fluidly and comprehensively. Critical and theoretical necessity is yet another reason it is a good time to write about Arab Americans. If the purpose of good critical writing is to dissolve truisms and raise provocative questions that generate more instances of good critical writing—not exactly a trenchant proposition, but one to which I subscribe, nonetheless—then Arab Americans demand more careful attention in both the social sciences and humanities because we occupy numerous theoretical intersections of interest to various disciplines (e.g., acculturation and deculturation; immigration and jurisprudence; ethnic identities and national mythologies; racialization and geopolitics). American society appears somehow to have morphed into a position in which Arab Americans frequently are demonized or mythologized in the service of assorted political strategies, and so it is impossible at times to discuss assorted political strategies without at least implicitly discussing Arab Americans. It is no longer acceptable to allow such discussions to remain implicit. Above all, though, it is a good time to write about Arab Americans because Arab Americans are worth analysis on the merits of our cultural and intellectual achievements, our vibrant and meaningful activism on behalf of countless issues, and our heretofore marginalized position in the United States, a position well worth writing into oblivion.

Ac knowledgment s

For her tremendous patience and her uncanny ability to illuminate the value of hard work by example, I thank, as always, Diana. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the members of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. (RAWI), who always lend unconditional support and endless food for thought; they are writers and scholars who refuse to accept the temptation of pessimism that would be so justified these days. This book has grown directly out of our numerous conversations. For their guidance and friendship, I would like to thank in particular Deborah Alkamano, Evelyn Alsultany, Khaled Mattawa, and Susan Muaddi Darraj. Nevertheless, all errors and infelicities in the forthcoming pages are solely mine. Sections of chapter 4 were published originally as “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride,” in New Centennial Review 6, no. 2 (2006). I would like to express my gratitude to the editors for allowing me to reprint those sections here. Finally, I should note that Nasr, Miriam, Michael, and Danya have, for longer than they may care to recall, supported my desire to become a writer; this book, then, would not have been possible without their encouragement—and their belief in the significance of Arab America, a community we are proud to support and even prouder to inhabit.


INTRODUCT ION

Searching Diversities: Observations of an Arab Ex-Student

I have chosen for this project a title that warrants a moment’s explanation. In pluralizing all the nouns—politics, cultures, fictions— I have tried to do more than merely adhere to a humanistic trend of altering grammatical commonplaces to better reflect changed social dynamics. I am trying to inscribe the book’s title methodologically into its contents, because I will argue that emphasis on plurality is the only plausible way to discuss Arab Americans (an emphasis that nevertheless leaves us open to innumerable methodologies). It is impossible to speak of Arab America as a singular, unified entity. This acknowledgment certainly makes analysis of Arab America more difficult than accepting the illusion of homogeneity, but it is a worthwhile acknowledgment because it points us in the direction of truth, a direction I hope scholars of Arab America will strongly emphasize. Arab Americans are Muslim (Shia and Sunni and Alawi and Isma’ili), Christian (Catholic and Orthodox, Anglican and Evangelical, and Mainline Protestant), Jewish (Orthodox and Conservative and Haredi and Reform),1 Druze, Bahai, dual citizens of Israel and twenty-two Arab nations, multi- and monolingual, progressives and conservatives, assimilationists and nationalists, cosmopolitanists and pluralists, immigrants and fifth-generation Americans, wealthy and working-class,2 rural and urban, modern and traditional, religious and secular, White and Black, Latin American and Candian.3 We also occupy the many spaces between these binaries. Sometimes Arab Americans are non-Arabs such as Circassians, Armenians, Berbers, Kurds, and Iranians.4 We are likely to inhabit any American industry and are represented across the social and political spectrums of the United States. To reduce Arab Americans to political symbols by lionizing them as radicals or portraying them generically as terrorists in campaign advertisements is therefore careless and irresponsible.

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ARAB AMERICAN LITERARY FICTIONS

Analyzing Arab Americans comprehensively requires nothing less than analyzing the intricacies of all that is considered fundamentally American. It also requires serious analysis of all that is set apart from fundamental Americanness in order to furnish it with an ostensibly unified definition. I will take up this ethic of plurality in Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics. There is no such thing as diversity in Arab America; there are diversities. We do not adhere to a singular body politic: we engage in all sorts of politics. We do not occupy an Arab American culture: we belong to numerous cultures housed, somewhat reductively but usefully as intellectual shorthand, under the rubric of an Arab American ethnic community. We do not produce a particular style of literary fiction: like all good authors, we write literary fictions spanning the available range of aesthetic and structural paradigms— sometimes we alter them to better exhibit cultural flavor, and sometimes we transcend them and create new ones. This book will search out these pluralities and examine how they challenge and reinforce preexisting conceptions of Arab America, contribute to the cultural and political tenor of the Arab American community, and influence the burgeoning Arab American scholarship that now appears frequently in the proceedings of multiple disciplines, literary criticism particularly. Let me offer another word about terminology. By invoking the phrase literary fictions, I hope to set the tone for a dual analysis, one a critical assessment of the fiction produced by Arab American authors and the other a demystification of the fictions about Arab Americans circulating incessantly in the United States and thereby inhibiting our ability to examine Arab American fiction clearly and soberly. Like most literary critics today, especially those who focus on so-called ethnic literatures, I believe that a certain amount of cultural knowledge must necessarily underline professional criticism and pedagogical approaches to literary instruction. Arab Americans are now so frequently misrepresented in American society that it seems impossible at this point to engage Arab American literatures without also offering some sociopolitical arguments. Having taught Arab American literatures for many semesters now, I can say from personal experience that students tend to react stereotypically to Arabs and subsequently misread the material at hand. Simple lectures about Arab American cultures and politics, however, tend not only to create excellent classroom discussions, but also visibly enhance the quality of student reactions to Arab American literatures. This project, then, will contextualize literary analysis within sociopolitical rubrics, although I am concurrently dedicated to old-fashioned aesthetic critique.

SEARCHING DIVERSITIES

3

The Usefulness of Influence This book certainly has its influences, and even a few antecedents, which deserve brief mention if only to better illuminate my methodology. Though I am directly influenced by the work of writers such as Lisa Suhair Majaj, Evelyn Shakir, Michael Suleiman, Khaled Mattawa, Andrew Shryock, Nabeel Abraham, and Amal Amireh, who have all written or edited books dealing with Arab Americans, there is currently a dearth of original, book-length scholarship on Arab Americans, though I am aware of numerous ongoing projects. I am more impressed by what Native writers managed to do in the 1990s when the field of Native American Studies reached maturity largely on the strength of creative and groundbreaking scholarship. I see in the trajectory of Native American Studies something of a model for an emerging Arab American Studies, although the many disjunctions between the two fields preclude straightforward mimicry. I would guess, however, that in the next decade a series of innovative and interesting books on Arab America will appear, and so scanning the development of other ethnic area studies might prove fruitful; Native American Studies is the most appropriate model because it has established itself only recently and deals with issues that, albeit unique, dovetail with many of the things Arab American writers discuss. Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics, for instance, has been inspired considerably by the methodologies used in Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays,5 the late Louis Owens’s Mixedblood Messages,6 Jace Weaver’s That the People Might Live,7 Craig Womack’s Red on Red,8 Taiaiake Alfred’s Peace, Power, Righteousness,9 Shari Huhndorf’s Going Native,10 Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets,11 Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places,12 and Devon Mihesuah’s Indigenous American Women.13 Though somewhat dissimilar (vastly so in some cases), each of these books interrogates crucial issues in the development of Native American Studies and emphasizes material considerations in addition to theoretical concerns. Many of them blend exposition with analysis and all of them make concrete recommendations. Indeed, they helped create a strong ethic in Native American Studies in which incomprehensible pontification is considered antithetical to the well-being of the communities represented by the authors. Upon publication, each book signaled a new point in the evolution of a heretofore (and often still) marginalized area study critical to any real understanding of the history of the North American continent. An Arab American Studies will be in good shape

4


if it can produce a similarly productive community of scholars devoted to serving Arab America both materially and intellectually. A few approaches in particular have influenced this book. I am wary, first of all, of repeatedly sloshing around in notions of hybridity or focusing on ethnic identity at the expense of more pressing—and, quite frankly, more meaningful—concerns. In Tribal Secrets, Robert Warrior contests the “dominating influence of essentialist understandings of Indian culture” and decries the fact that “both American Indian and Native Americanist discourses continue to be preoccupied with parochial questions of identity and authenticity” whose effect “has been to reduce, constrain, and contain American Indian literature and thought and to establish why something or someone is ‘Indian’ than engage the myriad critical issues crucial to an Indian future.”14 Warrior provides an important warning to those examining Arab America, for to reduce discussion of this community to subject identities (an approach that relies inevitably on amorphous, and thus ineffectual, criteria) is tantamount to forestalling productive scholarly engagement. Some of my earlier writings on Arab America remained somewhat preoccupied with some variation of the question, “What is an Arab American?” This is a useful question in the sense that it demands its purveyor to examine the invented and organic boundaries that usher individuals into ethnic collectivities. Its usefulness ends basically at this conceptual stage, however, because the question ultimately is unanswerable. One can never provide an answer to it that doesn’t simultaneously produce countless exceptions; the question therefore becomes little more than a stagnant but self-sustaining inquiry because it doesn’t allow its purveyor to emerge from the conjectural labyrinth he or she unwittingly created. Any brief review of the scholarship covering similar questions in Native, Asian, Hispanic, and African American Studies will reveal the same overextended futility. It appears that enough theorization of the authenticity of Arab Americans has been conducted and the time is right to transcend this approach and focus instead on questions that will challenge weak orthodoxies and enhance real understanding of Arab America despite its inherent complexities. Whether or not Native scholars listened to Warrior, the critical writing produced in the years following Tribal Secrets examined a host of more interesting questions. One of my reasons for writing this book is to encourage Arab American scholars to do the same. Another influence evident here is the rejection in Native American Studies of trendy theoretical movements in place of profoundly


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community-oriented approaches that draw heavily from Indian cultural peculiarities and intellectual histories, a rejection made famous by Craig Womack’s complaint that he is weary of encountering “the same damn Bakhtin quotes we’ve all heard a million times.”15 A word of caution is needed here. When Womack and other Indian critics reject mainstream theoretical paradigms and argue instead for the pursuit of “national” models, they write from the perspective of indigenous peoples organized as nations before European contact and still conceptualizing themselves as such today, a perspective unavailable to Arab Americans, whose presence in North America has an immigrant rather than indigenous origin. We can nevertheless appropriate ethical imperatives from these models, especially the assertion that a purportedly communal scholarship need not succumb completely to mainstream theory even if it can, when done skillfully, reorient mainstream theory to supplement the distinctive needs of the communal scholarship. Interchange across the academic spectrum usually is a productive enterprise, but I remain wary of any attempt to squeeze Arab American voices into preexisting scholarly traditions. A better approach will allow the interchange to enhance the probity of the intellectual models Arab Americans create based on examination of the unique spaces we inhabit in the United States. For in the end we are searching not simply for the inclusion of Arab Americans into ongoing discussions, although that certainly is a valuable goal. We are searching for ways to comprehend the coalescence of an Arab American community by looking into its own social and historical peculiarities; and we are searching for ways to map out a productive future not only for those who study the Arab American community, but, more important, for the community being studied. This pursuit entails searching diversities, in which searching acts as a verb and Arab American scholars undertake the action the verb requires. It likewise entails searching diversities, in which searching acts as an adjective, for in Arab America there are long-standing diversities that belie widespread notions of cultural, linguistic, religious, and intellectual homogeneity. There can be no room for Arab American scholarship to reinforce tacitly the mythologies about Arab America rampant in popular American culture. Randomly picking out three novels classified under the rubric of Arab American will bear out the veracity of this argument. I don’t, it should be mentioned, turn to Native American Studies merely for inspiration or because it forms the majority of my professional training in literary criticism. (Very few Arab American critics were trained formally in something that can reasonably be called Arab

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American Studies.) This turn is also strategic, because I would argue that efforts to devise an Arab American literary criticism or promote an Arab American Studies need carefully to be decentered from provincial notions of ethnic atavism and situated instead in comprehensive interethnic dynamics. Such a move will not devalue Arab American discreteness. On the contrary, it will help illuminate Arab American discreteness by rejecting invented concepts of a racial essence and by contextualizing Arab America within the multifarious processes that helped form the idea of discrete ethnic identity in the United States. More immediately, however, I find it crucial for those involved somehow in the indefinable colossus better known as American Studies to tip their hats to their indigenous brethren and acknowledge that no truly significant discussion of the American polity can emerge without at least mentioning the Indian nations that provided the United States a means through which a mythologized American self-image could arise and sustain itself across the centuries despite the vast differences among the immigrants landing in the New World, a phenomenon that continues into the present—and that continues to involve Arab Americans.

Arab Americans and Islam It is likely that readers picking out a book on the Arab American community will expect some reflections on Islam, a reasonable expectation that I certainly will attempt to fulfill. Some qualification, however, is in order. I am hesitant based on long-standing religious diversity to compel Arab America into an Islamic posture, something that frequently (and mistakenly) occurs in popular media throughout the United States. Even among Muslim Arab Americans there are longstanding religious diversities that prevent scholars of Islam in Arab America from offering formulaic discussion. As Suad Joseph observes, in the United States “Arabs and Middle Easterners are conflated with Islam, belying the reality that most Muslims are neither Arab nor Middle Eastern. . . . These sets of conflations are glossed on to Arabs in America, again covering the historical fact that almost all Arabs in America were, until very recently, Christians and that Christian Arabsstill constitute the majority of Arabs in America.”16 Today, despite statistics from the Arab American Institute (AAI) that show a large Christian majority in Arab America, Arab Americans are Muslim and Christian in roughly equal numbers (and have other faiths represented, as well). Joseph is correct that internationally there


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are far more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims, another fact that makes me wary of subsuming Arab America into an Islamic paradigm because such a move would be vastly exclusive. Yet it would be foolish to study Arab America without acknowledging both analytically and methodologically the importance of Islam in the formation and evolution of the Arab American community. I will develop this acknowledgment throughout the book without simultaneously devaluing the formative importance of Christianity, particularly Eastern Christianity, and other faiths in Arab America. Because I am concerned first and foremost with the multi-confessional Arab American community, and therefore am unconcerned with any specific religious community, I want to avoid overburdening Arab America with an Islamic positioning based merely on probable audience expectations. (Indeed, one of my goals is to alter the expectations readers may have of Arab America.) Obviously, the fact that I am proudly Arab American and also happen to be Christian limits my desire to insinuate or assert that Arab America is mono-religious. On the other hand, I would point out that much of the culture of Arab America, despite the religious diversity of its participants, is drawn from Islamic influences; Arab America thus is what Edward Said called an Islamicate community. Islam plays a fundamental role in Arab America external of the popular notion in the United States that all Arabs are Muslim (or, conversely, that all Muslims are Arab). The trick, in my mind, is to find a way methodologically to highlight the importance of Islam in Arab America without concurrently ignoring the realities of the many Arab Americans who are not Muslim. Construing Arab America as Islamicate offers a helpful start. Another helpful place to turn is the fiction written by Arab Americans, which discusses Islam frequently but doesn’t allow the faith to overwhelm its particular ethnic sensibilities. It is true, however, that because of the association of Islam with Arab America, some Christian Arabs in the United States prefer not to identify themselves as Arab Americans, and some Muslim Arabs in the United States prefer to conceptualize themselves as belonging primarily to a multiethnic Muslim American community. These, of course, are personal choices, and so I harbor neither positive nor negative opinion about their advocates, accepting the choices instead as individual necessities. In reality, though, the majority of Arab Americans—and the overwhelming majority of Arab Americans involved in scholarly pursuits—assume something of an ecumenical approach to the community, and I have always been pleased with how fluidly and effectively Arab Americans of multiple faiths communicate

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as Arabs. For, ultimately, the relationship of Islam and Arab America in reality portends the relationship of religion and ethnicity. Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics, is concerned with an ethnic community, Arab America, for which Islam, a religion, is crucial in myriad ways. However, this book isn’t concerned primarily with the religion associated with and exerting influence on the ethnic community.17 It intends to represent Arabs in the United States as we are actually composed, and not based on what our non-Arab colleagues imagine to be our composition. A small example will suffice to illuminate one feature of the relationship between Islam and Arab America and the importance of the influence of the former on the latter. Nothing has been more critical to the racialization of Arab Americans in the United States than Islam, and nothing, correspondingly, has more ability to preclude Arab Americans from total assimilation. Islam, like Judaism, retains discreteness in both a theological and ethnic context, and as long as Arab America includes Muslims—which presumably will be the case as long as there is an Arab America—we will be perceived as a minority group, either of our own choosing or, more likely, because in the United States Christianity often is a prerequisite of assimilation. This sensibility, with its corresponding tendency to appropriate Islam as a metonym of Southern/Third World barbarity, likewise ensures that Arab Americans will never achieve the status of being White (a desire long ago abandoned by most Christian and Muslim Arab Americans). There are many other ways that Islam plays a seminal role within the Arab American community and in external perceptions of the Arab American community. By the same token, though, the same is true of Christianity, and, in other frameworks, of the Arabic language, physical attributes, and national origins. The following chapters, therefore, will provide a secular analysis of Arab America that takes Islam and other religious elements into account when they elucidate crucial dimensions of Arab America as an ethnic group and not a religious community.

Arab Americans and the American Mainstream There are now palpable reasons for the interest in Arab Americans in the United States. They can generally be attributed to one or more of the following phenomena, each of which will be assessed in some detail in this book: 9/11; the status of and controversy over ethnic area studies; the prominence of several Arab American critics and


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writers (Mohja Kahf, Diana Abu-Jaber, Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine, Khaled Mattawa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Suheir Hammad); the role Arab Americans play, implicitly and explicitly, in domestic and international politics; changed immigration demographics over the past fifty years; widespread discussion in the United States of Islam and its philosophical tenets; the reduction of Arab Americans by neoconservative activists to generic threats to unbiased and impartial education; and vigorous (often stereotyped and sometimes racist) debates over how Arabs and Arab Americans should be portrayed in research and teaching. These phenomena are intertwined with one another and with more overarching issues such as capitalism, religion, gender, race, ethnicity, and representation. I am guarded against simplifying them and treating them as binaristic impediments to the articulation of Arab American sensibilities because Arab Americans are engaged with them in complex ways and because various articulations of Arab American consciousness often rely on profound, and often unacknowledged, interplay with their moral imperatives. It has yet to be seen how Arab Americans might best negotiate the interchange of ethnic discreteness and the perceptions of Arabness circulating widely in the popular culture of the United States, but it is reasonable at this point to say that conceptions of an ostensible Arab essence are not best contested by inventing a simulated ethnic identity. In contemplating these matters, I usually look back to my experience as an American student of Arab origin because students are the unknowing subjects on which many academic controversies are expressed materially, something I learned retrospectively and try to remember in my current role as a professor. From this vantage point as an Arab ex-student, I can get a better sense of how a vibrant, often adversarial, dialectic between politics and education creates intellectual frameworks in which living diversities and contestations are crudely altered into static injunctions or transformed into rigid pedagogical expectations. I have written about my personal experiences as an Arab ex-student elsewhere, so I want to limit my comments here to a few specific observations. I found it difficult, first of all, as an Arab American student both conscious and proud of my ethnic heritage to respond eloquently to what I found to be generalizations about Arabs on the part of fellow students and instructors, a fact that speaks to one of two things (or perhaps to both at the same time): a reliance on my part on organic experience to make sense of Arab cultures and a reliance on the part of my peers and instructors on supposedly empirical knowledge

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formed by disinterested inquiry. When ethnic groups are under discussion, these two things usually fail to unify because nothing even approaching disinterested cultural knowledge can ever be created, something instructors dealing with minority communities frequently refuse to acknowledge, resulting commonly in a feeling of alienation among students belonging to the minority communities under discussion. Conversely, students belonging to minority communities being studied formally in a classroom are sometimes unable to transcend the familiarity of belonging that accompanies cultural identification, a reasonable inability given the fact that culture is most clearly experienced in the minutiae of day-to-day living, minutiae that generally don’t figure in objective scholarship and pedagogy. This disjunction between lived experience and the strictures of academic inquiry (and there are other disjunctions I have not mentioned) accounts considerably for the tensions that at times exist among students from minority communities and the educators who claim expertise in those communities. The solution to this injunction isn’t simply to hire educators belonging somehow to the communities on which they base their research and instruction. (I have no objection to this sensibility; I merely don’t view in it the possibility of a comprehensive solution. It is dangerous, in my mind, to assume that somebody advocates a particular sensibility or is sufficiently authentic according to others simply based on his or her ethnic origin. Find me, for instance, an “authentic” Arab American—using, as is typical, biology, cultural orientation, and political ideology as the main criteria for “authentic”—and I will immediately find you an “inauthentic” person who is just as Arab American.) I find it more useful to examine why conflicts over culture and identity come into existence, what is at stake in those conflicts, and how they might be resolved adequately outside the restrictive logic of stereotype and cultural determinism. I would like, in other words, to move beyond the categories of pro-Arab and anti-Arab and assess instead more nuanced matters such as the epistemologies of this sort of categorization. In contemplating the sheer richness of the Arab American community and the thoughtful scholarship about that community still waiting to be produced I am heartened because I believe, perhaps naively, that many of the rhetorical pratfalls attached stubbornly to other ethnic area studies might be avoided if we privilege intricate analysis over reductive, and repetitive, philosophizing. These pratfalls include obdurate emphasis on ethnic authenticity, essentialized notions of cultural belonging, and the rank politicization of critical inquiry. I do not mean to suggest that other ethnic area studies are limited to these pratfalls; such a


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suggestion would be shockingly untrue. They are, though, hampered by them, in serious ways in some cases; in turn, nobody can say reasonably that it is possible to study ethnic communities in the United States without the simultaneous presence of such intellectual aggravations. Although much useful knowledge has been created through the presence of those intellectual aggravations, their usefulness doesn’t generally extend into real material or theoretical benefits. Nor am I advocating a poststructuralist rejection of ethnic nationalism, though I do believe that ethnic nationalism should be harnessed carefully before it descends into essentialism or begins drawing from an inverted biological determinism inherited conceptually from the dominant society, problems destined to occur without careful harnessing. I would describe myself to a degree as an Arab American nationalist in the sense that I believe strongly in the positive attributes of my community and detest intensely any foolhardy argument that we are innate terrorists worthy of continual surveillance and, if necessary, arrest or deportation, arguments, unfortunately, being produced with more frequency in the mainstream of the United States. All my writing, whether creative nonfiction or scholarship, attempts to address issues with an emphasis on communal empowerment, and so I am bound of my own accord to more than the mere pursuit of truth or contribution to disciplinary evolution. I am concerned deeply with eliminating the nonsensical—and, more bluntly, racist—attitudes gaining credence in the United States that conceptualize Arab Americans as a fifth-column mystery to be treated with wariness and suspicion. There is nothing mysterious or dangerous about Arab Americans, and, in my mind, an Arab American Studies should work hard to convey this point to both students and mainstream Americans. Beyond this sensibility, though, my ethnic nationalism dissolves, right at the point where I might be compelled to suggest that Arab Americans have no place in the United States or that isolation from anything “American” is a reasonable strategy for Arab American scholars and professionals. Indeed, I can point to many examples of scholarship that argues passionately for communal empowerment without concurrently lionizing the pessimistic notion that group uniqueness precludes any sort of interethnic dialogue, be it with the dominant society or other minority communities. These works include Catherine John’s Clear World and Third Sight,18 Anouar Majid’s Freedom and Orthodoxy,19 Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,20 Donald Fixico’s The American Indian Mind in a Linear World,21 and the other titles I mentioned earlier. Of course, in literary study it is far from clear that

12


scholarship can lead to anything even approaching communal empowerment, and the wisdom of approaches that claim it can have been criticized or even ridiculed, resulting in substantial controversy. I will take up this controversy to some extent in chapter 1. In producing this study I am interested in finding ways to close the gap I highlighted above between learning and experience. That is to say, debates over representation notwithstanding, I think it possible to transform the current animosities among minority cultural sensibilities and scholarly knowledge from an adversarial framework into a cooperative mode of honest investigation. I like the way Peter J. Awn puts it: Let us cherish our Arab heritage without overly romanticizing it. Let us not only recognize the serious social and political problems that currently exist in the Arab world but also work seriously to bring about positive change. Finally, let us never lose sight of the extraordinary depth and richness of the culture that we share—a culture that epitomizes the ideals of humanism. Keep in mind the words of the Muslim tradition: For truly God is beautiful and He loves beauty.22

Awn’s emphasis on cultural beauty—an emphasis I support unfailingly— combined with an appeal to humanistic rigor forms the basis of the methodology that will underlie Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics. Other things I can observe in retrospect as an Arab ex-student include the dangers of monolithic cultural representation, the difficulty of intercultural dialogue in authoritative environments, and a need by both minority and White students to question long-standing dogmas rather than defensively maintaining them. These issues are more easily assessed than they would be to actually implement, but this book is trained on performance rather than mere observation. I hope it will provide students and educators with a useful overview of what is happening in Arab America culturally and politically, including a language to counter the destructive nature of anti-Arab racism and a framework to better understand Arab American literary fiction. And I hope, more important, that it will inspire them to not only think differently about Arab America, but to transform their thoughts into scholarly addenda that correct the mistakes that I will make and build on whatever valuable ideas that I will articulate.

Methodological Diversities Whereas on the one hand I conceptualize this project as literary criticism, I also would consider it social analysis. Many writers before me


13

have illustrated that it is possible to combine the two approaches and, to some degree, I have used their examples as inspiration, although I am concerned with producing a book that is, above all, formed by Arab American needs and experiences. Anytime a person writes about anything, he or she invariably omits something. Such omissions are impossible to avoid, because the very act of privileging a particular topic or discourse means that other topics and discourses, sometimes more pressing than the ones being assessed, are excluded, even when the author works to be comprehensive. Sometimes these omissions occur because the author decides that the omitted topics and discourses have been examined thoroughly enough already. Sometimes the omissions occur because the author, for whatever reason, simply cares less about the omitted topics and discourses than the ones under discussion. Sometimes omission is the result of an authorial attachment to a limited set of ideas. And sometimes the author is well aware of what is being omitted and accepts the omissions for political or methodological reasons. No text, as a result, ever is truly complete. Neither creative nor scholarly writing amounts to more than a perpetual work in progress. I therefore will acknowledge up front that this book is incomplete. I will be quite happy if it becomes a perpetual work in progress. I have omitted certain topics and discourses from its pages for all four of the reasons I posted above. The most glaring omission is Arab American poetry. I would love to offer an urbane reason for this omission, but I’m afraid that none exists. I have always been a more astute critic of prose than poetry, and quite generally enjoy fiction more than I do verse. More important, there seems to be at this moment a dearth of criticism focused on Arab American fiction, an understandable fact given that as an artistic form poetry is more evolved in Arab America (nonfiction prose, however, is quite sophisticated, especially if we include, as I do, political nonfiction in this category). Recently, though, some excellent Arab American fiction has been published and warrants attention. This fiction includes Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa’s edited collection Dinarzad’s Children (2004), Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003), Miriam Cooke’s Hayati (2000), Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003), Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003), Rabih Alameddine’s I, The Divine (1999) and KOOLAIDS: The Art of War (1998), Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki’s Ghost Songs (2000), Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), and Samia Serageldin’s The Cairo House (2000), with much more by these and emerging authors certain to follow.23 This fiction has a rich antecedent in earlier titles such as Joseph Geha’s Through and Through: Toledo Stories (1990), Diana Abu-Jaber’s

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Arabian Jazz (1993), Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose (1978), Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki’s Tower of Dreams (1995), Francis Khirallah Noble’s The Situe Stories (1999), and early-twentieth-century books such as Ameen Rihani’s extensive fiction collection24 and Kahlil Gibran’s Spirit Brides (1906), Spirits Rebellious (1908), and Broken Wings (1912), his only true novel, written, like The Prophet, in the United States. With Rihani, Gibran helped found Arrabitah (The Pen Bond) in 1912, a literary society in New York that, at least philosophically, is something of a precursor to today’s Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. (RAWI), an organization devoted to Arab American literatures for which I currently serve as executive director. These examples illustrate that Arab Americans have been participating in literary and cultural life in the United States for at least a hundred years and have moved from a heretofore marginal position to active participants in numerous literary and cultural debates. It wasn’t always the case, however, that a critic could say enough Arab American fiction exists to inspire a broad critical study. It is easy to make such a claim today. (I would be remiss not to mention that drama and creative nonfiction—as well as some newfangled genres such as poetry slamming and Internet blogging—are starting to grow exponentially in Arab America; Arab American drama, which dates to at least Ameen Rihani, likewise is a long-standing genre, as is children’s literature, undertaken masterfully by Naomi Shihab Nye, Elsa Marston, and others.) Another omission here is historiography. Some good work already exists in this genre;25 in turn, I am dedicated to a scholarly but more informal approach that draws heavily from literary criticism and critical theory (in addition to some devotion to social analysis). Though I will draw on historiography to frame many of my observations and arguments, I will not bind myself to a historiographic methodology, which I have neither the inclination nor qualification to do. One goal here is to expand the range and style of critique into Arab America, an opportunity encapsulated in literary criticism. A final omission worth mention is empirical research. I view this project ultimately as a critical hodgepodge, not a presentation of data or an exposition of field work. I will assess a variety of social, intellectual, and literary concerns within frameworks that include both traditional literary analysis and topical critique of sociopolitical phenomena. The data gathered already about Arab America will be integral to those assessments, but I will not be presenting any anew. Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics is more interpretive than pragmatic, although the genre of literary criticism, it should be pointed out, has developed its own rules and expectations that sometimes give it the feeling of an empirical methodology.


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I have been speaking of omissions because they are easier to discuss than inclusions. I have tried to make the inclusions herein as far-reaching and worthwhile as possible, inclusive enough, in any case, to become a perpetual work in progress. Inclusions themselves, though, can sometimes be inchoate or ambiguous. Chapter 1, “Problems of Inclusion: Arab American Studies and Ambiguous States of Being,” will explore the prospects and problems surrounding the creation of an Arab American Studies and will review some theoretical possibilities and impediments to area studies in general. Chapter 2, “The Internationalization of the Nation: The Uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American Fiction,” will assess Etel Adnan and Rabih Alameddine to illustrate how a foreign event, the Lebanese Civil War, has been inscribed in the American landscape and the American imagination, with some emphasis on the juxtaposition of sex and sexuality with warfare. Chapter 3, “Honesty Lost: The Strange Circumstances of Love, Death, and Norma Khouri,” will examine the notorious Honor Lost hoax in the context of other famous American literary hoaxes and argue that Khouri would have been exposed much sooner had she not drawn from a wealth of available stereotypes in fabricating a story about Arab barbarity. Chapter 4, “Escaping Inadequate Spaces: Anti-Arab Racism and Liberating Fictions,” will hypothesize the existence of an anti-Arab racism in the United States and tend to issues of patriotism, immigration, and assimilation, using critique of Joseph Geha’s Through and Through and Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan to highlight those issues and convey how they influence Arab American literary fiction. A brief conclusion will synthesize many of the book’s arguments into a discussion of Arab Americans in relation to multiculturalism and ethnic studies in the United States, and will offer some practical observations for those interested in studying Arab America. A few words before we commence. It is worth remembering that today Arab Americans are too frequently concealed behind the pervasive stupidity that passes in popular American culture as astute analysis of Arab culture and Middle Eastern history.26 Writing honestly about Arab Americans, therefore, is a daunting prospect because it appears sometimes that a few tomes are needed just to set the record straight, to get writer and reader utilizing the same assumptions, before any exciting analysis can be created. So it is impossible—for me, at least—to engage Arab America in a scholarly (or popular) forum without remaining aware of how Arab Americans repeatedly are marginalized in the United States through profiling, deportation, arrest, stereotyping, and a flourishing anti-Arab racism. This fact will

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accompany all of our forthcoming discussions, and, even if we lack the space or temperament to focus on them exclusively, we will assume that knowledge is still a viable remedy for idiocy and that the pursuit of truth is still a worthy academic endeavor, despite the insistence of the (mainly White) gatekeepers of theoretical erudition that truth is quaintly archaic. For we are not searching here solely for affirmation. We are searching for the humanity of those who dehumanize us and seeking to recover the human from the dehumanization.

CHAP TER

1

Problems of Inclusion: Arab American Studies and Ambiguous States of Being

Throughout 2003 and 2004, when enough time had passed for sober analysis of 9/11, a plethora of articles interrogating the event appeared in scholarly journals, inspiring numerous special topics courses and symposia. Perhaps the most interesting of these analyses appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion, where Jonathan K. Stubbs explored race and the law in the United States with the rigor one would expect from a legal periodical. This exploration, however, occurred in the context of a shocking but pertinent question: “After the September 11 Catastrophe Are American Muslims Becoming America’s New N. . . . . s?”1 It is difficult to imagine a more effective thesis. Its effectiveness, though, rests not in its ability to entice its audience to continue reading but in its ability to continually raise crucial subsidiary questions. I will attempt to flesh out some of those questions as this chapter progresses. First, let’s take a look at how Stubbs answers his own question (this being the sort of question that requires an answer from the person who raised it). Stubbs qualifies his analysis by noting, “Using the word ‘race’ in America is like waving a red flag before a bull. You are likely to get a spirited response. In the context of a national calamity like the September 11, 2001 tragedy, discussing race becomes an even more delicate venture.”2 While it is true that race as a term and concept is under much debate in the humanities and both the social and biological sciences, it is not so ambiguous that we cannot invoke its predominant usages to observe that evidence exists that Muslims (more specifically, those perceived as “looking” Muslim) are being subjected to the same type of treatment

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in America that has been historically reserved for people of darker colors like Blacks, Latino/as, Asians, and Native Americans. Second, in light of the preliminary historical review, . . . how the courts respond to the strait-jacketing of civil liberties of American Muslims will signal, like the proverbial miner’s canary, whether individual freedoms for all Americans are likely to survive the societal backlash following the September 11 tragedy.3

Stubbs argues that insofar as the word niggers symbolizes profiling and mistreatment based on (perceived or real) moral, physical, and psychological difference, and insofar as racial discrimination has traditionally pervaded domestic jurisprudence, then, yes, Muslims in the United States are—legally and proverbially speaking, at least—America’s new niggers. We have, as a result of this argument, much to contemplate. In this chapter, I will elaborate on Stubbs’s propositions and situate them in a framework in which some of the concerns of literary theory can be employed in the service of humanistic analysis. I also will extend that framework to foreground what is, in my opinion, a more pressing matter: assuming that, as per our analysis in the introduction, we can incorporate the category of “American Muslim” into a discussion of the emergent category of “Arab American” (a move that I consider possible), how might we best comprehend the availability of an Arab American Studies and theorize curricular and disciplinary inclusion in the face of institutional exclusion? How, in turn, might analysis of Arab America (in whose rubric I will incorporate discussion of American Muslims)4 reveal to us some problems of inclusion in the United States? These questions are related directly to notions of being as both subject citizens and ethnic subjects in the United States. I will have to argue, then, that 9/11 created for Arab Americans a series of ambiguous states of being, each reflective of the invented realities necessarily engendered by patriotic narratives, themselves rendered increasingly narrow by pervasive fables of tragedy. Let me offer another word about the relationship between Islam and Arab America. Stubbs’s proposition implies a distinct ethnic framework because he appears to racialize Islam and employ it to refer to Middle Easterners and South Asians. Islam, of course, is a religion hypothetically without racial characteristics (beyond perhaps the Arabic cultural markers inscribed in its veneration); Muslims, then, are both White and Black and represented by every imaginable ethnic group in between. It thus is problematic to attribute to the faith any precise cultural or racial characteristics. One senses in reading Stubbs’s

PROBLEMS OF INCLUSION

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article that in it Islam acts as a metonym for domestic Arabs, and perhaps as well for other Asian Americans, South Asians especially. For this reason I prefer to abandon the insinuations Stubbs evokes and instead focus on the consequences of his thesis in a precise ethnic framework, using as our moral and theoretical basis the recognition that Arab Americans, who comprise an Islamicate community, are the best test case for his assertions. Our mere presence in the United States symbolizes an Islamic presence that generates ambiguous states of being. A number of issues play a role in these ambiguous states of being, including racism, demographic trends, discriminatory legislation, corporate avarice, religious fundamentalism, foreign policy, and some phenomena more specific to Arab America such as debates over assimilation and acculturation, the ascendance in recent years of Arab American literature, intraethnic diversities, and liberatory counternarratives. The biggest issues facing Arab Americans today are these multifarious problems of inclusion—problems that speak to the composition of an Arab American Studies as much as to the positioning of Arab Americans in the United States—so I am ultimately not so concerned with the dubious honor of Arab Americans becoming America’s new niggers, but rather with understanding how we became America’s original sand niggers.

The N-Word(s), Unwillingly We might respond to Stubbs’s analysis by asking: if Arabs and Muslims are America’s new niggers, then what happened to the old ones? Surely Arabs and Muslims have not replaced Blacks, Asians, Natives, and Hispanics as victims of hateful majoritarian attitudes and a racialized legal system. If Blacks, Asians, Natives, Hispanics, and other minorities (ethnic or otherwise) still face various forms of institutionalized discrimination, then Arab Americans are not the new, but the newest niggers, or, to be methodologically precise, marginalized sand niggers whose social and judicial troubles are derivative. Sand nigger is not only an epithet increasingly common among American purveyors of anti-Arab racism, but also a signifier of the alienation of minorities wrought by the majoritarian notion of American exceptionalism. It is a new word ensconced in centuries-old ideas, framed by an erstwhile attitude of White Supremacy noteworthy not so much for its ability to adapt and endure, but for what its adaptations and endurances reveal about the hierarchized organization of American ethnic communities. Any speculation that Arab Americans might be

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conceptualized as “America’s new niggers” acknowledges tacitly that there remains a White majority in the United States in whose image Americanness is still defined. Stubbs’s consignment of Arab Americans to a position in which we symbolize enduring racism is worthwhile on numerous levels. As an intellectual referent, it allows us to situate Arab America in precise historical spaces. As a moral proposition, it demands that we interrogate the commonsensical assumptions that foster racism in the United States. As a legal observation, it urges us to confront the discrimination inherent in the interpretation of existing laws and in the creation of new ones. Yet this position does not constitute a satisfactory representation of Arab America, or even of how anti-Arab racism functions legally and sociopolitically. Rather, its exploration of U.S. majoritarian dogmas inadvertently reduces Arab Americans to an alternately rigorous and inadvertent dehumanization. For to be “America’s new niggers” is simultaneously to be trapped in a particular metanarrative in which settlers invented racism in the New World and then ensured that such racism would be inherited by future generations. That metanarrative is crucial if we are to understand Arab America comprehensively, but it lacks the fluidity to become a definitive framework. I cannot so easily move beyond Stubbs’s rhetorical performance because his formulation evokes other questions that should not be dismissed flippantly. Because he uses the word nigger to represent social and legal American transgressions spread over centuries, he appears to suggest that abstract phenomena are linguistically quantifiable. And if they are linguistically quantifiable based on usage of the word nigger, then the word assumes a philosophical intertextuality that many would consider offensive or unacceptable intellectually. What is it, then, to be a “new nigger”? Does it mean that a community is destined to endure perpetual hardship? That a community symbolizes the re-creation of longstanding racialisms, something of a neoracism? Or does it mean that a community is manufactured into existence by guarantors of the so-called national interest? That American exceptionalism still has the power to generate social hierarchies that invariably benefit the corporate elite by inventing undesirables and outfitting them with a purportedly atavistic character? If any of these questions is answerable in the affirmative, then to be a “new nigger” is to be nothing less than an avatar of all that is fundamentally American. That is to say, the marginalization supposedly professed in Stubbs’s hypothesis actually connotes a mainstreaming of Arab Americans. In another sense, Stubbs’s rhetorical performance encourages readers to assess the endurance of injurious naming and its effect on the


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territorialization of American identity into a specific majoritarian space. That space has a history in North America preceding the arrival of Arab Americans, so it is possible to speculate that Arab Americans inherited a territorialized model of nationhood merely by entering the United States.5 Arab Americans, therefore, were predestined for alterity in the United States. We also have no real ability to mitigate the alterity we inherited, because “the new niggers” is merely a rhetorical truism until the “old niggers” finally transcend their inferior status in the imagination of the majoritarian elite. It is thus unwise to say in good faith that Arab Americans are America’s new niggers, even if the intention primarily is descriptive rather than philosophical. More intellectual possibilities might be achieved by exploring Arab Americans as America’s original sand niggers, for such an identification speaks to immoral naming as a rhetorical metonym for racism as well as to the morals of commonsense in the post-9/11 United States. This distinction, of course, is no less unsavory than Stubbs’s alternative. No ethnic minority, it is reasonable to speculate, wants to be identified by any variation of a racial epithet, nor is it likely that any ethnic minority desires to continue piggybacking a violent history of nation formation in the United States. Yet to respond honestly to Stubbs’s provocative question requires something of an unsavory conversation. (This entire business of identifying majoritarian impulses is thoroughly unsavory.)6 Let us then be as uncomfortable as we can without simultaneously becoming unpleasant: Arab Americans are America’s original sand niggers because the term arises from a specific context, anti-Arab racism, that itself subsists in multivalent frameworks— historical majority and minority interactions—versatile enough to constantly reinvent their own social objectives. The real question, in other words, might not be whether Arab Americans are either America’s new niggers or original sand niggers, but rather how Arab Americans acquired an epithet as a result of multivalent interactions with unstable discourses on race in the United States. None of the possible responses will absolve the exceptionalist mores fundamental to majoritarian identification in the United States, and so those attempting to unravel how Arab Americans came to occupy various positions of marginalization will necessarily encounter the dilemma of what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “the informal, imaginative, anecdotal constructions of the Other.”7 Thomas J. Ferraro also examines this sentiment, claiming that ethnic minorities have no choice but to inherit the tensions that come to be symbolized by epithets: “Otherness does persist, whether one likes it or not—powerfully so among the offspring of immigrants who have attempted Emersonian

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self-transformation only to experience both the skepticism of the longerentitled and the return of the culturally repressed.”8 Arab Americans, then, acquired an epithet because we or our forebears migrated to a nation in which some modernized variation of “niggerdom” is a prerequisite for cultural naturalization. This acquisition certainly has not been consistent since the late nineteenth century, but one can identify both the increasing number of Muslim Arab Americans and the gradual association of Arab America with Islam as major factors in the inability of Arab Americans to become acceptable in a nation in which Christianity often presupposes acceptability. Then there is the matter of Arabs becoming a race in the United States on 9/11. There are many ways an ethnic community can become a racial group, just as there are many ways a cultural group can become an ethnic community. At different times, Arab Americans occupy all three categories; all minorities who have—of their own accord or not—achieved categorization as “racial groups” do. That Arab Americans achieved such a categorization in one day—or perhaps during the span of twenty minutes—says much about the ability of humans to utilize mass communications to generate meaning immediately after the onset of an event (a word I use in a Derridean sense, to refer to something with the ability to alter or reinforce preexisting social customs). A more interesting approach, however, would be to consider why Arab Americans were invented as a racial group rather than merely a foreign presence or even an immigrant community; this question is made more resonant by the fact that before 9/11 Arab Americans had lobbied unsuccessfully for official minority classification. Why, given the supposed desire of most Americans for a meritocracy in which national identification should trump ethnic identity, did Arab Americans become yet another racial group in a deeply fragmented country? There are countless ways to approach this issue, but I suspect that it is the type of question that answers itself. The fragmentation of American society into majority/ minority binaries ensured that the predominant response to 9/11 would be to appropriate the new Arab enemy into familiar categories. Thus even as a heightened foreign presence or religious deviant, the Arab American became on 9/11 an unwilling addition to a racialized taxonomy packed with unwilling participants. Part of the ambiguity highlighted in the title of this chapter arises from within this set of issues. Arab Americans have never been privy to a fixed legal identity in our history in the United States; neither have we been assigned a trenchant position within American racial hierarchies in popular (albeit ethically problematic) conversations about


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immigration and civil rights. Indeed, Arab Americans have been classified and treated as both “White” and “ethnic.” There remain questions about whether Arab Americans are best viewed as so-called White ethnics, of the same order as Italians and Greeks, or as proper minorities like Africans, South Asians, and Hispanics. I would argue that to search out inclusions in this sort of taxonomy reinforces ambiguity because the taxonomy has largely been inhospitable and contrived ever since its origin in the juridical imagination of pre-Revolution settlers. The system by which human subjects are assigned placement in racialized hierarchies relies at least partly on the reduction of diverse communities to their imagined or invented essences. I would further point out that any argument about where Arab Americans best fit into extant racial paradigms is hopelessly ambivalent because Arabs comprise the entire range of human skin pigmentations and don’t necessarily form a race so much as a loose cultural grouping that is likewise impossibly abstract. I am reminded of an Egyptian friend of mine of dark complexion who in the course of a traffic stop was subjected to an identity screening because the police officer who had pulled him over couldn’t reconcile his appearance with his legal classification as White. The point that arises from this example—beyond the utterly arbitrary nature of legalized racial identities—is something of a warning: no matter where people conceptualize Arab Americans in the tapestry of long-standing ethnic taxonomies, we might avoid pressing for systematic answers when the system itself renders them impossible and explore instead the extent to which Arab American racialization has become a de facto reality in the modern United States. We can also approach the issue with a different perspective, that of the ethnic minorities themselves, many of whom are guilty of inventing a racialized essence or promoting an inflexible pluralism. Even in the absence of such guilt, however, it might be foolish to continue without exploring how ethnic minorities influence the process we have discussed thus far. Catherine A. John provides some insight into how ethnic minority identity can be formed in opposition to the perceived moral and intellectual failings of the majoritarian culture. Engaging James Clifford’s well-traveled cultural theories, John writes, I would like to argue that . . . “the predicament of culture” described by Clifford is peculiar to the “postmodern” cultural situation of the European intellectual, still adrift in bankrupt master narratives tied to imperialist traditions. This “where to go from here” predicament, while not absent from non-European cultural contexts, is much more

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characteristic of the white Western subject than it is of peoples who have historically suffered aggressive racial and cultural oppression and who are the descendants of peoples who identify with non-Western stories of origins.9

Paradoxically, it often is in the perceived exoticism (or inferiority or purity or childishness or savagery) of minority cultures that a majoritarian ethos is constructed and reinforced.10 Clifford’s “predicament of culture,” therefore, often is resolved by valorizing the same tendencies that created the predicament in the first place. John’s comment is important for Arab Americans especially, because we have an acute relationship with what we perceive overwhelmingly to be American imperialism in the Arab World; so if, as John speculates, ethnic minorities typically reject what they view as “imperialist traditions,” then it is possible that Arab Americans contribute to our own racialization by rejecting the mainstream paradigms that bespeak imperialism. Legally speaking, in any event, the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and other xenophobic legislation both locally and nationally have consigned Arab Americans to something of a special status that is both racialized and, in this moment, inalterably rigid.11 These juridical phenomena ultimately produce the social atmosphere that marginalizes Arab Americans and induces our appropriation as Other into narratives of exceptional Americanness.12 We have much to explore beyond the assignment of old and new epithets if we are to create for Arab Americans a productive and hospitable critical apparatus. After 9/11, Americans turned increasingly toward fables of tragedy—reflections on 9/11 that compartmentalized human suffering and rendered the American tragedy exceptional—as a means of reinforcing a national identity made universal in the image of the majoritarian elite. This peculiar mix of exposition and jingoism (often resulting in propaganda) has subordinated Arab Americans to a spectator’s position in many debates of great national import; or it has institutionalized Arab Americans as an alien presence bound unwillingly to the commonplaces of a racialized society.

In Pursuit of an Arab American Studies By this point we have, I hope, established with some confidence that Arab Americans interact in multiple ways with both the majoritarian American polity and the communities excluded for various reasons from that polity. It is my hope, in any case, that we will assume as a starting point for discussion of an Arab American Studies that we are


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not dealing with a singular community; Arab Americans are not ourselves singular, nor are we perceived as such by various communities in the United States. This assumption is pertinent because I will have to argue that the composition of an Arab American Studies, though exciting politically and intellectually, faces variegated challenges— both internal and external—that demand caution, none so conspicuous as the threat of reduction or homogenization. Let us proceed with some necessary acknowledgments: ●

●

●

●

●

●

If Arab Americans are America’s original sand niggers, then we have in this originality a justification for pursuit of a discrete area study; but this is nevertheless a poor excuse on which to base such a pursuit. Humanistic and cultural phenomena need also to play a role, preferably a primary role. The current fiscal and political atmosphere in the United States does not lend itself to the creation of any new areas studies or to the expansion of existing ones. The political atmosphere is especially pernicious to Arab Americans, who usually are the subjects of neoconservative demands to curtail radicalism in American universities. The current outside pressures being applied to universities, then, will conflict directly with any initiative to study Arab Americans accurately and grant us classroom agency. Those interested in formalizing an Arab American Studies— as majors, minors, certificate-granting degrees, interdisciplinary courses of study, or even departments—must determine how to generate a strategic approach to formalization without encouraging any administrative or departmental impulse toward tokenism. Pragmatic dimensions of an Arab American Studies must be articulated in this era of hyper-specialization and consumer education. There needs to be a rubric that stipulates reasonably what sort of material is appropriate to study as “Arab American.” Problems of inclusion must be interrogated continually. Who, for instance, do Arab Americans include in our pursuit of academic recognition? Only Arab Americans (and, if so, what type of Arab American)? Ethnic Studies scholars? Anybody who expresses sympathy? And what sort of curriculum, for example, will underpin the pursuit? A palimpsest of, say, African or Native American Studies? A cross-section of Middle East and American Studies? The fact that these questions are endless speaks to both the need for an Arab American Studies and the difficulty of even conceptualizing its existence.

These acknowledgments touch on both philosophical and pragmatic concerns—an untidy list, really, of things for us to consider.

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I do not, however, wish to map out any sort of groundwork for an Arab American Studies here. Rather, I deem it more useful to invoke some of the issues raised in the previous section in order to explore philosophically what an Arab American Studies can be (as opposed to what it should do, something I will examine later in this chapter). I’m even more concerned with the viability of an Arab American Studies given the ambiguous states of being in which Arab Americans are unwillingly positioned. If Native American Studies can be said to have a common ethic across disciplinary and intellectual boundaries, it is the recognition that one must search the past in order to comprehend the present and prepare for the future. It might be wise for us to borrow from this methodology and examine where Arab American scholarship has been and where it appears to be going. It would certainly be pleasant if this scholarship resolves many of the problems of inclusion with which I am concerned without the inconvenience of repeatedly confronting them. It is difficult to imagine, first of all, a communal scholarship that has evolved so dramatically in only the span of a decade. Although, as Lawrence Davidson has illustrated, Arab Americans have been visible as a cultural and sociopolitical entity since at least the early twentieth century, the coalescence of what is now called Arab American scholarship is a relatively new phenomenon.13 (Scholarship before the 1990s that focused in some way on the Arab American community—and there was a decent amount of it—rarely was self-described with or provided an organized ethnic designation.) To speak of Arab American scholarship, therefore, is to describe a phenomenon essentially limited to the past twenty years. I would identify the publication of Ernest McCarus’s edited collection, The Development of Arab-American Identity (1994), as a pivotal moment in the coalescence of Arab American scholarship as a specific entity.14 This is not to suggest that McCarus’s book was the first monumental study of Arab Americans, for it was not, though it was (and in many ways remains) a groundbreaking contribution to a burgeoning area study. Nor do I wish to suggest that discussion of Arab Americans as a community only occurred (or can occur) though the medium of scholarship; in reality, people have been holding organized discussions in various forums about Arab Americans since Arabs arrived in North America. The Development of Arab-American Identity was so pivotal because it inspired a handful of similar books in the eight years that followed (pre-9/11) and because, more important, its contents signaled a change of direction in the sorts of topics scholars of Arab America examined.15 Two chapters in particular—Nabeel Abraham’s


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“Anti-Arab Racism and Violence in the United States” and Ronald Stockton’s “Ethnic Archetypes and the Arab Image”—contextualized with great skill the cultural and sociopolitical issues of Arab America within more broadly established ethnic studies paradigms.16 In so doing, Abraham and Stockton signaled that no longer would Arab American scholarship remain focused almost exclusively on issues of migration and assimilation; rather, they politicized their scholarship and broadened their methodological content in ways that became immensely helpful to those who would follow. Throughout the 1990s a number of writers and academics followed Abraham’s and Stockton’s examples; thus until 9/11, a steady emergence of diverse scholarship appeared, examining such topics as the influence of the Oslo Accords on the cohesiveness of Arab Americans;17 the image of Arabs in American media;18 Arab American invisibility as an ethnic minority;19 twoness, or the influence of W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness on Arab American literature;20 the politics of memory in Arab American writing;21 race, ethnicity, and racial classification in Arab America;22 religious practices in Arab American communities;23 the political and legal ramifications of migration, immigration, and assimilation;24 Arab American musicology;25 local and geopolitical activism in Arab America;26 feminist themes in Arab American autobiographies;27 the consumer market represented by Arab Americans;28 cultural sensitivity in health practices and psychiatric treatment;29 and gender in Arab America.30 I am doubtlessly omitting other important studies. This swell in Arab American scholarship indicated that on the eve of 9/11 a serious discussion of the probity of an Arab American Studies was imminent, even if the critical apparatus on which such an endeavor would be based was still relatively immature. After 9/11, though, Arab American scholarship assumed something of a chaotic disposition. A community that once was virtually invisible suddenly became the object of much (often unsolicited) curiosity. In the year following 9/11, reactions from Arab Americans in scholarly publications were scarce, although by now a broad range of inquiry exists and touches on everything from the effects of 9/11 on Arab American politics31 to the post-9/11 challenges of acculturation and integration.32 Now that Arab Americans have come to be treated as a race in the United States and have become a community subject to more outside scrutiny than internal study, numerous scholarly tasks have been identified: countering American myopia in the Arab World; demythologizing stereotype and overeager romanticization; developing critical paradigms for interdisciplinary projects; confronting human

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rights violations in the Arab World; situating Arab Americans in the ever-changing panorama of American multiculturalism; and theorizing an appropriate link between scholarly pursuit and social responsibility. These kinds of tasks have been analyzed over and again in non-Arab American area studies, so the writers who identify them as salient to Arab American scholarship have the benefit of preexisting models, even if those models sometimes dismiss the plausibility of academic cohesion. The only thing certain at this point is the need for a dialogue about what to do with the proliferation of Arab American scholarship after 9/11. This dialogue should not only occur among those producing the scholarship, but also among cultural studies theorists, advocates of multiculturalism, and literary critics in general. The problems inherent in developing an area study, however, are tremendous, and go beyond mere problems of inclusion (although they account for a substantial portion). For instance, the ambiguous states of being discussed above raise the possibility that, based on a lack of autonomous intellectual space, an Arab American Studies will merely repeat the trajectories of the area studies forged by other ethnic minorities. Issues of intent arise, as well, for it would be foolish to reactively create the analytic space for the study of an ethnic minority in response or opposition to a majoritarian gaze. Ideally such a space will be created proactively, identifying communal and theoretical needs and then attempting to fulfill them. The only university-affiliated institution devoted to the study of Arab Americans, The University of MichiganDearborn’s Center for Arab American Studies (a small, interdisciplinary program), has done well to avoid these pratfalls, thus signaling to comparable institutions that formalized study of Arab Americans can be communally and institutionally productive. Of course, even studying ethnic minorities as distinct groups has been controversial for some time, and so I imagine that any discussion of an Arab American Studies will have to account for those controversies. James Kyung-Jin Lee, for example, sees in current uses of multiculturalism a comforting illusion: Multiculturalism imagines anew how to reorganize the heretofore unequal representation of American life; its more difficult task lies in its capacity or even its willingness to redistribute uneven resources in American communities. The fantasy of multiculturalism’s practitioners depends on this parallel movement of more equitable representation and resources: to win hearts and minds in the space of our imagined communities, to gain the bread and land for those living in the landscapes of our real neighborhoods.33


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Lee concludes that “the work of representing race differently, the work of crossing lines, has not resulted in the work of redistributing resources. In many ways, it has not helped break down walls, but has instead helped to build them higher.”34 Lee is correct that advocates of multiculturalism have long entered political territory by concerning themselves not simply with traditional scholarship but also with issues such as the redistribution of wealth, the dismantling of perceived White privilege, the empowerment of ethnic minorities, and so forth. He also is correct that these concerns have not necessarily played out the way many of their progenitors had envisioned. In many ways, multiculturalism has been an exquisite myth, a delusion with the ability to comfort both its enemies and proprietors. Too often it has been invoked as an example of institutional open-mindedness when it was being used in reality to pigeonhole ethnic area studies into a tokenized position more appropriate for promotional brochures than real understanding of minority cultures. At other times it has allowed Whites to encroach on the same academic territory that ethnic minorities worked so tirelessly to create. In other ways, though, multiculturalism has been extraordinarily useful— in creating alternatives to Eurocentric scholarly paradigms, for example, or in offering sophisticated challenges to the probity of retaining the Western literary canon. Lee’s argument, then, highlights a few concerns that will likely remain critical to proponents of an Arab American Studies: how to invent a position for the articulation of Arab American voices that does not simultaneously hinder their proliferation; how to achieve a dynamic intellectual and pedagogical environment without adopting multicultural delusion; how to encourage scholars of this area study to assist the Arab American community in reality rather than in their imaginations (in which case their imaginations might induce the exquisite myth that scholarship leads to material empowerment for people other than the scholars). Even these imperatives, though, are fraught with problems. “Literary criticism,” Jeffrey Wallen observes with devastating candor, “in the guise of engaging social and political questions, functions instead to displace political debate.”35 Wallen believes that scholars should undertake profound critical inquiry rather than producing weak rhetorical critique (“the promotion of persuasion”) purportedly in the service of political advocacy, an engagement Wallen, in any event, finds untenable because “these techniques of stripping away the rhetoric of freedom and democracy to expose exploitation and injustice, which frame our view of conflict as a struggle of interests masked by a superficial contest of ideas, are likely instead to give those in

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power all the greater license to act on their desires.”36 This argument leaves us with much to contemplate, foremost among them the notion that conceptualizing discourses as indelibly competing (and merely socially constructed) interests undermines the very notion of justice from which many critics today draw inspiration. Wallen’s critique of what he dubs moralistic academic criticism— particularly his charge that it contravenes what it sets out to do—is insightful and worth attention, especially since it appears sometimes that a critical dogmatism has engulfed the study of literature. And yet I cannot help but feel disappointed ultimately in Wallen’s performance because he fails to adequately highlight ethnic scholars whose analyses essentially agree with his, with the exception that they generally treat “moralistic academic criticism” as a thinly veiled Eurocentrism masquerading as anti-imperialistic and advertising itself as open-minded and inclusive. Such analyses date back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, notably Abd-l Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat’s “The Ideology of Black Social Science”37 and Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins.38 They have continued into the present, forming something of a discrete critical tradition, and include classics such as Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory,”39 Gerald Vizenor’s Manifest Manners and Shadow Distance,40 and, more recently, Craig Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, in which Womack argues that Native critics should abandon the Western theoretical canon and rely primarily on Native intellectual traditions.41 Based on this tradition, then, it is not only possible to incorporate political concerns effectively into critiques of literary, cultural, and national traditions; it has, in fact, already been done effectively, just not in the places where Wallen looks (and rightly criticizes), which, with the possible exception of Edward Said’s work, share an association with the institutions long targeted by ethnic critics. Like Wallen, the best of these ethnic critics—Deloria, Alkalimat, Christian, Vizenor, Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Catherine John, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Taiaiake Alfred, Anouar Majid—reject relativism both morally and theoretically. This fact does not necessarily solve some of the dilemmas inherent in contemplating an ethnic area study—nor does it require proponents of ethnic area studies to reject relativism—but it at least helps validate intellectual pursuits meant in part to benefit particular communities. Narrowing this discussion to Arab Americans specifically, I would suggest that the great interest about Arab Americans exhibited in both academic and popular institutions in the United States itself merits the formation of an Arab American Studies, for Arab Americans belong to a community already being


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studied—vehemently and incessantly in some cases. We need, then, to explore issues of access, ideology, and accountability before Arab Americans are rendered inalterable by the certainties of our countless overseers. Proponents of an Arab American Studies also must consider a separate but related concern that Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk raise comprehensively in their edited collection Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: that of negotiation between cosmopolitanism and pluralism and the wisdom of forming or reinforcing discrete area studies as opposed to integrating them based on thematic similarities rather than on mere ethnic identification. Contributors to the collection point out that a serious problem of inclusion is the advocacy among some ethnic studies scholars for exclusion. Werner Sollors, for instance, argues, While I would be the first to agree that one could write a history of modernism using only African American texts, I still find the group-bygroup method that is also focused on finding the groupness of the group in literary works, untenable as an exclusive organizing device, as it by necessity marginalizes the most important area of ethnic interaction and transethnic reading that has given aesthetic shape to the writings of many people who, as persons, may have had remarkably different social locations.42

Sollors later becomes rather hyperbolic, suggesting that “one could go a step further and say that the ideal texts to study for the group-bygroup approach would be the ones that were faked by outsiders but were believed to be by insiders, because they are likely to contain the richest agglomeration of those signs that are taken to establish ethnic verisimilitude.”43 In the framework of Native literatures, Wolfgang Hockbruck, drawing from Sollors’s warning of “implied purism” in group-by-group approaches, likewise argues that “[m]any ethnic authors in the U.S. and in Canada do not speak the languages of their original group. The professed polyglossia of their texts is often an invention.”44 Hochbruck further argues that “authenticity of voice is not a problem of bloodlines but of markets and of political positions,” then announces that “some impulses behind the arguments for minority members only authorship . . . are segregationist, possibly even racist, in their thrust.”45 Though Sollors and Hochbruck might be accused of defensiveness, they raise valuable points. Though I will not go as far as Ward Churchill and deem Sollors a White supremacist,46 I do tend to

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disagree with his admittedly provocative thesis; I would also register the same disagreement with Hochbruck. I rather like the way Katrin Schwenk, one of the editors of the volume in which Sollors’s comment appears, negotiates these complexities: Not being able to determine when the group-by-group approach and with it the privileging of race, ethnic, and gender categories will fall into totalitarianism makes the concept sound dangerous, and it may seem theoretically sounder to dismiss the group-by-group approach as potentially essentialist. But as sexism and racism persist, so does the call for partiality and commitment, and the group- by-group approach appears to be a concept that, handled with care, will probably stay around for quite another while.47

Schwenk’s suggestion that political phenomena necessitate discrete area studies is ironic given that Sollors and Hochbruck argue so vehemently against discrete area studies on the grounds that they needlessly politicize critical inquiry and themselves induce the same set of problems they wish to eliminate (racism, sexism, and so forth). Though Sollors’s and Hochbruck’s arguments are impeccable logically, they are nevertheless practicable only if we assume that equality has been achieved transethnically in the United States (and in particular in American universities). A scholarly position, in other words, is of limited value when it is isolated within its own logical inhibitions. I would argue that we can still focus on group-by-group approaches without concurrently searching for “groupness”; we can instead search out historical discreteness, which is a different phenomenon altogether. The possibility of an “implied purism” is arguably offset by the current reality of an actual purism in the form of academic Eurocentrism. I thus support transethnic studies as conceptualized by Sollors—and supported presumably by Hochbruck—but not at the expense of discrete area studies. Indeed, it is possible for the two to coexist, but transethnic affinity must necessarily grow out of intraethnic exclusivity. Besides, Arab Americans are already being made discrete, usually against our wishes, across the United States. What better reason, then, to interrogate the underpinnings of that discreteness? We have plenty of time to generate scholarly models across ethnic lines, something, in any event, being done more frequently these days.48 This debate over ethnic discreteness (pluralism) versus transethnic integration (cosmopolitanism) puts me in mind of Jonathan Stubbs’s intriguing question assessed at the beginning of this chapter. In asking if American Muslims can be considered “America’s new niggers,”


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Stubbs has evoked some of cosmopolitanism’s basic assumptions: that historical piggybacking precludes real communal discreteness; that ethnic communities might benefit more from an interethnic dialectic rather than pursuing isolation; that a dialogue about injustice will be incomplete if it is unable to transcend its own communal boundaries; that historical occurrences are never limited to those the occurrences most directly effect; that nothing is created anew, external of the vicissitudes of influence, when it comes to sociopolitics. (To be fair, the final two assumptions also are fundamental to pluralism and to most schools of today’s critical theory.) And in answering his question in the affirmative, Stubbs seems to have at least partly validated some of those assumptions as social realities. I thus refer back to an argument I made earlier in order to contextualize the issue: the sheer crudeness of becoming America’s original sand niggers is also richly cosmopolitan, just as it is unbearably pluralistic in its ability to define identity permanently and without consent.

Area Studies: Exclusively Inclusive? One of the most difficult impediments to the creation of an Arab American Studies is invented reality. By “invented reality,” I refer in one sense to the violent disposition ascribed to Arab Americans and the peculiar Arabness underlying that disposition; in another sense, “invented reality” refers to the ethnic group itself—and, by extension, the critical school tasked with studying it—and the challenge of theorizing a cultural epistemology without simultaneously generating a theoretical simulacrum; in yet another usage, “invented reality” refers to the corporatized invention in the United States of geopolitical imperatives vis-à-vis actual geopolitical need, a disparity that invariably affects how Arab Americans are perceived and positioned in the United States. Although I would deem it foolish to argue for the creation of an ethnic area study based primarily on geopolitical events (as opposed to, say, cultural practices), this final usage of “invented reality” cannot be glossed over or ignored. I mentioned at the start of this chapter that pervasive fables of tragedy have necessarily engendered patriotic narratives that produce invented realities, a point worthy of some elaboration. It is my contention that to be patriotic today in the United States, if we utilize the prevailing conception of patriotism, is also to be engaged in some way in anti-Arab racism, perhaps as its direct purveyor or as one of its unwitting progenitors. At the very least, the patriotic American is flirting with discourses that convey

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anti-Arab racism either directly or obliquely. A continually malleable narrative, patriotism is the central phenomenon through which American unity and an American essence are invented, and it necessarily subordinates Arab Americans to the whims of an imagined national community from which we are isolated and through which Arab American isolation is invoked to distinguish Americanness from more unsavory ethnonationalities. Indeed, as long as the prevailing version of patriotism continues to attach itself to imperial adventurism and as long as the imperial adventurism continues to target the Arab World, Arab Americans will never be allowed to properly become “American,” although I would question, in any event, if becoming “American” in such a capacity is a worthwhile goal. For these reasons, theorists of an Arab American Studies, as well as theorists of or participants in any ethnic area study, must necessarily confront the weight of geopolitical and ethnic interplay in the United States in addition to analysis of intercultural dialectics.49 Intercultural dialectics, however, should remain a primary focus of this task, given that they transcend any ethnic or intellectual group’s immediate concerns, a prerequisite of healthy theorization. When I say “intercultural dialectics,” I speak not only of interplay between a White majority and an Arab American minority, but also of interplay among Arab Americans and other minority communities—ethnic, sexual, political, and cultural. Here Rob Kroes’s notion of creolization is useful; it is a notion he articulates in the context of an internationalized United States, a phenomenon that describes the United States within and outside its physical borders, and in the peripheries of the world where American influence is evident.50 Creolization appears to be different than hybridity because creolization hypothesizes the perpetual creation of new cultural practices based primarily on the movement of peoples and their linguistic interactions. Kroes demonstrates that the United States rapidly is becoming internationalized even as it continues to impose its hegemony on others around the globe, whether or not they desire Americanization. One of the main reasons for its internationalization, of course, is immigration, a concern Arab Americans have played a critical role in fostering and maintaining. Immigration itself, first of all, does not worry either the “average” American or the xenophobe (if there is a difference between the two); rather, it is the arrival of specific populations from certain parts of the world that render immigration a concern—or even a controversy, as illogical as it is to refer to immigration as such—among some segments of the American populace. I would further argue that the ability traditionally of immigrants to question the confidences and


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certainties (read: dogmas) of the American mainstream render Arab Americans especially insalubrious to the unwitting guardians of corporate power known more familiarly as patriotic Americans. To return to Kroes, although creolization inevitably accompanies migration and immigration, it is culturally immaterial—that is to say, imminent and thus an unreliable indicator of communal evolution. Creolization, however, must nevertheless underscore any serious methodology purporting to develop the intellectual framework of an ethnic area study, for the brilliance of Kroes’s argument is his refusal to allow us to retreat to the emotional—and often philosophical—safety of ethnic purism, either implied or explicit. Creolization necessitates enough transethnic interplay to induce mutual cultural transformations. As such, it demands analysis of what Lisa Suhair Majaj calls reciprocal inter-communalism, although it might be useful here to reiterate my contention that the fact of creolization itself cannot illuminate a useful paradigm for the formal study of Arab Americans; rather, interrogation of the sociopolitical conditions that instigate creolization would be a better indicator of scholarly effectiveness. The more difficult question is how much we are willing to allow that creolization minimizes cultural discreteness, a process that Kroes believes happens frequently (albeit subtly) and that he speculates is destined to increase as globalization progresses. In a sense, we find ourselves faced again with cosmopolitanism and pluralism, because insistence on the immutability of cultural discreteness generally belongs to the realm of pluralism. There is no realistic way to measure either cultural purity or creolization, a simple fact that may well account for the ample scholarship on race, culture, and ethnicity. Even given this reality, though, we can produce useful analysis by avoiding the absolute presented to us by ethnonationalism and by examining skeptically the homogenizing potential of creolization (as well as its cousin, hybridity). As the child of Middle Eastern immigrants who has both a cultural and political interest in the retention of an ethnic category known as Arab American, I can certainly understand the defensiveness that arises among many ethnic critics when cosmopolitan notions of mutual cultural interchange appear to impinge on each ethnic community’s self-avowed uniqueness. We need not, however, allow the defensiveness to encumber serious investigation of how group-by-group approaches to area studies might hinder the ability of ethnic minority communities to maximize their political and intellectual potential. I posit, then, that creolization is most helpful as an intellectual strategy that, if approached honestly, lacks ability to eradicate

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communal uniqueness even as it paradoxically forces us to acknowledge that communal uniqueness is largely the result of continual interplay. The model for an Arab American Studies, in other words, should underline the discreteness of Arab Americans. It should then theorize how Arab American discreteness came into existence through transcultural interchange and contemplate how that interchange might contribute to a multiethnic collective. We should aspire, in short, to be exclusively inclusive. Such an aspiration is one way to overcome the multifarious problems of inclusion in the United States and an approach I would like to believe may benefit Cultural Studies as a field as it continues to struggle with its broad ideological underpinnings as they inevitably encounter and usually contradict the tenets of pluralism so fundamental to ethnic area studies. This is a problem of inclusion that literary scholars of all specializations have an interest in overcoming.

Mapping Arab America I focused earlier on what an Arab American Studies can be philosophically, choosing at the time to suspend discussion of what it can accomplish pragmatically and in its curricular ambitions. I would like to revisit the issue here and examine some of these pragmatic and curricular concerns in the framework of recent scholarly reflections on the past, present, and future of American Studies. Let me begin with the conceptual Arab American Studies under discussion throughout this chapter. In its literature, the Center for Arab American Studies [CAAS] at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, which provides an interesting test case because, albeit fledgling, it is the first program of its kind in the United States, references Arab American “communities,” in the plural, thus indicating that Arab America should not be homogenized institutionally, and emphasizes “cultural heritage,” which presumably will ensure that Arab Americans escape whatever tendencies students and instructors might have to shepherd us into an inalterable realm of metonymy. Most curricular analyses eventually come to focus on naming and its implications, and this one will do the same because, like in all programs of study trained on human communities, concise language (a marketing necessity in academe) never adequately intimates the complexity of what it purports to describe. In particular, the decision by CAAS to highlight “Arab Diasporas” in addition to Arab Americans alters both curricular possibilities and philosophical topographies. It appears that


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the primary consequence of that decision has been to acknowledge that the confines in which academics study Arabs do not completely accommodate the countless spaces Arabs actually inhabit. Such an acknowledgment, which should be commonsensical, is rare enough to be considered a novelty, and illustrates rather dramatically the fundamental point that an Arab American Studies, if conceived and delivered carefully, has the potential to alter the rigid paradigms into which diasporic Arab communities frequently are relegated (in both popular and professorial discourses). Highlighting “Arab Diasporas” has the added advantage of tacitly encouraging comparativist and transnational scholarship, which might presumably entail investigation of interethnicity. This possibility is crucial in determining the types of things an Arab American Studies can accomplish pragmatically and in its curricular ambitions. It portends, first of all, an integration of Arab Americans into complex American polities as well as internationalist paradigms. Second, its hermeneutics indicate that complexification necessarily underlies scholarly pursuit into Arab American themes. And third, it counters any impulse scholars might have to theorize racial or cultural essences through exploration of group uniqueness. (Here I would argue that group uniqueness is more of a truism than an analytical discovery, and that overemphasizing such obvious matters would likely rely on generalization to justify the overemphasis.) The result, then, might be an area study not only devoted primarily to Arab Americans (and, less explicitly, to all other Arabs), but, more important, one that uses an Arab-centric approach to organize inquiry into more traditional scholarly explorations of Americanized landscapes. The distinction between an Arab-centric approach and an approach centered exclusively on Arabs warrants some analysis. An approach centered exclusively on Arabs will likely concentrate on the ethnonationalistic characteristics of its subject matter, in this case communities originating from Arabic-speaking nations. An Arab-centric approach, on the other hand, explores communities originating from Arabicspeaking nations in a foundational capacity; that is, with the recognition that communities partake of complex human interplay always worth serious attention. An Arab-centric approach also assumes that communities originating from Arabic-speaking nations merit placement in academic hierarchies and, more immediately, in discussions about the multicultural demography of North America. Advocates of Arab-centrism (and I am one of them) presumably would commence the difficult task of transforming Arabs from objects to subjects, a

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position we rarely have occupied in ivory towers in the United States. Whatever else an Arab American Studies is able to accomplish or willing to attempt, such a transformation is fundamental to its evolution; it represents, in fact, the necessary groundwork from which curricular and philosophical matters will evolve. We might thus purport to create an intellectual paradigm that has long been omitted and aspires in turn to represent the perpetually underrepresented. Simple enough, this aspiration. Given the endemic objectification in the United States of Arabs and Arab Americans, however, it becomes easy to realize just how difficult simplicity invariably becomes. I would applaud any initiative to endow an Arab American Studies with an internationalist perspective, by, say, including analysis of Arab communities in Europe and Latin America (the university programs dealing somehow with Arab Americans do emphasize such a perspective). This type of initiative might reduce dramatically the possibility of or propensity for provincialism and simultaneously might humanize Arab Americans by mere virtue of proclaiming our worth as participants in cultures and politics beyond our own ethnic milieus. We still are left with pragmatic questions, though. An especially pressing matter is that of the objectification I condemn in the preceding paragraphs. How, then, might advocates of Arab-centrism actually go about transforming Arabs from objects to subjects in American ivory towers? This question, of course, is like most others that academics like to ask: its rhetoric implies thoughtful straightforwardness but, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that no one answer will be adequately uncontroversial (or comprehensive). It therefore becomes a tricky proposition and tricky propositions tend not to induce frankness as much as they do conciliation. Arab Americans, however, need to be frank with one another and with those with whom we enter into dialogue. Keeping in mind controversies and exclusions, I would therefore like to answer the question of transformation and objectification as frankly as possible: ●

Many do not like to confront this fact openly, but a fundamental component of any community’s ability to counter objectification is power, which in the United States generally arrives through the acquisition of money. Institutionalization of an Arab American Studies relies on funding that universities often are unwilling (or unable) to provide. The Arab American community, then, must play a role in funding academic programs, endowed professorships, research initiatives, and so forth. Arab Americans inhabit the entire economic spectrum, but without question


●

●

●

●

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have more than enough capital in our community to help sustain the study of Arab America in U.S. universities. This imperative certainly arises from within the framework of a troubled higher education system, but nevertheless is the system in which Arab Americans hope to craft a presence. An Arab American Studies curriculum should be simultaneously exacting and interdisciplinary. Whereas interdisciplinary courses—that is, courses in which material traverses customary disciplinary boundaries— usually are exciting for the instructor and beneficial to the student, there is much to be said as well for training students to do the work of empirical and philosophical analysis from within disciplinary boundaries (which may or may not be customary). An Arab American studies will flourish only to the extent of how specifically we are able to understand Arab America. Faculty and administrators should try to attract non-Arab American students in addition to students of Arab origin into Arab American Studies programs.51 This point is especially apropos of the desire to counter objectification, because objectification can never be countered effectively if the margin becomes the primary site of articulation. I imagine that some might object to an effort to attract non-Arab students into Arab American Studies programs (although I doubt that such objections would be overwhelming), but I will have to argue that of all the impediments that might prevent an Arab American Studies from realizing its undeniable potential, I can think of few more pressing than the possibility that we will begin to entertain our ethnonationalistic impulses. This argument, I should mention, arises from somebody voraciously devoted to retaining and elaborating an Arab American identity. Arab Americanists, a growing demographic in the humanities and social sciences, should work to incorporate their research agendas into their departments’ curricula. Arab Americanists should especially target departments with any sort of commitment to comparative ethnic studies, in which case at least a nominal obligation to inclusion will be present. Participants in an Arab American Studies (both students and faculty) might broaden their professional interests to include communal work in addition to the matters that typically occur within academic institutions. An Arab American Studies, in other words, needs a conscious and unapologetic activist mission—at least it does until those who would criticize that mission cease to contribute to the phenomena that necessitate it. This activist mission could include the preservation of human rights, the elimination of racism and Islamophobia, the deconstruction of gendered mythologies, critique of U.S. relations with Arab countries, and the creation of various dialogues among Arab Americans and other communities (both majority and minority). In whatever forms they might assume, I see no reason to develop an Arab American Studies if proactive goals do not somehow underlie it.

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ARAB AMERICAN LITERARY FICTIONS ●

An Arab American Studies ultimately must be positioned in such a way that it can undermine inalterability. Albeit impossibly abstract, this injunction also touches on a fundamental aspect of ethnic studies, the common belief that cultures are always dynamic. Arab Americanists should return to this common belief—even if, for us, it is insultingly obvious—because it provides a counterpoint to the equally common belief in the United States that Arabs and Arab Americans occupy fixed cultural spaces and endorse a violent and unmoving worldview. Included in this argument would be a resistance to allowing non-Arab Americans to continue speaking publicly on our behalf (which normally amounts to a truncated dialectic).

Nothing in evidence suggests that CAAS or any other course of study involving Arab America has resorted to curricular simplification or rejected a proactive agenda; indeed, one of the surprising things that we can thus far observe about an Arab American Studies is its emphasis on heterogeneity, transnational critique, and communal responsibility (a controversial word, to be sure, but a worthwhile one). Perhaps this emphasis results from the newness of Arab American Studies, or from the idealism that inevitably grows out of resistance to colonization and marginalization. Maybe it’s possible that Arab Americans simply haven’t been active in the academy long enough or in large enough numbers to have collectively grown crotchety and cynical. And certainly it’s possible that in choosing to be proactive Arab Americanists are unwittingly chasing intellectual fool’s gold, something we will learn after more closely examining the luster of our optimism. It is equally possible, however, that our late arrival in academe is a benefit, that we’re incredibly serious, vigorously dedicated, and manifestly purposeful, and that, as a result of our newness, quite ready to speak and well worth listening to. The main benefit of an Arab American Studies, and what best portends its future success, is the fact that it has arisen in a moment in which various cultural and political forces have demanded it; that is to say, it has not been coerced into existence. Arab Americans have much work to do, perhaps more work than we can account for systematically, but the initiation of intellectual labor is precisely what will counter objectification. If we look at some of the broader intellectual pursuits related directly or indirectly to an Arab American Studies it becomes apparent that many of the concerns inherent in the study of Arab America correspond with those inherent in other area studies, or are in some cases identical. I have already explored how an Arab American Studies might relate or respond to Native American Studies, a field that certainly has been positioned as a subset of American Studies but that in


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many ways warrants its own taxonomical and philosophical spaces (given that it, like American Studies, deals with large and small national issues). But how does an Arab American Studies correspond with, belong to, or potentially remain autonomous from American Studies? Without question, an Arab American Studies has a more intimate relationship with American Studies than Native American Studies programs generally do because Arab America has grown out of the American experiment in a completely different way than have Native peoples, who belong to distinctive national as well as ethnic communities. Given this fact (along with many others), it appears that it would be difficult for Arab Americanists to isolate the community we study from the communities—academic or otherwise—with whom we interact. As such, we are always going to be in the position of negotiation and comparativism, even when we endeavor to highlight discrete ethnic phenomena. Our community, that is to say, is essentially the product of a competing and perpetually negotiated historical dialectic. We can illuminate some important matters by examining how an Arab American Studies relates to American Studies, or how it forms a natural subset of American Studies, paying particular attention to the role critical race theory has played in the past few decades in the formal study of North America. Critical race theory has evolved from a legal subspecialty with mainly juridical concerns to a rather complex methodology (or perspective or worldview) of import to nearly all humanities and social science fields (as well as to some of the natural and biological sciences).52 Its importance repeatedly is valorized through the pervasiveness of its subject matter, the role of race and racism in nation formation and national identity, which, as Ali Behdad notes, has been an inconsistent but omnipresent force on the American landscape through the persistence of immigration: “America’s ‘other’ does not remain the same . . ., for every historical epoch demands a new representation of the seditious foreigner, a representation that is shaped by different cultural conditions, economic needs, political exigencies, and social conflicts.”53 Behdad’s argument reinforces the claim of derivation offered by Ronald Stockton and indicates that, as per Jonathan Stubbs’s legal hypothesis, the American landscape is layered temporally and organized in such a way that newness often is ushered into extant points of view. Today, Arab Americans frequently represent the venerable newness of immigration; in turn, we illuminate Behdad’s observation and find ourselves, whether or not we chose to arrive there, constantly at the peripheries of American Studies, but in a rather strange way, if I can be

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permitted to extend this metaphor. Certainly Arab Americans experience liminality, but, like others, we do so perhaps in more nuanced ways than definitions of liminal can accommodate. We often push toward the center of American Studies, but are repelled by various forces, some of them xenophobic and others rigidly traditionalist. In other cases, we unavoidably occupy the center (through, for instance, discussion of immigration, terrorism, Islam, geopolitics, and so forth), but sometimes it is against our will and at other times it is merely as a token to augment the speaker’s credibility. In yet other cases, our existence at the peripheries of American Studies shifts the nucleus of the ever-moving center—for example, when Americanists decide to discuss a domestic issue like religious tolerance without particular concern for Arabs and Muslims but find themselves in a position where these groups simply cannot be ignored. But let us extract ourselves from these metaphors, for through them I am getting at a basic point: there is some ambivalence not only about what might comprise an Arab American Studies but also about how an Arab American Studies interacts with the fields in which it inevitably participates. To clarify this ambivalence we must force recognition of an Arab American Studies among Americanists, especially in those instances in which Arab America participates explicitly in analyses where it still manages to go unmentioned. The recent surge of whiteness studies offers some clarity (beyond, of course, its own merit as a subfield of Cultural Studies). It has developed primarily during the past fifteen years and now can be found as a desired research emphasis in job postings and advertised as an area of expertise in faculty bios. Whiteness studies is a rather paradoxical descriptor because its theorists rely heavily on movements within ethnic studies. Yet the field has a visible absence of analysis focused somehow on Arabs, Muslims, and Arab America. The field likewise has had the opportunity to evolve institutionally in a way that has thus far been unavailable to Arab Americanists.54 I am troubled that whiteness studies has managed to grow institutionally whereas Arab American Studies currently exists at a marginal or, more precisely, conceptual stage. It indicates that, despite the positive value whiteness theorists have endowed American and Cultural Studies, many Americanists are more interested in the reformulation of entrenched paradigms than in undermining conventional archetypes based on the discovery of heretofore unorthodox models of inquiry. Or, to put it differently, if whiteness studies can manage to splash onto the scene, then only an active resistance to any loss of White privilege should prevent an Arab American Studies from doing


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the same. Indeed, rather than urging whiteness theorists to pay more attention to the relationship between Islam and race and the ways in which White identities rely on Middle Eastern alterity, it would be appropriate to urge Arab Americans to address the same questions, and any others that involve Arab Americans either directly or indirectly. The point, of course, is to quit waiting for others to discover some abstract conception of intellectual responsibility; the point is to forge our own concerns and define our own responsibilities based on the Arab American realities we experience and investigate. Thus, I would like to argue that my colleagues shouldn’t necessarily explore gaps in existent area studies, but might instead find ways to position the existent area studies in such a way that our own gaps are rendered less ambiguous. The groundwork in American Studies is such that diversity of interests and approaches becomes an operative methodology. Günter H. Lenz points out, for example, that since the 1960s “American studies have become much more aware of their international and comparative dimensions.”55 John Carlos Rowe similarly explains, “If a single nationalist mythology of the United States no longer prevails, then our understanding of just what constitutes the cultural border of the United States is no longer clear. Immigration has always shaped the United States in ways that demonstrate the shifting nature of such cultural boundaries.”56 Any impulse to formally study Arab America necessarily arises from these shifting “cultural boundaries,” a fact that warrants curricular open-endedness among those conceptualizing a set of research and classroom materials that will surely come to represent the features of an actual ethnic community. We can also intuit from Lenz’s and Rowe’s passages the suggestion that because of its heterogeneous composition American Studies is prepared intrinsically to accept emergent fields and subfields; thus—hypothetically, at least—integrating an Arab American Studies into some of the more established dimensions of American Studies—critical race theory or ethnic studies, for example—should not be a prohibitive undertaking. More important, integrating the established dimensions of American Studies into the emergent field of Arab American Studies should likewise be possible. This possibility is of particular interest because any Arab-centric paradigm will oblige Arab Americanists not to actively conform to prevailing scholastic models, but rather will encourage us to assess their prevalence from within the multidisciplinary context of Arab America. This ethic is evident in the extant programs that somehow incorporate domestic or diasporic Arabs. It also opens up the possibility that analyses of Arab American literature,

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a potentially massive enterprise that already has the attention of numerous scholars, can make their way more centrally into the pedagogical and curricular proceedings of English departments. The desire for such an inclusion presupposes many of the geopolitical forces that influence literary marketplaces and thus canonical institutionalization. Let me focus briefly on mapping Arab America within the multidisciplinary terrain of literary study. I am an ardent supporter of compelling English departments to expand their offerings—especially those with emphasis on ethnic studies—to include at least some representation of Arab America. I remain mindful, though, in vocalizing this support not to encourage a situation in which Arab American literature might be confined to stagnant or predefined spaces. That is to say, I do not want to summon Arab American literature simply to buttress unwittingly the exquisite myth of multiculturalism. It would be wiser to normalize Arab American literature both as available and appropriate, and, more important, as an actual presence in the American literary tradition purportedly (but almost always unsuccessfully) represented by curricular paradigms within the discipline of English. But how might we accomplish this normalization? Like other questions focused on matters of inclusion, this one has neither a simple nor a singular answer. The scope of my analysis here and elsewhere in the book certainly focuses at least piecemeal on potential answers and on the philosophical and political implications of raising certain answers. Let me then give the shorthand version: we should, at least initially, examine attitude and performance rather than merely seek the dissolution of the political categories used to organize English curricula that Rey Chow and others dislike based on their tendency to marginalize writing produced by authors of color.57 By invoking attitude and performance, I attempt to highlight the performative dimensions of criticism and instruction and acknowledge that they never arise from disinterested perspectives. The extant categories often used to organize the study of ethnic literatures are markedly political, and even if many of those subsisting within them professionally find these categories inadequate or insulting, they are not so easily disavowed or revised because real people and real communities have real stakes in their existence. On the other hand, those subsisting professionally within ethnic literature programs have more control of the way literary and communal matters are positioned in relation to more traditional areas of study (theory, Victorian Literature, American modernism, and so forth). Or, to be more succinct, if we have no real control over the politicized


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categories that have come to define much of our professional subsistence, then we must seek control wherever it is available, in this instance in a most conspicuous location, our pedagogical methodologies. Emphasis in the classroom on the aesthetics of Arab American literature, for instance, can illustrate to students that the literature actually has merit rather than supplementing the political value of satisfying some abstract diversity criterion.58 A similar emphasis on cultural dialectics bespeaks a performative approach that refuses to pigeonhole textual material whose taxonomical context likely is pigeonholed already in most departmental curricula. In any case, I hope that I have interested fellow travelers in a conversation about how best to work through some of these curricular, philosophical, aesthetic, and political matters. I am always partial to the notion of a public conversation—even if it could be a long one, as this one doubtless would be—because only in the sort of interplay that conversation generates can the theories we consider in our research enter into tangible communities that have an actual bearing on their ability to enact their objectives. My initial contribution to this conversation would be to argue that ethnic literature need not be assigned a special status or treated as unavoidable addenda to extant programs of study. They need merely to be involved in the curricular tapestry of English departments that are by nature indelibly diverse, but often structured in such a way that no place is available for emergent communal traditions, such as the one arising from Arab America. Ethnic literatures likewise should be considered a normal part of English Studies, often no more exotic than Shakespeare and Cervantes and sometimes no less rigorous than Faulkner or Joyce. Mike Hill best articulates the necessary caveat: “As everyone everywhere now seems to agree, race is a historically changeable social construction. Republican congressmen and postEnlightenment race theorists join each other in touting this boilerplate them. But the fact that anti-essentialism is approaching postmodern common sense should not make it a trivial matter. . . . On this order, race is everywhere significant and nowhere identifiable in the old formalist sense.”59 Far from intensifying ambivalence, Hill’s paradoxical observation supports the notion that isolating ethnic literatures as a special category belies the actual function of those literatures in their many social environs. Arab American literature, for example, participates in countless dialectics with both dissimilar and comparable literary traditions, as does all textual matter claiming the privilege of having at some point been read. I am wary, then, of inventing for it fixed curricular

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spaces or deifying the contemporary spaces in which it exists. It would be more useful to engage the scope of this literature on its own historical, aesthetic, and geopolitical terms, often, no doubt, to the benefit of the literature, but sometimes to its detriment, as well. I’m looking for ways to think about Arab America and the relationship of its literary tradition with ethnic studies, multiculturalism, American Studies, and so forth, in ways that don’t conform offhand to available taxonomical methodologies. This task requires a conversation that far surpasses what I am able to articulate from within the confines of this project. The operative point for me, in brief, is to complicate any impulse to reinforce fixed conceptions of Arab American cultures and literatures.

In Conclusion: A Pragmatic Vision Much of what I have argued above has, perhaps only in slightly different terms, been stated already. I imagine, however, the argument (and its many variants) bears repeating until an apparatus for real scholarly interchange has actually been developed. I happen to believe that more, not less, ethnic area studies will aid rather than obstruct this pursuit. The unavoidable caveat is that the area studies must actively resist the temptation to become doggedly provincial. These philosophical dimensions of an Arab American Studies, with which I have been concerned almost completely in this chapter, are supplemented by a host of pragmatic issues: administrative receptiveness, financial viability, curricular design, departmental autonomy, faculty recruitment, student job placement, disciplinary composition, and so forth.60 I assume it can go without saying that all of these questions, both philosophical and pragmatic, can be approached productively only through a framework that assesses sociopolitics, economic conditions, racist/xenophobic attitudes, and legal nuances in addition to culture and aesthetics. However, I prefer at this point, to use a favored cliché, to avoid putting the cart before the horse, and so I want to close by focusing on a pragmatic vision rather than on the technicalities of a yet nonexistent institution. An Arab American Studies is needed in U.S. universities. I do not shy from admitting that I am uncertain what form or structure such a Studies would best assume; I know only that one would enhance the well-being of the Arab American community and the ethnic studies components usually associated with the field of


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English. Form and structure are things to be interrogated repeatedly, discussed publicly and privately with unceasing vigor. I will offer some preliminary remarks. A good place to begin conceptualizing form and structure is in the mistakes of other ethnic area studies, a place, unfortunately, that offers no shortage of examples (not that Arab American scholarship is without its own problems). Ethnic area studies often are destructively contentious, fraught with unhealthy professional rivalries, isolated from nonacademic communities, pretentiously insulated, detached from proactive organizations, and inhabited by scholars who write about ethics they rarely seem to utilize in their day-to-day lives. Ethnic area studies, in other words, often contain the same problems as the universities in which they are housed. Advocates of an Arab American Studies thus need to determine whether these problems are unavoidable or if an area study can effectively circumvent the destructive norms so deeply embedded in university culture. I would argue, therefore, that an Arab American Studies should seek cultural paradigms as a disciplinary underpinning. It is doubtful that an Arab American Studies can function as smoothly as all idealistic professors envision of their curricular activism, but I see no reason why it has to repeat the trajectories, and thus the mistakes, of the area studies preceding it. It is, anyway, in the advantageous position of re-creation rather than invention. Another issue of form and structure to consider is whether an Arab American Studies is unavoidably derivative, by which I mean a natural subset of Middle East Studies. If so, the problem of inclusion faced by advocates of an Arab American area study would be the fact that study of Arab Americans is already included in some university curricula. A number of Middle East Studies departments, themselves too few across the United States, have faculty who deal in some way with Arab Americans, and the extension through migration and globalization of the Arab World into North America is treated seriously by scholars of the Middle East. However, the incorporation of Arab America—via curricular, geopolitical, or philosophical imperative—into the study of the Arab World, or its positioning as an offshoot of the study of the Arab World, inevitably consigns Arab America to a patrimonial gaze. It likewise limits productive interaction with the American polity and circumscribes engagement with majoritarian dogmas and minority identities. Arab America belongs somewhere in the rubric of American Studies, although it need not assume its preexisting methodological traditions, a point made available by the fact that Arab American

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scholarship is not derived specifically from American intellectual histories (even if it is, in many cases, inspired by them).61 We might also ponder the moral composition of an Arab American Studies. The word “moral” can lead us in any number of directions, but I mainly have in mind the way an Arab American Studies would substantiate its existence in relation to the area studies of other ethnic minorities. I am deeply interested in the ways ethnic manifestos of all varieties derive meaning from competing discourses and engage, often unconsciously, in continual interplay with voices and institutions otherwise unseen or ignored. The process of exploring and perhaps even working out some of these complexities is valuable to the health of any minority community, and the opportunity for such exploration provided under the aegis of an area study is, despite the invariable problems an area study fosters, incalculably self-affirming. The affirmation of cultural discreteness in the framework of belonging discretely to rich interethnic traditions is visibly absent as a communal variable in Arab America. Morally, then, I would like to see how Arab America fits into the constantly evolving panorama of American multiculturalism. I would like to see also how American multiculturalism constantly evolves in part because of the influence of Arab Americans. This vision would end ideally with an assessment of the influence of these interconnected multiculturalisms on the tone and direction of Cultural, Ethnic, and American Studies. Perhaps we can even convince the connoisseurs of these growing fields that their futures depend very much on the ability of critical theorists to understand how majoritarian notions of inclusion long have effectively rationalized the subjection of ethnic minorities—or, to put it more plainly, how “old niggers” become “new niggers” and how, more than anything else, racialized neologisms connect space and time in the United States. I realize that it is probably redundant for me to lament that, as far as Arab Americans and an Arab American Studies are concerned, there is much more to discuss and debate than what I have presented here. Much needs to be done, anyway, to illustrate how Arab American came into existence as a cultural grouping and as a descriptor of an ethnic community. Then we can determine how the cultural grouping and ethnic community have affected the evolution of intercultural relations in the United States—the influence of Arab Americans on this front, I hasten to note, has been considerable and affects multiple dimensions of the American body politic: literary, legal, geopolitical, religious, and so forth. I more eagerly invoke a point elementary to any interrogation of culture and cultural production in the United


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States: all domestic problems of inclusion are exemplified some way in the myth of a unified America; those unaffected by this performance in national invention will never totally clarify the problems of inclusion without the participation of an ethnic mishmash known somehow as Arab America.


CHAP TER

2

The Internationalization of the Nation: The Uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American Fiction

I have thus far highlighted sociological and theoretical issues to generate topics of discussion. I raised these issues in the service of exploring a conceptual Arab American Studies, an undertaking that likely would be developed with some, perhaps considerable, emphasis on literature and literary study. It might be useful, then, to bridge the gap between area study and literary criticism before producing specific fictive analysis. An Arab American Studies could be rendered comprehensive by virtue of its mere existence, by which I mean its ability to serve as a palimpsest of multidisciplinary inquiry—something of a metaphorical safehouse in which those pursuing some type of academic work in Arab America can attach that work to preexisting scholarship, all of it in turn contributing fluidly or discordantly to a common area study. This body of scholarship would underpin curricular questions and pedagogical imperatives. The point, in my mind, ultimately is to search out something palpable despite its probable inconsistencies, something that can be nurtured from the inside and perceived from the outside as an Arab American Studies. An Arab American Studies, in short, requires a perpetual sustenance. Arab American literatures produced in the past twenty years encapsulate an extraordinary range of communal ethos and issues, both cultural and political. Although this point implies that critical analysis might commence from the ability of literature to illuminate sociologica rather than through identification of its artistic expressions, I have in mind instead the unusual thematic groundings evident in Arab

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American literatures, which can be drawn out and assessed alongside communal ethos and issues in order to illustrate that social evolution in Arab America has visibly influenced literary production in the same community. Thomas Keenan has observed that “literature is not simply a matter of novels and poems, not a given body of work, but a question of reading, its strategies, difficulties, and conditions.”1 If this observation is correct, then it would be foolish to seek the purity of a literary text because, even beyond the archaic truisms of New Criticism, we must acknowledge that organic and everyday experience underline both textual production and reception, especially in ethnic minority communities whose daily concerns often become literary phenomena. We can take, for example, the Israel–Palestine conflict, a longstanding imbroglio that has been central to the coalescence of an Arab American entity and has for many decades provided much of the cultural and political substance of Arab America. It should be no surprise, then, that the Israel–Palestine conflict is inscribed thematically in a great amount of Arab American literature, including that of major authors such as Naomi Shihab Nye,2 Nathalie Handal, Edward Said, Diana Abu-Jaber, D.H. Melhem, Samuel Hazo, Fawaz Turki, and Suheir Hammad. Looking at these inscriptions, however, doesn’t merely inform us that the Israel–Palestine conflict is at least sometimes on the minds of such authors; it informs us rather that the Israel–Palestine conflict is essential culturally to these authors and thus a perfectly normal thing for them to explore sometimes when they choose to produce art. The literary critic in turn can say, not without some controversy but nonetheless with confidence, that it is unnecessary to incessantly compartmentalize politics and art in analysis of ethnic literatures because the politics inevitably become cultural, just as the culture becomes politicized even without the aid of specific politics. That is to say, even the most political and politicized dimensions of world affairs such as the Israel–Palestine conflict manage to carve out attendant cultural paradigms that when expressed in literature often are mistaken for advocacy or polemics but that in reality demonstrate a cultural exposition no more threatening politically than exploring a pastoral childhood in Appalachia or infusing colors and musical choices with symbolism—all cultural items, these, but never neutral, and therefore never apolitical. I would argue, therefore, that it is possible to extract a sociological epistemology from literature without ignoring its aesthetic integrity. Such an epistemology is pertinent to any contemplation of the role literary criticism might play in illuminating Arab America and ultimately

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in devising an Arab American Studies. In fact, emphasis on literature’s aesthetic integrity is not only the best moral option available to critics, but also the most strategically viable one for critics interested in supplementing their criticism with a broader disciplinary purpose. As Lisa Suhair Majaj notes, [O]ne of the reasons we read is to help us better our understanding of how to live—not just within our own communities, but with others, in mingled and diverse contexts. Ethnic literature, like other kinds of literature, helps us move across, and transform, the boundaries that separate us: ethnic from non-ethnic, non-white from white, male from female, Arab from Jew from Greek from Italian from Polish from Anglo-Saxon.3

Though it seems likely that critics on the Right—Roger Kimball, Mark Bauerlein, Hilton Kramer—and their counterparts positioned somewhere in the field of Cultural Studies—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Paul Gilroy—might accuse Majaj of quixotic oversimplification, there is much to admire in her modest formulation.4 Indeed, I would suggest that searching out an Arab American Studies is either pointless or counterproductive if those doing the searching are unable to confront the necessity of transgression, transformation, and interethnic communication. This task would be more difficult if such necessities were not already evident somehow in the majority of modern Arab American literature, and more specifically in the genre of fiction. Any honest literary criticism will have no choice but to eventually confront them because Arab American fiction has started broadening its thematic and poetic range and generating larger, multiethnic audiences. In fact, Majaj’s well-known 1999 call for Arab American authors to diversity their form and content has in many ways been heeded, although it is uncertain whether that call was heeded directly or coincidentally. (It’s probably wise for literary critics to discard the appealing belief that criticism directly affects the choices of literary authors, although critics unquestionably affect the literary marketplace and sensitive phenomena such as inclusion and canonization.) It is no accident that Majaj points specifically to the novel: We need to write texts—especially novels—that will translate political realities into human terms, and that will create a space for empathy of the part of readers who might otherwise remain indifferent. Given the depth of ignorance and misinformation about the Arab world, we are particularly in need of prose—of writing that is capacious enough in

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form to convey fact as well as emotion. We need historically-grounded novels that will narrate Arab realities to American readers without sacrificing literary quality to didacticism, that will tell a compelling but also informative story. But in taking on such projects, we need to make sure that we’re not writing tracts, but are writing literature.5

Majaj correspondingly urges the development of a parallel body of literary criticism, a move that indicates at least tacit belief in the ability of criticism to induce pragmatic models of inquiry when it is conducted with nuance and with an eye toward communal realities. Decrying a “scarcity of critical discussion” of Arab American literature, she writes, This scarcity of critical discussion has also accentuated the problem of reception. Given the political pressures facing Arab-Americans, and the omnipresent stereotypes of Arab culture, writers may feel (and readers may expect) that their task is to affirm Arab identity and to translate this identity to outsiders. But while these concerns are part of our literary endeavors, they should not limit them. A body of informed and nuanced literary criticism would play a significant role in situating Arab-American literature for both Arab and non-Arab readers, thereby lessening somewhat the pressure on Arab-American writers to serve as “translators” of their culture. Literary criticism also has a crucial role to play in highlighting not just the cultural and sociological, but the literary dimension of our writing, reminding us that we are, first and foremost, writers.6

In these two passages Majaj covers ample philosophical ground to which I would add only a few observations: I have taken up as a methodology her insistence on a critical inquiry that blends sociological exposition with a grounded emphasis on aesthetics, but I have taken up that methodology not simply because I find it useful and sensible, but also because the Arab American fiction available for critique lends itself thematically to this sort of dual approach; and the vision offered by Majaj functions well as a philosophical basis to ground Arab American narratives formally into both scholarly dialogue and university curricula (a move that in my mind would best be facilitated through an Arab American Studies). I used as an example above the Israel–Palestine conflict to argue that the supposedly “political” in Arab America simultaneously is cultural; one therefore can discuss politics in literary criticism—very explicitly, in some cases—without necessarily offering a politicized inquiry. On the contrary, one can, in any given moment depending on


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his or her skill and the tenor of the primary material, discuss politics in order to offer an aesthetic critique. It is practically impossible to imagine, for example, any serious assessment of Laila Halaby, miriam cooke, Shaw Dallal, or Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki without at least broad exploration of the Israel–Palestine conflict because without some mention of it any methodology purporting to highlight the aesthetic and cultural techniques exhibited by these authors would be conspicuously incomplete. In the Arab American community, the things that happen overseas in the so-called Old World very much influence how we carry ourselves as Americans, a fact that has been more than peripheral in the maturation of the Arab American novel. My focus on a foreign event has a larger purpose, one that will frame the remainder of this chapter. Though much undoubtedly can be written, and needs to be written, about the role the Israel–Palestine conflict plays thematically and aesthetically in Arab American fiction, another foreign event has had an even greater impact on the Arab American novel—a nonquantifiable but largely justifiable claim if we measure this impact by the sophistication of its representation and by the sheer passion through which it is invoked and approached. This event in reality is more like an interlocking series of alternately coherent and discordant events layered seemingly into infinity and generally treated in such a manner by Arab American novelists. I speak, of course, of the Lebanese Civil War, which, as Elise Salem has aptly demonstrated, has had a tremendous impact on the modern literature produced by Lebanese authors, in Arabic, English, and French, and in both the Orient and Occident.7 (Chapter 4 will focus somewhat on the uses of the Israel–Palestine conflict in Arab American fiction.) Before I enter into analysis of how the Lebanese Civil War is represented in Arab American fiction, I would like to further develop a few dimensions of our current discussion in the hope of providing a more reasonable context for the forthcoming one. Two things are of particular importance: the extent to which the uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American fiction reveal to us specific literary archetypes that can be appropriated into critical paradigms; and the fact that the complex ethnic and geographic realities of Lebanon—the international version, not merely the Near Eastern one—render it quite difficult to assess without the nuisance of terminological and methodological qualification. The first point is relatively complex and will be explored incrementally as this chapter evolves. We can say at this point, however, that the uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American fiction intimate a storytelling dynamic inspired by various interpretations of a violent

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and omnipresent reality. Or, to put it more plainly, the Lebanese Civil War seems to have been superimposed on the fictive consciousness of numerous diasporic Lebanese authors. One of the effects of this superimposition has been to remove any provincialism from reflections on the war, an entirely appropriate effect given that the war itself was far from provincial, having involved both regional and international participants (Syria, Israel, the Soviet Union, France, the United States, places where the war has been naturalized through its articulation in cultural media such as literature). Another relevant effect has been the creation of transnational literary methodologies in which the issues encountered by migratory authors are juxtaposed with the varied moral and political dimensions of the civil war, a phenomenon common to literature in general in today’s globalized era and a common aspect of the modern American novel, which this chapter will examine in some detail. The complex ethnic and geographical realities of Lebanon present more complicated questions. The fact that more people who identify as Lebanese live outside of Lebanon than inside it—indicating that Lebanese has meaning as an ethnic descriptor at least as frequently as a national one—limits any propensity to neatly conceptualize Arab America as a cognate entity, just as it speaks to Lebanon’s unique placement in the Near East as an Arabic-speaking but not clearly Arab collective.8 As it is within the purview of my methodology, let me focus briefly on the categories of Lebanese and Arab American. Any brief glance at one of the many Lebanese discussion boards on the Internet demonstrates that it would be problematic to reactively subsume all Lebanese Americans into Arab America because some Lebanese Americans actively combat this move, preferring instead to remain Lebanese, a desire that renders the term distinctly ethnological. Other Lebanese Americans, on the other hand, participate actively in Arab America. In fact, there would be no such thing as a category of Arab America without the participation of Americans of Lebanese extraction because they form the largest demographic within Arab America and because their tireless creativity and sociocultural advocacy have been instrumental in creating the institutions that enable an ethnic group to develop its aspirations. Why, then, am I entering into this philosophical quicksand? Primarily, because I find it important to acknowledge the diversities that render Arab America not so much a collective but a convenient designation. If we take it as a point of fact that Lebanon is unique—a trenchant argument—then we should take it as a point of fact that Palestine is, as well, and so are Syria, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt,


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Morocco, and the other nations in which Arab Americans have an origin. Arab America comprises highly diverse components that often coexist seamlessly but that sometimes come into cultural or philosophical conflict. As a result, the literature of Arab America doesn’t quite bespeak a unified tradition, but rather a communal grouping, a point made evident by the sub-traditions that have developed in Arab American fiction according to various Middle Eastern calamities (the Lebanese Civil War, the dispossession of Palestinians, the heavyhandedness of certain Arab regimes, and so forth). I am entering into this philosophical quicksand also because it facilitates our reading of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American fiction. No author who descends into rank sectarianism in exploring the Lebanese Civil War will be taken seriously as an artist, and so the critics interested in representations of the war in literature have little room to defer nuance in favor of intellectual convenience. I am concerned, then, with carving out a specific methodological space in which the peculiarities of the Lebanese Civil War and the artists who write about it can be freed from critical injunctions that force event and artist into limited paradigms. For anybody who has studied the Lebanese Civil War knows that its paradigms were unlimited. And anybody who has read Arab American literature knows that its imperatives too are limitless. Other relevant issues arise beyond the difficulties of categorization, one of which is the artistic merit of the Lebanese Civil War as a fictive theme. By “artistic merit,” I mean its ability to inspire timeless and sophisticated novels around the world in multiple languages, including in English in the United States, the site with which I primarily am concerned, although I will explore Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, written in French and first published in France. If, for instance, we juxtapose the Lebanese Civil War as a theme alongside the Israel–Palestine conflict, arguably the other predominant Arab American theme based on an overseas event, it becomes apparent that the civil war often is more explicitly positioned in Arab American fiction, whereas the Israel–Palestine conflict often remains in the background or merely frames interpersonal conflicts. Beyond its use in novels by Shaw Dallal9 and Ibrahim Fawal,10 authors who have written highly politicized fiction, the Israel–Palestine conflict doesn’t usually assume the role of a primary character, nor is it generally characterized with allegorical personification, as is the Lebanese Civil War in the fiction of writers such as Adnan and Rabih Alameddine. This isn’t to say that these authors submit to the pervasiveness of the war, for we shall see that each of them situates it fluidly in the service of their aesthetic

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prerogatives. We shall also see that the war has become integrated into the consciousness of Arab American fiction. This final observation denotes another relevant issue, the internationalization of American literature. That American literature has become internationalized—in its authorship, themes, and settings—is no revelation, as numerous scholars have focused somehow on this development.11 It is safe to say that a significant quantity of “American literature” doesn’t even take place in the United States, which indicates that literature often is categorized according to authorial attributes rather than to its own thematic features. It also is safe to say that a great number of “American writers” were brought up elsewhere, which indicates that an “American” denotation, in literature and otherwise, is slippery because it has no choice but to constantly evolve. Recent critics have done well to take these generalities as starting points for discussion of specific patterns and tendencies in local or communal traditions within the broader tradition of American literature. Indeed, with the exception of Native literatures, which can reasonably carve out for themselves indigenous spaces independent of American patrimony, what we know as “American literature” is little more than countless local and communal traditions, sometimes conjoined and evolving in tandem and sometimes at serious odds poetically and politically.12 In fact, I will have to claim that there is no such thing as an “American literature”; there is only a cohort literature bound together because it is written by authors with American passports (or in some cases by noncitizens who happen to be located somewhere in the United States). Arab Americans comprise one of these local and communal traditions, and within this Arab American tradition the Lebanese Civil War has been instrumental in generating a literary identity that helps render the Arab American tradition distinct. The war likewise has facilitated the internationalization of American writing. The internationalization of the American nation has had a profound impact on the way critics can (or cannot) approach textual material. In a pragmatic sense, we must broaden our scopes in heretofore unimaginable ways—for instance, to illustrate to students that a recent civil war in Lebanon in fact matters to them as Americans. How so? Because that war, first of all, involved the United States militarily and diplomatically; and, more important, because it caused a great migration from Lebanon, with many émigrés landing in the United States. And any time population shifts occur, demographics are altered, linguistic utterances evolve, supermarket aisles expand, xenophobia arises, the marketplace adjusts, and familiar cultural traditions are


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forced to confront a changed social polity. In the modern world, we must inform our students, what happens “there” always influences the “here,” usually before “there” even arrives, as it usually does, in the United States. And this is to say nothing of the universal moral consequences of the Lebanese Civil War that would be useful for anybody in the world to confront. From a more theoretical standpoint, the internationalization of the American nation has complicated (or stimulated) inquiry into venerable issues such as border-crossing, national identification, ethnic discreteness, transnational communication, and interethnic dialogue. In other words, there would be no American literary criticism or critical theory as we know them today had the United States not become an internationalized nation.13 Anouar Majid perhaps best summarizes the ethics underlying this internationalization: “People do not escape or transcend their social milieus, even if they try to do so by breaking down the social into its constitutive parts.”14 Indeed, breaking down the social into its constitutive parts leaves us with the sort of fragmentation that disallows fluid inquiry into the multiple cultural elements that coalesce into reality in the United States, which severely contradict its rigorously invented essence (often maintained by xenophobes attempting to preserve a nostalgic image of an invented past). The United States is internationalized because it exports its popular culture to the rest of the world and because the rest of the world is now represented within its borders. Despite this fact, however, the United States has not yet achieved the worldliness Edward Said encouraged many years ago; it is thus incumbent upon today’s scholars to transform the fact of internationalization into the goal of worldliness.15 Based on the way their novels are composed structurally and philosophically, this goal is at least implicitly supported by the Arab American authors who explore the Lebanese Civil War either as a theme or a setting.

The Political in Literature Immigrant communities in the United States have always produced writers that explore in fiction many of the political issues affecting their places of origin (e.g., Wole Soyinka, Amy Tan, Amitav Ghosh, Khaled Hosseini, Frank Chin, Bharatee Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya). This trajectory is repeating itself in the Arab American community, which intimates the existence of consistent patterns of acculturation— or deculturation disguised as its counterpart—in modern American literature. Certain themes can be weaned from this trajectory in the Arab American literary tradition, none so conspicuous as the Lebanese

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Civil War.16 We thus are tasked with contemplating how the civil war, a decidedly political event, influences the relationship between art and politics, an undertaking that might allow us to better understand how events travel even when they don’t expand physically. Literary criticism has long entertained a dialectic between art and politics that often has separated the two and claimed that political criticism devalues the integrity of art; or, conversely, that explicitly political art devalues its own integrity. These types of claims frequently are accurate, but in general they limit productive exploration of the nuances of the relationship between art and politics. I have argued already that critics of Arab American literature are best served highlighting aesthetics, and I would like to take a moment to develop this argument in the framework of the Lebanese Civil War. In basing the pursuit of critical paradigms on the identification of aesthetic phenomena, critics sometimes encourage a needless exclusion of politics from art. Politics have been a fundamental component of art ever since humans began engaging artistic expression, and so in searching out productive critical frameworks for the study of Arab American literature, critics need not eliminate political discussion from the conversation. The critic is better served by drawing a distinction between the political and the politicized. If this argument is limited specifically to Arab American literature, I would like to point out that critics will be unable to highlight art in its totality without approaching it in the context of its thematic patterns, which more often than not evoke poetic dynamics through the use of political occurrences. Sitt Marie Rose, for example, will be impossible to comprehend if we isolate it from its own political commentary. The distinction between the political and the politicized is really a distinction between critical methodologies. On the one hand, the political must necessarily play a role—a prominent role, in some cases—in the exploration of Arab American literature; on the other hand, the politicized, especially when it is confused with the political, has a devaluing potential that serious critics should avoid. The politicized, in other words, transforms the political, a crucial dimension of artistic exposition, into something crude, and art that is crude rarely is worth reading or discussing. Politicized criticism treats the literary text as a metaphorical straw man to facilitate a polemic of the critic’s own choosing, which usually was chosen before the process of criticism began. Politicized criticism forces art to conform to the critic’s preexisting agenda. The more sophisticated versions of this sort of criticism at times keenly assess literary texts but fail to distinguish between the artistry of the art and the imagined social mores of the


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artist and therefore unintentionally perform the intentional fallacy.17 Aesthetic criticism that invokes the political, in contrast, distinguishes at least tacitly the genre of fiction from the op-ed essay by illustrating how political events are rendered artistically. That is to say, it is both possible and desirable to infuse political discussion into criticism, but only if the discussion clarifies why the author under analysis produced a novel rather than an opinion piece. Though this point is, or should be, made in most undergraduate English courses, the political and the politicized have nevertheless inspired fierce debate in literary studies for decades. John WhalenBridge takes up this debate in Political Fiction and the American Self, arguing that literature can indeed be political, brilliantly so in some cases, and that in turn it is troublesome to treat politics in art as an impurity and equally troublesome to conceptualize literature as a mere subset of broader political expression. He writes, “If we assume that a literary work has both aesthetic and political capacities, we may respect the differences between political and aesthetic motivation and at the same time allow for their intermingling within a work of art.”18 Whalen-Bridge also observes that there is no reason why American readers have to follow uncritically the traditional paths wherein the critic eyes political struggle from afar, even if the most enduring element of the American Dream happens to be that Americans continue to view themselves as individuals defined in opposition to the State—even when doing the State’s work. To abandon our fondness for storytelling is to estrange ourselves from a large part of the world in which we live, but to deny or acknowledge only as “complicitous” our formative role in the world in which we live is equally stultifying. Americanist criticism of political fiction must combine aesthetic pleasures and a fondness for storytelling with the political motivations—sometimes pleasurable, sometimes risky and unseemly— that are essential to public life.19

Whalen-Bridge’s dialectic fleshes out some of the ironies encapsulated in approaches to literature that devalue important literary components by self-consciously working to avoid devaluation, a counterproductive irony that has the ability to create liminal scholarship. His assertion that there are aesthetics inscribed in fictive politics is a useful way to resolve some of the tensions that arise in approaches to political authorship, and that will be confronted repeatedly as critics of Arab American literature come to realize that events like the Israel–Palestine conflict and the Lebanese Civil War cannot ultimately be marginalized (they are not, it should be mentioned, marginalized in the majority

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of criticism that focuses on literatures concerned in some way with these events). The points I offer arise in the context of a general movement in literary studies of reasserting the political in the postmodern, an ethic best articulated in work by Satya Mohanty, Anouar Majid,20 Linda Tuhiwai Smith,21 and Nancy Fraser.22 Such reassertions, though quite varied, work somehow within the principle that literature, when read and critiqued effectively, offers us wisdom about the worlds we inhabit that generally is unavailable in the popular institutions that dominate those worlds. And in searching out the numerous methodologies available to me in reading Arab American fiction, I inevitably am drawn back to those that stress some material value in critical work—a quintessentially political injunction—despite the controversies and uncertainties attached to them. I cannot, in any event, abandon the notion that Arab American critical apparatuses have a role to play in both English Studies and the Arab American community beyond mere illumination, and a role quite less formulaic than explication. I would be more worried about this ethic if it didn’t reappear perpetually based not simply on my own desires and idiosyncrasies, but also on the poetic encouragement of the authors I read and study.

The Source: Etel Adnan Though the prominent artist and author Etel Adnan is not the source of Lebanese Civil War fiction in the Arab American literary tradition— the war itself is—she arguably has defined it with her 1978 novel Sitt Marie Rose. Adnan, however, is the source of many things in Arab America, most conspicuously through the formative role she has played in evolving modern Arab American literature, both as a celebrated writer and as an activist on behalf of the Arab American literary community (Adnan, for instance, helped found the RAWI, and served as its president for over a decade, insisting consistently that the organization never slow down). A respected visual artist and author in English and French, and of Syrian Muslim and Greek Christian origin, with a Lebanese, French, and American national positioning, Adnan in many ways exemplifies through her mere physical presence the cultural multiplicity inherent in Arab America. More important, though, Adnan has exemplified this cultural multiplicity through her humanistic aesthetics and the philosophical tenor of her writing. Sitt Marie Rose, written in French, is the work for which Adnan is best known internationally and in the United States, where the book


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is taught regularly in English courses (including my own). A multivocal story that seems almost to occupy a sub-generic space between novel and novella, Sitt Marie Rose, like the civil war omnipresent in its setting, has crossed the Atlantic to become an integral part of modern American letters, helping to facilitate the internationalization of domestic art. That a novel composed in French and published originally in France would go on to become the defining text of modern Arab American literature certainly provides us with some curious material for discussion. Sitt Marie Rose has become inscribed in the Arab American tradition because its author self-identifies as Arab American, being a citizen of the United States and spending considerable time there. Thus, Sitt Marie Rose is privy to a technical classification. Yet I suspect it also has been inscribed in the Arab American tradition for more complicated reasons. Its themes force readers to confront a variety of issues that have long been pertinent to Arab Americans and that resonate with us profoundly: ●

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The complexities of integrating discrete Lebanese sensibilities— whether Christian or Muslim, Arab or Phoenician—into transArab concerns; and, by extension, the difficulties that exist in general with juxtaposing national identification with trans-Arab identity.23 The steady, sometimes considerable, migration of Lebanese into the New World, a phenomenon abetted by the war Adnan condemns and that further inhibits the coalescence of a unified Lebanese polity. The confrontation of a colonial legacy that continues to affect Middle Eastern politics and that, thanks in part to the development of a decolonial consciousness in modern critical theory, Arab Americans discuss frequently in both scholarly and literary genres. The condemnation of machismo attitudes that nurture warlike tendencies. The articulation of an economic humanism that exposes bigotry arising from class and cultural difference. The exploration of both Western and Middle Eastern gender roles in relation to long-standing social organizations of men and women. The criticism of religion as a dividing force and as a rhetorical device among those who engage in confessional politics, warfare, crimes against women, and corruption—and, conversely, like Sitt Marie-Rose, in humanistic activism and liberation theology.

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ARAB AMERICAN LITERARY FICTIONS ●

The emphasis on Palestinian refugees and what often is referred to as the Palestine question, rendering Sitt Marie Rose, at least in the eyes of many Palestinian readers, a liberatory text.24

This list comprises sociopolitical phenomena, which have played a considerable role in the success of Sitt Marie Rose because of Adnan’s sharp insights and propensity for layered commentary. Poetic features of the novel, however, also have contributed to the inscription of Sitt Marie Rose in the Arab American tradition: ●

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The use of multivocal narration and multiple perspectivism, a technique long in existence before Adnan employed it, but that has had a demonstrable influence on the Arab American novels that would follow— Rabih Alameddine’s KOOLAIDS, for instance. The lack of explicit technical and temporal markers, prompting readers to focus on the implications of the story rather than on the pacing of historical events. The inclusion of what I would call flashback equilibrium—the retelling of the same scenes from different points of view—another technique in use before Sitt Marie Rose but that has been carried on in Arab American fiction such as Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan. The creation of textual conflict through a dialogic framework that induces the full development of the main characters (many of the secondary characters remain, if not underdeveloped, then progenitors of conflict as psychological or political caricatures). The skillful interweaving of description that gives life to the setting and transforms it into a narrative participant. The infusion of humanistic values into the structure of the text, a move accomplished through the development of moral conflicts that compel readers to sympathize with Sitt Marie Rose’s decisions.

There is nothing new in Sitt Marie Rose but the story itself; that is to say, Adnan didn’t invent heretofore unknown literary devices, but she blended numerous existing ones into a resolutely original story of the sort never quite seen before and never duplicated since. And she set the metaphorical table for the emergence of a modern Arab American literary tradition by producing a novel that is searing in its political critique and timeless on the strength of its aesthetic intricacy. The civil war portrayed in Sitt Marie Rose is limited to brief contextual flashes and I have found in teaching the novel that while students will be able to comprehend the tenor of the story and its moral implications, they generally cannot engage a complete reading of it without some background on the war that has forced the characters


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into their intimate situation. I thus use handouts with basic information about the Lebanese Civil War, drawn from the most disinterested sources available on the Internet, although I, like many literary critics, am wary of the concept of neutrality. (A major problem with this pedagogical strategy is the fact that the Lebanese Civil War was more complex than any brief handout can accommodate, but in most circumstances teaching Sitt Marie Rose doesn’t mean teaching the civil war; it means simply that understanding the basics of the civil war will encourage students to read the novel more fully and better identify its moral underpinnings.) Despite its restricted positioning in the action of the novel, the Lebanese Civil War has a central positioning in its narrative features and its ethical commentaries. It is, in turn, a challenging novel to teach to American undergraduates who overwhelmingly know little about Lebanon or its sectarian history. Along with distributing handouts, I refer my students (and here I refer my readers) to nonfiction syntheses of the war such as Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation25 and David Gilmour’s Lebanon: The Fractured Country.26 I find it most useful to focus on the dimensions of the war that actually are represented in the novel, a task made easier by the fact that the novel was published in the late 1970s, more than a decade before the war concluded. Noting that readers of Sitt Marie Rose “who are unfamiliar with the history of [the Lebanese] civil war might construe a clear-cut distinction between the victim and victimizer categories,” Mohomodou Houssouba points out that “[a]lthough the narrative captures the polyphonic diversity of the historical conflict, . . . Christians become the embodiment of the cruelty that dehumanizes everyone as the battle intensifies.”27 Though this criticism is accurate, and generally is the conclusion drawn by students unfamiliar with the history of the civil war, Sitt Marie Rose is too multilayered to lend itself to binaristic interpretation, beyond perhaps with the exception of participants in sectarian politics (the novel remains marginalized in Lebanon, for instance, because of its purported anti-Christian bias). Houssouba is aware of this fact, acknowledging that “[t]he novelistic rendition of history is potentially even more dialogic [than actual history] because the genre accommodates a conversation between conflicting worldviews in a way that textbook history usually does not.”28 Houssouba’s formulations provide an apt summary of the civil war portrayed in Sitt Marie Rose, a conflict in essence undertaken by Lebanese Christians and Palestinian Muslims who are abetted rhetorically and physically by Lebanese Muslims. The war itself, of

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course, was quite more complicated than Adnan’s fictive version, involving, for instance, Palestinian Christians who identified little if at all with Lebanese Maronites and Syrian Sunni Muslims initially siding with Maronites and battling against their Sunni Palestinian and Lebanese brethren. And Adnan does offer heavy-handed criticism of Lebanese Christians, portraying them, outside the persona of Sitt Marie-Rose, as brutal Europhiles completely intolerant of their Muslim compatriots and Lebanon’s Palestinian underclass. Yet Adnan’s reproach—indeed, admonishment—of Muslims is no less meaningful than her critique of tribalistic attitudes among the Maronites. Although she focuses on Christian characters with questionable moralities, these characters have metynomical functions that extend throughout the Arab World. In fact, beyond Sitt Marie-Rose, her Palestinian lover (who has no dialogue and is given no point of view), and the unnamed female over-narrator (whose religion is unmentioned but who appears to be Christian), none of the characters is particularly sympathetic with the exception of the deaf-mute children, whose religious origins are not stated directly but who likely are Christian. Even though religious sectarianism provided the most obvious (but by no means comprehensive) basis of the Lebanese Civil War, and thus of the character conflicts in Sitt Marie Rose, I don’t know that American critics of the novel are well-placed to linger on it. Nor is it probably wise for American critics to subsume the novel into Lebanon’s historical trajectory. As John Champagne suggests, teaching postcolonial literature in the metropolitan center is teaching students how to read their own positionings as subjects: how to theorize their own practices of reading as necessarily structured by, among other things, the history of imperialism, a history in which they are woven as subjects; how to interrupt and complicate their desires to over- or dis-identify with the Other (as character, as implied author); how to recognize themselves as implicated in the text of the Other. This is the only teaching that can avoid treating postcolonial texts as either 1) simply another commodity for western consumption (this time, under the guise of a benevolent “appreciation” of “foreign” literature), or 2) a representation verifying the savageries of “underdevelopment” and the need to reinvigorate the exportation of western humanism to the Third World.29

Drawing from transactional reader response theory, Champagne offers a salient warning about the dangers of commodifying Sitt Marie Rose as a cautionary fable that American readers can invoke to preserve


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U.S. civility, an invocation that might be facilitated if readings of the novel aren’t liberated from its historical origins.30 This isn’t to say that the historicity of Sitt Marie Rose is unimportant, for it frames much of the novel’s action; it is to say merely that Sitt Marie Rose has more conspicuous functions, among them a literary humanism that frames its narrative artistry. This literary humanism is, for the most part, expressed dialogically. The character Sitt Marie-Rose is kidnapped in the second half of the novel by her former love interest, Mounir, and his small band of Christian militia, the Chabab.31 Her crime is having aided Palestinian refugees in 1967 and then working with them ever since in a social and political capacity in Lebanon’s refugee camps. She is especially detested for having taken a Palestinian lover, an unnamed physician active in political causes and targeted by the Maronites. The militiaman Tony, perhaps the most aggressive person in Mounir’s entourage, exemplifies how political antagonism is played out in the symbolic framework of the female body, in this case Marie-Rose: “It’s a waste of time to try to reform a woman who takes herself seriously. She should not have had a Palestinian for a friend. She could have found someone better to sleep with. If she were my sister, I would have killed her long ago.”32 Tony’s chauvinism contains an ironic twist: it is not the immorality of promiscuity per se that bothers him, although he obviously sees in women’s sexuality a phenomenon that needs to be monitored; rather, it is Marie-Rose’s choice of a sexual partner that warrants her execution, a perspective that renders Marie-Rose a Christlike figure who must assume the burden of Tony’s immorality. This perspective can only exist through the assumption that Palestinians are subhuman, an assumption that has been instrumental in motivating the kidnapping of Marie-Rose, who has become less a human with a functioning physiology and emotional agency than a symbol of immorality on which her captors’ depravity is projected. This depravity is connected directly to what Adnan construes as the tribalistic foolishness inspiring the war. Her critique extends as well into the character of Bouna Lias, the friar who appears to have been recruited by Mounir’s clan to the school for deaf-mute children Marie-Rose runs and in which she is being held. His discourse, contextualized in his mind with the emancipating power of divinity, in reality conjures apocalyptic images that permanently forestall ecumenical rapprochement. At one point he tells Marie-Rose, “But Islam is behind them [the Palestinians]. Therefore we are at war with Islam, whether you like it or not.

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They can’t separate their religion from their culture, from their heritage, and neither can we. We’re fighting for the road that leads to the Divine. The best road.”33 This remark contains multiple revelations, but seems especially apropos of much of the discourse in existence in the United States as it pursues its current “war on terror,” thus adding a newfangled element to Sitt Marie Rose: that of the visionary novel. Just as the novel has traveled into an Arab American paradigm, it allows its American readers to reinvent Bouna Lias as a modern culture warrior whose theological certitude intimates destruction more than salvation. Taken in his own environment, Bouna Lias emblematizes the complicity of the religious clergy in fomenting the sectarianism underlying Arab political ineffectuality. He is the legitimized religious presence that both justifies and demystifies the behavior of his peers, and he presumably was summoned to lend a pious aura to Marie-Rose’s execution, a presumption supported by his announcement, “I’m the guardian of justice.”34 The announcement buttresses the overconfidence of the militiamen and allows them to accept Fouad’s stunningly brutal proclamation that “I am absolute order. I am absolute power. I am absolute efficiency. I’ve reduced all truths to a formula of life or death.”35 Although Fouad gives himself credit for reducing truth to a formula of life or death, it is actually the social circumstances of sectarian violence in which he participates that has allowed him to derive his conclusion. And Bouna Lias is the progenitor of the discursive binary that has reduced divinity to mere advocacy of unreflective clan loyalty. Adnan interpolates gender through the malady of violence and in turn creates a fascinating juxtaposition of sex and war that motivates the actions of Fouad and Tony (Rabih Alameddine also juxtaposes sex and war, albeit in different ways, as we shall see later). Beyond her relationship with the Palestinian physician, Marie-Rose is dehumanized in an explicitly gendered context, which reveals two important points about the narrative: (1) that Adnan is aware of the fact that dehumanization always precedes torture and infuses this gruesome fact into the novel’s moral and aesthetic structure; and (2) that gender often is a good replacement for cultural, racial, or religious difference among those interested in inventing group identity in opposition to an imagined, antagonistic community—or, gender helps facilitate the opposition by working alongside culture, race, and religion in the lexicon of imagined difference.36 Tony, for example, opines, “This woman [Marie-Rose] is nothing but a bitch. Mounir should not regard her as an ordinary person.”37 Conversely, Marie-Rose’s name conjures images of virginal purity, something her deaf-mute students


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appreciate: “She looks like the Blessed Virgin at church, the big one, the one that stares at us during mass. She’s very scary when she gets mad. But we love her. We’re not scared.”38 Marie-Rose’s virginal nomenclature and her purity in the eyes of her students markedly contradict the whorishness attributed to her by her captors. This ideological gap—it certainly is more ideological than behavorial—introduces to the novel a pattern of ethical possibilities that force readers to choose sides. For example, either Marie-Rose is a whore, in which case the person offering such an interpretation has internalized chauvinistic and colonialist sensibilities; or Marie-Rose is a blessed victim of chauvinistic and colonialist sensibilities, in which case the person offering such an interpretation has acknowledged at least tacitly that sectarian identification is in and of itself a violent act. The choice is an easy one for anybody identifying as a humanist, but likely would be more difficult for those attached to identity politics. Yet Adnan’s presentation of the ethical formulation compels readers invested emotionally in the narrative to adopt Marie-Rose’s position and thus to accept the author’s humanism.39 Marie-Rose, then, acts in various capacities as both the innocent virgin and the sacrificed Christ figure whose death arises from profound human failings, a gendered reworking of biblical narratives that likewise attaches itself to the failure of the modern Arab nation-state. According to Champagne, these ethical formulations result in a detectable pattern: By the novel’s conclusion, the pattern is complete: Europe, Christianity, violence, masculinity, and male heterosexuality—all are interwoven to form the identity of Sitt Marie Rose’s killers. The novel thus suggests that identity is “ideological”: it works through a process of interpellation that draws upon a variety of different discourses in an effort to produce subjects “useful” for global, postcolonial capitalism.40

Mohomodou Houssouba criticizes this pattern—which, with a few variations, he also detects in Sitt Marie Rose—as overdetermined, or even as simplistic.41 And unlike Champagne, he doesn’t attribute the pattern to Adnan’s recognition of ideological factors in the formation of identity. He argues instead that Adnan appears to invoke atavism as the source of sectarian identity politics in the Arab World even if she may have intended the source to be ideology.42 Both Houssouba and Champagne are on to something; Adnan uses notions of ideology and atavism to articulate her fictive ethics—and she complicates both phenomena in the process—but it appears that the atavism she

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critiques is intended to provide the groundwork for a humanistic ideology by seeking common rather than tribalistic origins, a point Houssouba and Champagne overlook. Ultimately, I see in Sitt Marie Rose an articulation of humanism more than a retreat to the comforts of invented ancestries and cultural determinism; or, to put it differently, the novel is a rejection of religious, ethnic, and cultural fragmentation in favor of a transcultural humanity articulated locally in the form of a universal (and unavoidable) Arab destiny.43 This sensibility impels Adnan to treat the Chabab as colonial agents in addition to chauvinists. As Sami Ofeish and Sabah Ghandour observe, “To the Chabab, being a Christian is equated with being ‘western,’ which in this context implies non-affiliation with Arab causes, and with being privileged within the status quo.”44 The Chabab both symbolize and help comprise what Ofeish and Ghandour, drawing from Frantz Fanon, call the Maronite “comprador bourgeoisie.”45 In forcing Mounir and his peers into this type of political space, Adnan evokes an allegorical reworking of modern Arab history in general and Lebanon’s tumultuous national formation in particular. France is portrayed in the novel as a divisive force that instigated a divide-and-conquer strategy whose effects have been disastrous, and the Maronite characters transfixed in a Western gaze are reprimanded through subtle thematic maneuvers for pursuing the privileges afforded them by remaining complicit in the preservation of a socioeconomic system tainted with the residue of colonial intervention.46 Mounir, for instance, draws from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the Noble Savage in explaining to the unnamed narrator in the “Time I” section of the novel that in a film he hopes to produce he wants “to show how happy [the Arab peasants] are in those Syrian villages, what wisdom they had there, how integrated they are with Nature.”47 This desire is reminiscent of the attitudes of New World colonialists who incessantly romanticized North America’s indigenous peoples as childlike figures living peaceably, and irrevocably, within nature, a perception that was also appropriated in film and other cultural media to provide the colonialists with a conceptual origin in the lands they settled. It is doubtful that such imagery is merely coincidental, for Adnan has often condemned injustice by referencing genocide in North America.48 Muslims too are chastised for their failure to overcome tribalistic inclinations that preclude unity, as when Marie-Rose complains, “The Arab world is infinitely large in terms of space and infinitely small in its vision. It’s made up of sects and subsects, ghettos, communities, worked by envy, rotten, closed back on themselves like worms. This world must be aired, its stiffness must be


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erased.”49 This statement contains a rhetorical irony: the stifling reality of occupying an “infinitely small” space spells out Adnan’s criticism of what she perceives to be a limitless shortsightedness in the Arab World. Yet Adnan ultimately avoids binaristic historical interpretation, an avoidance made evident in the character of Mounir, who is considerably more complex than his friends Tony and Fouad, one-dimensional aggressors who violently articulate their sectarian loyalty (as does Bouna Lias, who nevertheless achieves more discursive complexity). Many of the novel’s aesthetic distinctions and political imperatives are inscribed in the dialogue Mounir undertakes with Marie-Rose in the short period leading to her torture and execution. He appears to be obsessed with Marie-Rose’s blue eyes, a physical feature that he associates with Europe and that in turn confounds him in his attempts to understand why she would commiserate with the quintessentially Eastern Palestinians. He tries to connect with her on an interpersonal level inspired by their brief teenage relationship but ultimately chooses to fulfill what he imagines to be his duty to the Chabab—and, by extension, his religious-political sect—rather than fulfill a more human, and humane, destiny. “I’m their friend, it’s true,” he muses, “but I’m also their section chief. I can’t say no to my comrades.”50 He conceptualizes himself as modern and inclusive of women, but it becomes clear that Marie-Rose’s gender plays an important role in his decision to authorize her execution, for it is through construction of gendered moralities that sectarian violence is expressed.51 Mounir proves himself to be less nuanced than his veneer would indicate and functions instead as an inheritor of a colonial legacy that clearly draws from New World ethos, arguably the most pernicious of all European colonial projects:52 “It’s violence that accelerates the progress of a people”;53 “I represent legality”;54 “I’m defending the power of the State.”55 His many rhetorical and philosophical contradictions are unmasked by Marie-Rose’s relentless counterdiscourse: “Morality is violence”;56 “It’s already too late for you to crawl back to the cocoons of the past”;57 “You usurped the power of the State. You’re a militia.”58 Perhaps the most provocative of her arguments, however, is also the most simple: “I represent love.”59 Ultimately, it is the love Marie-Rose both articulates and symbolizes that leads to her execution, for this emotion, Marie-Rose’s guiding motivation, arises in stark contrast to the hate associated with the sexism and sectarianism of the Chabab. Marie-Rose’s body is destroyed, but her humanism has survived in the novel in which Adnan inscribed her name and, more permanently, her spirit.60

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The Consequence: Rabih Alameddine Of Lebanese Druze origin, the novelist, visual artist, and short story writer Rabih Alameddine entered the American literary scene with gusto in the late 1990s with the publication of The Perv: Stories (1999) and KOOLAIDS: The Art of War (1998), a novel that offers seemingly endless analytical possibilities. Although a reader could produce a substantial critique of any of its numerous themes—AIDS, homosexuality, representations of artists’ communities, Bay Area culture, Arabism and queerness, racism and xenophobia—I would like to focus broadly on three areas, two thematic in nature and the other aesthetic: Alameddine’s representation of the Lebanese Civil War (in the framework of its association with Adnan’s representation and its transferal into an American setting); his juxtaposition, like Adnan’s, of sexuality and warfare; and, aesthetically, his use of highly unorthodox narrative devices, which I consider to be an example of pastiche. KOOLAIDS is a vastly different book than Sitt Marie Rose, in style and, to a lesser degree, in outlook and philosophy. Both, however, explore a common theme, the Lebanese Civil War, which allows us to conjoin them productively for the purpose of critical engagement. Their stylistic and philosophical differences make such conjoining more rather than less fruitful, because those differences generate wider artistic scopes in keeping with the diversities inherent in modern Arab American fiction. To put it in a different way, it would be troublesome to literary critics and proponents of an Arab American Studies if Alameddine had merely reinvented what Adnan did in Sitt Marie Rose because literary reinvention often, though not always, results in stagnation. The polyphonic nature of the Lebanese Civil War undoubtedly has led to the polyphonic fictive depictions of it (intratextually as well as intertextually). There are nevertheless some discernible features that KOOLAIDS shares with Sitt Marie Rose, and these features will be relevant to my forthcoming analysis: ●

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Alameddine challenges with great vim and audacity religious dogma and the destructiveness of literalist biblical interpretation. He refuses to endorse sectarianism and as a result articulates an implied humanism. He creates vivid scenes in which sexual aggression facilitates violence, or vice-versa. He subtly criticizes Orientalist Western attitudes that either expect belligerence of the Lebanese or that inspire domestic xenophobia (not completely unlike the xenophobia articulated by the Chabab).

INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE NATION ●

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He infuses his narrative devices with commentaries that inform a broader philosophical objective of intercommunalism and coexistence. He raises, whether purposefully or not, a series of questions of critical importance to the Arab American community—for instance, the role sexuality plays and should play among Arab Americans in an environment that induces a different set of sexual tensions than those generally found in the Arab World. He explores the globalized nature of modern Lebanon and demystifies romanticized notions of the nation as an edenic motherland (something that Adnan also does in Sitt Marie Rose, as, too, does Patricia Sarrafian Ward in The Bullet Collection).

I would argue that the appearance of KOOLAIDS represented a milestone in the modern Arab American literary tradition, not merely because of its artistic quality (the publication of any great novel is worth at least a minor, silent celebration), but because of all the new directions and possibilities it represented. In my parenthesis above, I insinuate that I consider KOOLAIDS “great”; this insinuation is an accurate representation of how I feel about the novel. I don’t, I should mention, consider the novel great because, like Alameddine, I am Arab American and thus share with the author an atavistic ethnic affinity; I consider the novel great because I am a reader—sometimes hopeful, bored, engaged, slothful, or astute, or sometimes all of these things simultaneously—with fundamentally human responses to the humanity inscribed in all great literary fiction. For example, as somebody who has lost a treasured family member to AIDS, I am enthralled with the realistic nature of Alameddine’s situational and thematic settings, and comforted somehow by his graphic depiction of physical deterioration due to the disease. I am sharing these reactions because they inform a larger point that is crucial to this chapter—and, by extension, the book in which it appears. I have maintained rather defensively that my admiration of KOOLAIDS is not the result of ethnic affinity, a point that doesn’t preclude me from admitting that ethnic affinity is never completely absent from my readings of Arab American literature—or any literature, for that matter. I am attempting merely to dispel notions widespread among students and educators that ethnic critics are unable to objectively examine writing arising from their own cultural traditions (I treat the notion of objectivity with the same skepticism with which I treat the notion of disinterestedness). The more fundamental point is that there is much value in so-called ethnic literatures beyond what

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readers—both inside and outside the authors’ communities—imagine to be their innately communal verisimilitude. Therefore, though KOOLAIDS has much to reveal about Arab America and its attendant cultural articulations, it also has much to reveal about the peculiarities of life and art in the modern United States in general. I shall like to emphasize these revelations in addition to specific cultural articulations in my analysis of Alameddine. Another point I can also develop along these lines likewise arises in a personal context. Ten years ago I would have been unable to find an Arab American novel other than Sitt Marie Rose that could induce as much critical excitement as KOOLAIDS—or, for that matter, as many affective and critical possibilities. There is a chance, of course, that these possibilities are merely an invention of my own disposition, but any quick glance at the trajectory of Arab American fiction will reveal that KOOLAIDS represents a demonstrable high point with countless, as-yet unexplored consequences. Although the two books published before it that are widely considered to be high points in the trajectory of Arab American fiction, Joseph Geha’s Through and Through and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz, indeed are superlative texts, neither achieves quite the same level of thematic and poetic complexity as KOOLAIDS. For this reason, in addition to its participation in the intricate tradition of Lebanese Civil War fiction, KOOLAIDS is an excellent novel for Arab American critics to examine because it is completely globalized even while remaining vigorously local. It is quite surprising, in fact, that as of this writing very little critical work on KOOLAIDS has been produced. Alameddine is a wellknown author among Arab Americans with literary inclinations and KOOLAIDS—again, with the exception of Sitt Marie Rose—has crossed more ethnic and cultural borders than any other novel classified typically as Arab American. The novel has been discussed in queer and Gay-Lesbian-Transgendered (GLT) literary communities and has had some crossover appeal in the American mainstream. It is not, therefore, a marginal work; neither is Alameddine’s second novel I, The Divine, which, like KOOLAIDS, was both critically and commercially successful. Given that Alameddine is far from obscure, it is rather disappointing that more readers haven’t taken up his work formally. It is possible that the difficulties of critical border-crossing, as KOOLAIDS necessitates, have tacitly encouraged critics interested in Arab American texts to focus on examples of what might be considered more quintessentially Arab American. In any event, one need not splice KOOLAIDS into distinct categories according to the multiple


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communities represented in its pages; a good approach is to engage discussion by attempting to amalgamate its many fragmentations— that is to say, we might certainly identify either sexuality or ethnicity as the novel’s most relevant dimension, or, better, we might simply read the novel’s sexual and ethnic dimensions simultaneously. I mentioned above that I would consider KOOLAIDS to be a classic example of pastiche, probably a reasonable opinion given that, as Wail Hassan illustrates, Alameddine “subverts dominant discourses, ideologies, and sanctioned narratives,” particularly “teleological narratives of progress and development; of self-confident knowledge of, and discursive mastery over, other, particularly Arab, cultures; and of individualistic becoming and self-realization.”61 Frederick Jameson characterizes pastiche as an evolution away from high modernism— the sort of high modernism, incidentally, that defines the aesthetics of Sitt Marie Rose—that ultimately transformed parody, with its engaged political commentaries, into what he calls “blank parody,” or a postmodern simulacrum without a political purpose.62 Jameson’s conceptions of pastiche are rather pessimistic given that his analyses essentially deplete literary texts of political agency, and thus of their transformative potential, something I am unprepared to do. As intellectual shorthand, however, there is much value in the notion, supported by Jameson, that pastiche transgresses the commonplaces of literary modernism. This notion is apropos of critical approaches to KOOLAIDS because one of the text’s defining features is its lack of an obvious defining feature, and, more important, its dissolution of the sort of modernist poetics employed in novels like Sitt Marie Rose (although it certainly arises from within the tradition Sitt Marie Rose helped create). Such transgressions certainly account for an element of pastiche in KOOLAIDS, but so do its structural peculiarities, illuminated in part, as Hassan notes, by Alameddine’s insistence on subversion. Though the traditional conception of pastiche is that of literary imitation or revision, many humanities scholars today view it as an aesthetic hodgepodge—that is to say, a mixing of textual features and even of conventional genres into a work that follows no logical or chronological sequence. Pastiche, then, is something of an ardent usurpation of tradition, and by its very nature lends itself to subversion, which sometimes is its purpose.63 It also lends itself to fragmented narratives, something increasingly common in modern American letters. KOOLAIDS utilizes a fragmented narrative to subvert a host of truisms about the Lebanese Civil War, Arab America, homosexuality, immigration, and the AIDS epidemic. It is a pastiche that is deeply

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suspicious of organized politics, but that engages continually in political expression. This sort of aesthetic dynamic has unsurprisingly produced antipodal reaction among the novel’s readers. (I assign the novel every semester, for example, and invariably my students either detest it or find it brilliant—rarely have I encountered a reasonable in-between; reaction consistently is weighted more toward brilliance.) It has received mixed reviews, though the majority have been positive, and has been noticed most frequently in queer media, a reasonable fact given its relevance to the GLT community. Of interest in these reviews, however, is the lack of focus on Alameddine’s contemplations of the Lebanese Civil War and his doggedly antidogmatic reflections on the Arab American community. Writing in the New York Times, for example, Mark Lindquist makes the unverifiable assumption that “most readers will wind up wishing Alameddine . . . had more literary flair.”64 Lindquist further asserts that “[d]espite some interesting ideas and memorable imagery, his book demonstrates little feel for narrative. In fact, there is hardly any dramatic urgency in his collage of observations, thoughts and vignettes. You know what will happen next: somebody will die, either of AIDS in the United States or in combat in Lebanon, and then somebody will wax philosophic about life, and then somebody famous may offer a non sequitur.”65 In a more approving review, Stan Henry likewise muses, “I . . . wish [Alameddine] could write better. I kept wanting him to take my breath away, but he never quite did.”66 Lindquist and Henry both offer valid critique of KOOLAIDS, whose unorthodox narrative devices can be read in a number of ways, one of them unfortunately being a lack of authorial command over the material. I tend to view these narrative devices differently, as a function of pastiche and as a philosophical challenge to an array of dogmatic certitudes. Indeed, I see in KOOLAIDS a striking resemblance to some of the work produced by Anishinaabe trickster Gerald Vizenor, who has been subject to similar criticism.67 A more important quarrel I have with negative reviews of KOOLAIDS concerns their limited emphasis on Lebanon and Arab America. This shortsightedness, which generally results in unjustifiable omissions, reminds me of the section in the novel when Samir, a Lebanese immigrant, visits the Baltimore Museum of Art, which purchased one of fellow Lebanese immigrant Mohammad’s (Mo’s) paintings, and observes, Mohammad was talented. There was no doubt about it. As I began to study his paintings, I realized he was even better than I thought. Most of


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the art critics who reviewed his work were not Lebanese. I felt they missed quite a bit in his paintings. I learned a thousand and one new things about his painting from their writing, yet they never asked what we saw.68

At a gallery reception earlier in the novel, Samir is treated like a dilettante by his peers when he marvels at Mohammad’s lucid depictions of Lebanon. “These are abstract paintings, dear,” his partner, Mark, informs him.69 When Mohammad meets Samir, he speaks to him in Arabic, a conscious invocation of cultural empathy that excludes the American bystanders, and jokes, “You had to ruin it, didn’t you?”70 He adds, still in Arabic, “Don’t worry about it. I thought everybody would see what the paintings were when they saw them. Nobody did, so I didn’t tell them. Makes you wonder about these Americans.”71 In a further expression of Lebanese culture alien to the horrified gallery director and Samir’s delighted lover, Mohammad insists that Samir take an extremely valuable painting. Samir finally relents, and insists that Mohammad come over for dinner. “It is ingrained,” Samir muses to himself after their highly ceremonial exchange.72 These scenes provide an unwitting but appropriate metaphor for some of KOOLAIDS’s critical reception. Its American reviewers viewed it largely through domestic perspectives that omitted ethnicity, a suitable approach given that the novel was written and published in the United States but that ultimately created for the reviewers an evaluative limitation. They failed to see Lebanon in the literary portrait Alameddine created, and they had neither the inclination nor the ability to comprehend how other Arab Americans might react to the novel. I would suggest that Samir is correct: it is ingrained—at least it is if, by “it,” we mean the ethnic and cultural traditions Alameddine either derides or celebrates. And so, more out of critical impulse than the need to invent a corrective methodology, I would like to examine how Alameddine incorporates Lebanon into the American polity and how this incorporation elucidates crucial dimensions of an Arab American body politic and literary aesthetic. Unknown to many American reviewers, Alameddine’s inclusion in KOOLAIDS of the Lebanese Civil War made inevitable the narrative fragmentation that partially defines the novel. Saree Makdisi has shown how the political upheaval entailed in the civil war eliminated both temporal and ontological certainties, a development that likely influenced many of the disjunctions permeating the novel. Makdisi writes, Until the climactic paroxysm of violence that signaled the end of the Lebanese war in 1990, the civilians of Lebanon had seen their state

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collapse around them, and with it went many of Lebanon’s prewar traditions as well as virtually all the meaning-generating structures of society. The war generated its own rules and orders, over which no one seemed to have any control, and, indeed, each new theory of the war saw its predictions and assumptions shattered in the next stage of the fighting. Most unsettling was a situation in which, on the one hand, there were people going to work and trying to lead lives as normal as possible and, on the other hand, there was the on-again, off-again war, which violently intruded every now and then on this normalcy, often with little or no apparent causality. As a result, the people of Lebanon . . . had to try to carry on their daily lives and social interactions while at the same time following each new development in that other reality called the war—and, between these two parallel realities, meaning and signification got cut off.73

Makdisi’s argument offers a revealing explanation of the structural idiosyncrasy Alameddine employs in KOOLAIDS, whose narrative often follows parallel realities while complicating the reader’s ability to glean both meaning and signification.74 Makdisi, in fact, claims that this sort of structural idiosyncrasy has been fundamental to post–civil war literature in general: “For both the fictional and the nonfictional narratives of the war are laid out in confusing or incoherent— schizophrenic—disorder, with incidents or memories from the various protagonists’ prewar lives mixing in with other characters’ stories, emotions, and thoughts as well as the terrifying flux of the war itself.”75 Makdisi’s observations implicitly ascribe to literature focused somehow on the Lebanese Civil War a thematic and philosophical realism that in the case of KOOLAIDS is accurate (the same holds true of Sitt Marie Rose). KOOLAIDS, in fact, is so forthrightly realistic that it exhibits the type of imagery employed in what one of my late mentors, Scott Christianson, used to describe as “extreme literature” (a malleable category that encompasses both the so-called literary and popular).76 Some of Alameddine’s sexual imagery, for instance, is quite graphic, as are the descriptions of warfare. At one point a character records in her diary that “Najwa’s husband and three boys were dead. Killed by the explosion. Najwa was hit by two pieces of shrapnel. One was lodged in her stomach and the other seemed to have cut her forehead.”77 In another scene Samir reflects on a childhood experience with another teenager, Georges: “He leads me to a dark, secluded corner. It is dark, damp, and putrid. He asks me if I want to see his cock. I say sure . . . . He shows me his cock. It is beautiful. You can touch it, he says. I do. You’re a natural, he says. I am


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aglow. Turn around and bend over, he says. I do as I am told.”78 Scenes of heterosexual sex also are described, as when Georges “deflowered” Samir’s cousin and she “arrived home with a smile on her face and blood on her panties.”79 This type of graphic description, which abounds throughout the novel, can be read as both aesthetic and philosophical strategies. Aesthetically, Alameddine obviously felt no need to sugarcoat what he perceives to be fundamental human pursuits (and at times imperfections): sex and warfare. There usually is an undertone (and sometimes an overtone) of violence in the scenes in which Alameddine depicts those pursuits, which suggests that violent human tendencies often are articulated in sexual activity and political decision-making. KOOLAIDS employs maneuvers that disallow readers to hide from sexual and political hyperreality because aesthetically such maneuvers support a fictive approach that emphasizes both spatial and psychological dislocation. KOOLAIDS is not the sort of novel that expresses ideas and conflicts through the use of innuendo; rather, it normalizes what might be considered the extreme of human behavior into various expositions that remind readers of their own inclinations as they are reflected in the behavior of the novel’s participants. The fact that Georges ends up becoming “a killing machine”80 in a Phalange militia recalls vividly the connection Adnan draws between sexual aggression and eager participation in warfare. Philosophically, Alameddine, in keeping with his novel’s polyphonic structure, parlays graphic description into a number of commentaries, which don’t necessarily correspond.81 I find the most interesting of these commentaries to be focused on homosexuality and the Arab American community, which tend not to be read in conjunction in existing analyses of KOOLAIDS. It is important to remember that in KOOLAIDS homosexuality and Arab American culture are not rendered mutually exclusive. There are widespread notions among American liberals that Arabs are viciously homophobic, but these notions, which appear to be accurate if raised in a superficial context, oversimplify issues of sexuality in the Arab World and unwittingly glorify ostensible sexual tolerance in the United States. Indeed, one of the traditional ways Westerners have construed Arabs as savage is by condemning their voracious homosexuality as it was invented in the Western imagination and then disseminated in a variety of Orientalist images of harems and Turkish baths,82 images Alameddine evokes in KOOLAIDS in the scene where Samir visits a hammam (public bath) in Paris and sees a Lebanese man “sitting between two other Lebanese men on a sofa. They were ogling me as I was coming up.

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He said to the other two in Arabic, ‘Look at this one. He is so beautiful.’ ”83 The novel essentially blurs readers’ ability to compartmentalize seemingly distinct communities and their attendant lifestyles. In so doing, it achieves the sort of globalized equilibrium to which so many critics and scholars aspire. Its fragmented structural dynamics and disjointed moral observations, particularly as they dissolve the boundaries separating ethnicity from sexuality, have the effect of dispriviliging any sort of metanarrative. KOOLAIDS is a profoundly democratic work of fiction. One of the more notable features of this globalized equilibrium arises from Alameddine’s superimposition of Lebanon onto the American polity, not in the classic sense of a palimpsest, but instead as a more assimilative phenomenon with the ability to transform the commonplaces of everyday American life. I want to point out here that I don’t see in KOOLAIDS an exposition of hybridity or of simple acts of border-crossing; the former concept is too problematic and therefore limiting, and the latter concept is rather too convenient to be of critical use. I have taken my cue from Gerry Smyth, who argues that “the dissolution of the border is far from unproblematic” and that “hybridity is also hegemonically recuperable,”84 and notes that “culture’s fantasy of presence is shattered by its fatal doubleness, a doubleness which is revealed at all those points where the ‘original’ is repeated and translated.”85 Smyth’s assertion is validated in KOOLAIDS by Mohammad’s deliberations on the type of book he would write if he had the ability. One of these deliberations confirms Smyth’s skepticism and describes with ironic precision the poetics of KOOLAIDS: “I wanted to write an endless book of time. It would have no beginning and no end. It would not flow in order. The tenses would make no sense. A book whose first page is almost identical to the last, and all the pages in between are jumbled with an interminable story.”86 Alameddine’s blurring of space and time, as well as of foundational narratives of ethnic origin that inform modern political claims, indicates that hybridity rarely is neatly comprehensive, nor is bordercrossing a simple act of geographical relocation. It might be more appropriate to read KOOLAIDS as a text in which the concept of Lebanon is made to travel along with the diasporic Lebanese characters, who provide a different type of American consciousness, one based on the interaction of memories and contemporary realities. This consciousness is too malleable and too subjective to ever fulfill the dictates of a political sensibility or a theoretical injunction. The only concrete philosophy Alameddine imparts beyond his wariness of all manner of dogma is voiced through Mohammad as he contemplates


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his would-be book: “I wanted to make sure death and sex were associated.”87 This desire, which ends up coming to fruition in KOOLAIDS, produces the sort of violent irony that confers to the novel its moral stimulus, for sex is supposed to be associated with life—as, in fact, the only activity that creates life; in associating it with death, Alameddine forces readers to confront the mortality inherent in our attempts to survive as individuals and communities. In turn, hybridity and border-crossing are submerged beneath ironic temporal and thematic devices that encapsulate both Lebanon and the United States and subsume them into a newfangled, indefinable entity. Gazing at Lebanon from the United States in KOOLAIDS ultimately brings Lebanon into this new entity Alameddine has created. Mohammad, for example, has moments of nostalgia despite his typical sarcasm and cynicism: I pine for pine. That is a funny way of putting it, but I really do miss the smell of pine. There are various trees back home, each with its own charm, yet it is the pine trees I miss. Specifically, I miss the scent of pine trees. And, contrary to what most Americans assume, they do not smell like house-cleaning detergents. I do miss the olive trees, and I do miss the oaks. I also miss the cedars. However, it is the smell of pine that gets me. It calls me home.88

Mohammad complicates geographical stability because his thought disrupts clear interchange between Lebanon and the United States. American misperceptions are criticized in the framework of physical Lebanese attractions, and “home” is made to be something distant even if its connotations in Mohammad’s thoughts belie its presence in Mohammad’s reality. Indeed, Alameddine’s complicating of geography is best exhibited by the fact that, as Syrine C. Hout points out, “The word home is used to refer to either Lebanon or America, depending on the context.”89 This sort of ambiguity is exemplified in Mohammad’s dictum, “In America, I fit, but I do not belong/In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit.”90 In a sense, this dictum intimates placelessness, but it can also be taken to mean omnipresence. Mohammad is nowhere and everywhere all at once; he is local and transnational, and so his very existence disrupts both national identification and ethnonationalism.91 Alameddine’s dislike of national identification and ethnonationalism is revealed elsewhere in KOOLAIDS when one of the unnamed Lebanese characters notes, We all had what some would call a European complex. We wanted so hard to be European. This manifested itself in a couple of ways. There

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were those who mimicked everything European. They ate European, dressed European, watched European movies. It was a sign of sophistication if one intermixed difficult English words with the predominant French. Many of these Lebanese—let’s call them Francophiles—had trouble speaking their native language, Arabic. They really had problems speaking to other Lebanese if those others were not like them, if they did not speak French fluently. Most Francophiles were Christians, but not exclusively. They even developed a relationship to America similar to what the Europeans have, an unhealthy fascination mixed with simultaneous disdain.92

The disapproving tone of this passage reveals that Lebanon had traveled westward before a large number of its citizens actually migrated to Europe and the United States during the civil war. Alameddine thus indicates that memories of an innocent Lebanon are merely a nostalgic fantasy and that interchange in the United States between Lebanese and American characters is something of a tradition established outside the boundaries of immigration and assimilation. He also suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Adnan’s critique, that a westward gaze in Lebanon helped contribute to the sectarianism that inspired the Lebanese Civil War. This suggestion is not the only time that Alameddine, intentionally or not, reiterates a sensibility present in Sitt Marie Rose. Adnan condemns in her novel Western notions of Arab barbarity, especially when those notions are internalized by Lebanese characters mimicking, as in KOOLAIDS, what they imagine to be Western sensibilities (the mimicry is accurate when it emphasizes Western perceptions of Arab backwardness, but otherwise manifests itself as fantastical caricature). Alameddine uses the setting of the United States to condemn prejudicial and even racist attitudes. When Mohammad, for instance, travels to Dallas to oversee an exhibition of his work, the woman who offers him her apartment leaves him a note in the icebox saying, “No national specialties with odors hard to get rid of.”93 Another time a Catholic priest asks Mohammad if he is Catholic. When Mohammad informs the priest that he is Muslim, “[h]e looked at me funny. He said I could not get absolution if I were a Muslim.”94 A page later, a diarist in Beirut records the following event: “The head of the department at Georgetown insulted [my husband]. He called him a camel jockey.”95 The diarist later writes, “Americans make fun of us. They mock us. My son told me they even had a comedy skit about us on Saturday Night Live.”96 This type of racialist innuendo appears throughout KOOLAIDS and further illuminates Alameddine’s skepticism of knowledge created through foundational discourses.


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The novel seems to articulate Sacvan Bercovitch’s reflection that “America was more than an imperial wish-fulfillment dream brought to life in the assertion of nationhood. It was a way of imagining that expressed the mechanisms through which, in Elaine Scarry’s terms, the made-up becomes the made-real.”97 This blurring of invention and reality underlies Alameddine’s exploration of two intertwined, imagined spaces: Lebanon and America, in whose interchange only mythology manages to become real. Ultimately, the predominant theme in KOOLAIDS—above and beyond its countless peregrinations and subtexts—is the danger of self-imposed boundaries, both physical and philosophical. This recognition underlies textual development throughout the novel and accounts at least partly for its unorthodox composition. In one scene, a child in Lebanon laments, “For us kids, the boundaries are very important.”98 These boundaries contributed to the initiation of the Lebanese Civil War, and once the war commenced they justified it. Boundaries also prevent characters in the United States from understanding one another as human agents in various situations: as homosexuals, immigrants, AIDS patients, Muslims, artists, refugees. And these boundaries sometimes are reflected in the literature of authors immersed in their moral and philosophical confines. Alameddine, then, has accomplished something remarkable with KOOLAIDS: he created a finite text with unbounded textual boundaries.

In Conclusion: An America without Boundaries KOOLAIDS, with its internationalized structure, might be considered a metonym for the current state of what is known as modern American literature. Sitt Marie Rose also poses important questions about the limitations of conceptualizing a national literature within a set of borders. Both novels indicate that it will never be so easy to delineate criteria for what constitutes Arab American literature and that it will never be possible to isolate American literature from the rest of the world. Indeed, as peoples across the globe continue migrating into North America and as North America continues to impose itself across the globe, the traditional values critics have ascribed to American literature—including its geographical values—have been reworked and reinvented as something considerably more complex and infinitely far-reaching. This is all to say that there is no American literature anymore, at least not in any sense in which the category can be

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accompanied by inclusive criteria. There is only literature written by authors who happen to be American citizens or located in the United States. There are no specific themes to define this literary tradition as it exists today, nor are there any available racial and ethnic profiles (short of racist ones, of course). Neither are there geographical limitations to American literature, and linguistic diversity is rendering English-only notions archaic. The author’s passport or locale, in other words, is the only criterion by which a literary text can reasonably be judged as American. This development, I would like to argue, is a good thing, because the evolution of American literature has, in essence, done nothing more than conform to the actual demographics of modern life in the United States. Arab Americans play an important role in this evolution. Though I don’t believe that Sitt Marie Rose and KOOLAIDS are particularly similar and would therefore be wary of any attempt to construe them as analogous, both novels do contain enough thematic and philosophical compatibility to construe them as occupying the same tradition. Both Adnan and Alameddine articulate a sophisticated humanism inspired by their recognition that the Lebanese Civil War ultimately was a futile historical episode borne of the shortsightedness of political dogma and cultural determinism. Both authors in turn have contributed tremendously to the profound antisectarian humanism central to modern Arab American literatures, and available as a theme in every Arab American novel published since 1990.99 Although the Arab World justifiably is criticized in the United States for its lack of political freedoms, the concomitantly judicious and reflective dialogue initiated in literature by Arab Americans is quite more developed and productive than what passes for meaningful discussion in the mainstream of the United States. We all, as human consumers, thus have much to learn from one another if we are not prevented from doing so by our clannish overconfidences. That is the ultimate lesson available in the novels I have examined here. We also have much to explore by way of the rapid globalization of American literature. One identifying marker of that globalization is the use of the Lebanese Civil War—an event that never physically affected the United States100—in literature produced by American authors (again, using the passport as our major criterion for American). The Lebanese Civil War has been inscribed into the American polity because it was a part of the consciousness of writers who migrated to the United States and expressed that consciousness in writing, thus rendering the civil war a participant in American social


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discourse. As the two authors discussed in this chapter illustrate, the Lebanese Civil War can act as an ironic warning to American literary critics that ethnic affinities often are implicitly violent even though ethnic affinities provide our enterprise its only useful and intelligible meaning.


CHAP TER

3

Honesty Lost: The Strange Circumstances of Love, Death, and Norma Khouri

In the late Emile Habiby’s carnivalesque novel The Secret Life of Saeed, the Palestinian protagonist repeatedly encounters strange circumstances, one particularly memorable. Saeed, a wise fool, buffoon, and trickster, takes refuge in a footnote and converses hypothetically with his Israeli superior: “You used to assure us, honored sir, that history, when repeating itself, does not reproduce itself precisely. If the first occurrence were tragedy, the second would be farce.”1 Since Habiby invented it thirty years ago, this axiom has proved extraordinarily accurate. The American tradition of literary hoaxing, for instance, generally entails farcical renditions of tragic historical sequences. Take Norma Khouri’s Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan. It managed to make a farce not only of its own credibility, but also of the credibility of its countless admirers. That Habiby, a verifiable Arab and venerable Middle Eastern politico, accidentally predicted the ascent and subsequent dishonor of a pseudo-Arab with a knack for con artistry only adds to the irony encapsulating Saeed’s tricksterism and Khouri’s trickery. Khouri nullified the generations of nuance evinced by the activists and creative writers of the Middle East. She transformed the politics Habiby satirized into political melodrama that rendered a farcical carnival an awkward reality. If, to paraphrase Saeed’s formulation, a real oppression of women in the Arab World demands serious analysis, then Honor Lost is the farce that followed inevitably. This chapter is an attempt to make some sense of these strange circumstances perhaps too fantastical even for the inventive mind of Emile Habiby. The attempt begins with an observation that will remain central to the forthcoming discussion: to anybody even slightly familiar with

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Jordan, and the Islamic world more broadly, Honor Lost is virtually unreadable. It is poorly written with hysterical narration and clichéd description.2 It is worse methodologically, relying not only on spurious information and falsified data, but also on every imaginable American stereotype of Arab men and women. In a sense, the most interesting question Honor Lost raises is not about how myth is interpolated into reality through multiple sociocultural developments, but rather how anybody read the book and actually believed it. I will have to argue that the book’s believability, despite its unbelievable contents, can be attributed in part to its appeasement of a long-standing cultural mythos in the United States and its ability to retroactively justify decades of aggressive foreign policy in the Arab World.3 Honor Lost, in other words, could be believed because its readers had already accepted its contents as true before it had even been written; had they not, it would have been impossible to write. The story of Honor Lost is remarkable, even if its status as a fraud is not unique—or, for that matter, unusual—in the history of American publishing. I intend merely to sketch the broad outline of that story here before analyzing the book and its ramifications. Honor Lost was first published in Australia in 2002 under the title Forbidden Love. The book, featuring the author and her best friend, Dalia, takes place in Amman, Jordan, where Dalia, a Muslim, fell in love with Michael, a Catholic who frequented Norma and Dalia’s unisex beauty salon. When Dalia’s ostensibly modern family discovered her relationship with Michael they killed her in order to preserve the family’s honor. Khouri, complicit in the illicit relationship and therefore fearful that her own family might kill her, consequently fled to Greece, where she claimed to have written Forbidden Love secretly in an Internet café, and then to Australia, which granted her asylum. In February, 2003, Atria Books published Forbidden Love as Honor Lost to both critical and commercial success. By mid-2004, the book had sold hundreds of thousands of copies globally and Khouri was in great demand as a speaker in Anglophone nations, where, displaying what she called the slain Dalia’s engagement ring, she reportedly left audiences in tears (an indictment, to be sure, of liberal Western sensibilities when they are directed patronizingly at the Middle East).4 During this period, however, investigations by Jordan Times reporter Rana Husseini, The Sydney Morning Herald, and various women’s rights groups found that the events described in Honor Lost never occurred. In fact, they found that “Dalia” and “Michael” were inventions, as was the beauty salon, and concluded that Honor Lost was a fabrication. (Ironically, in Honor Lost, Khouri praises the work of

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a Jordan Times reporter who remains unnamed but who likely is the same Rana Husseini who exposed Khouri as a fraud.)5 Atria and Random House Australia withdrew the book permanently and newspapers that had once lionized Khouri as a model of courage disparaged her trickery. Subsequent investigations revealed that although Khouri was born in Jordan, she moved to Chicago at the age of three and thereafter never resided in the Middle East. Her real name apparently is Norma Bagain, although she also has gone by Norma Toliopoulos. She stands accused of numerous fraud cases, including bilking an elderly Chicago woman of nearly half a million dollars, and, according to Al-Jazeera, has a police file a meter thick. The Sydney Morning Herald found more than seventy factual errors in Forbidden Love. As of this writing, Khouri is in Queensland, Australia, where she has remained after the Australian government decided to allow her to stay despite violating the terms of her visa. Honor Lost, then, is one of the most spectacular literary frauds ever perpetrated, and I want to stress that in this chapter I will conceptualize Khouri not simply as a hoaxer or huckster, but as a con artist, for her con artistry speaks powerfully to the vapid state of political discourse and transcultural interchange in the United States today.6 I want to proceed using two discrete but complementary approaches. The first approach will offer a brief exegesis of Honor Lost and survey its reception in popular American media in order to identify some of the cultural forces that extended to it such lofty recognition. I will concentrate on Honor Lost primarily as an American phenomenon, because Khouri’s American background and current U.S. geopolitical imperatives lend themselves to such a concentration, although the book and its subsequent dishonor certainly generated more headlines in Australia. The second approach will analyze those cultural forces in the context of an American tradition of ethnic impersonation and falsified personal narrative, a tradition most evident in the assumption of Native identities in order to tell stories about tribal nations that fulfilled American readers’ stereotyped expectations. The second approach also will examine Khouri’s primary readership, as it is evident that Khouri intended to translate an alien landscape to eager and credulous Western women using the narrative genre and purporting to affirm the bonds of womanhood. Personal narratives by Americans about the Arab World have for centuries helped perpetuate the stereotypes that provided Khouri with a ready-made audience eager to validate as fact its notion of male Arab barbarity and inalterable female victimhood. Khouri, a seasoned con artist, thus discerned in the United States an opportunity to peddle certain images and profit handsomely from them.

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“A Brutal Desert Code of Behavior” Honor Lost was received in the American press with nearly universal praise. Such a reception intimates a deep misunderstanding arising from a long-standing misrepresentation of Arabs in the United States. In surveying various reviews, we learn that anybody with rudimentary knowledge about Jordan could have identified countless prevarications, and, more important, that Honor Lost was timed perfectly to suit the disposition of a nation embroiled deeply in the Middle East and desperately in need of an ameliorative narrative to mystify its imperial fantasies. The New York Times, for example, evinced a frightening propensity for both cultural and physical essentialization in describing Khouri as “a dark-haired woman with even darker eyes” and praising her for risking death “for violating a brutal desert code of behavior.”7 The article, with unintentional irony, went on to admire Khouri’s flawless American English and universalized her false story as a metonymical descriptor of Jordan in total: “Female chastity—and the appearance of chastity—is the bedrock of the culture’s code of honor.”8 This type of reductionism was repeated in a Publishers Weekly Reviews notice that commended Khouri for exploring Islam’s “rigidly determined, denigrating attitudes to women.”9 Kirkus Reviews condemned “Islamic society’s privileging of men and degradation of women” and recommended Honor Lost, “[a]n eye-opening indictment of Islam as ‘a totalitarian regime operating under the guise of a religion’ and of the mistreatment of women in the modern Arab World.”10 Booklist lauded Khouri for her “astounding” exposé on the “sadistic” cultural practices in Jordan.11 Perhaps, however, the more relevant notices ran in publications advocating American intervention in the Arab World. Those publications treated Khouri as an intrepid crusader because Honor Lost validated their incessant stereotyping of Arabs as innately violent. (Ironically, in using stereotypes as a pretext to urge the liberation of Arab women through preemptive invasion, neoconservatives aligned themselves with a version of feminism they otherwise abhor.) It turns out that Honor Lost merely validated the charges of racism frequently directed against neoconservative periodicals by Arab Americans and other communities. National Review Online, in a piece by Emmy Chang, even took the opportunity to reflect on the need for Arab nations to adopt capitalism as a steppingstone to civilization: “In the bustling streets of Amman, Jordan, however—where the events described in Honor Lost

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took place—men in Western suits drive Jeeps and schedule their business appointments by cell phone. Surely those old, brutal remnants [of Bedouin culture] have been wiped out by the civilizing forces of capitalism?”12 According to Chang’s logic, not even capitalism, the necessary precursor of modernity, has overcome a centuries-old Middle Eastern barbarity. Chang’s invocation of capitalism is noteworthy because it indicates that Honor Lost is prescriptive rather than solely descriptive; supposedly inherent in its story is a call to conquer tribalism with free-market development spearheaded by American expertise (i.e., corporate excess). The Arabs would thus have impetus, using Western technocratic capital, to overcome their raw cultural substructure. Such emphasis on the desirability of Westernization as the solution to Arab depravity was articulated in the Jerusalem Post by Ruthie Blum, who observed, “Honor Lost is a book about the state and status of women in Jordan. It is also a must read for anyone who harbors illusions about the Hashemite Kingdom being a Westernized, democratizing Arab country.”13 The inability of Arabs to yet overcome their inferiority despite continuous American urging, and at times military intervention, is cause for vicious scolding and simultaneously reflects a host of anxieties about the Arab enemy so meticulously invented in the United States. Condemning the “rage that underlies the misogynistic culture of Arab men,” psychiatrist Irwin Savodnik carried Blum’s observation to its logical conclusion by treating Honor Lost as a scientific theorem: “Khouri’s account makes graphically clear the moral gap separating the West from the Arab world.”14 Savodnik later remarked, “She makes it clear that whether we understand it or not, the moral organization of the Arab world raises the question of whether or not the West can ever reach an accommodation with it.”15 Leaving aside Savodnik’s totalization of “the West” (by which he really means a particular conception of the United States) and his idolization of inaccurate material, we are left wondering what type of “accommodation” Savodnik had in mind (he apparently never considered the possibility that Arabs might have reacted skeptically to his generosity). By “accommodation,” does Savodnik mean mutual dialogue, normally the process by which accommodation is generally understood to occur? It appears that Savodnik actually had in mind the silencing of the “antiglobalists, multiculturalists, and postmodernists” who believe in the ability of Arabs to govern themselves, and, more immediately, the appropriation of the Middle East into permanent American patrimony.16 Here market and cultural forces achieve a symbiosis that supplements preexisting dogmas about the autochthonous

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incivility pervasive throughout the Middle East. That the inspiration for such an argument turned out to be a fraud has not derailed the forward march of the exceptionalists intent on reconfiguring the Middle East; it has merely inspired them to reinforce the mythos of American individualism, whose wisdom dictates that Khouri’s shortcomings are hers alone. In order to make better sense of the strange circumstances underlying the Honor Lost hoax, we might identify what it is about the book that reviewers and neoconservative commentators extolled so avidly. A few of Khouri’s passages will suffice to illuminate the imprudence of reading simply to verify as true certain prejudices that buttress a set of geopolitical interests whose imperatives demand the legitimization of stereotype. The first line of the book sets an appropriate tone: “Jordan is a place where men in sand-colored business suits hold cell phones to one ear and, in the other, hear the whispers of harsh and ancient laws blowing in from the desert.”17 Khouri insinuates that male Arab cruelty is incurable, as when she notes, “[Jordan’s] fierce and primitive code is always nagging at men’s instincts, reminding them that under the Westernizing veneer, they are all still Arabs.”18 Foregrounding Emmy Chang’s faith in capitalism, Khouri defines progress in terms of American commerce: “Amman did progress dramatically in the final decade of the twentieth century. New hotels and banks sprang up on virtually every city street. Computers equipped with the latest technology brought the quiet power to offices and homes everywhere, linking Jordanians to the larger world.”19 This paean to globalization is one of the few moments in the book where Khouri does not disparage Jordan as hopelessly backward, and it bespeaks a skillful con artistry attuned to the sensibilities of the target victim. The unreflective notion that corporatization of Arab cultures is a positive development is instructive of a specific Americanist prejudice; in the landscapes of American dialogues, this prejudice affirms without permitting a dissenting analysis that American encroachment into tribal or otherwise traditional cultures is beneficial to those cultures just as it so happens to benefit American economic interests. Other lines in the book are lies, as when Khouri claims that in Jordan “a woman dare not be seen by a male doctor”20 and that “[i]n a country that boasts of its modernity, a women’s decisions are still made by men. A man must authorize everything in her life, from the person she marries to her wardrobe.”21 Other lies include the assertion that in Jordan the Christian minority “must not build new churches or temples, or sound church bells”22 and the wildly exaggerated statistic that “each week one Jordanian woman is murdered for

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losing her chastity, whether she’s a victim of rumor or a victim of rape.”23 Khouri also notes that “Jordan discourages any stories about honor killing in the media,”24 an observation that Queen Rania, who appears routinely on Arabic and Western television to condemn the practice, must have found fascinating. Honor Lost also is defined by a religious intolerance that recalls a widespread Islamophobia in today’s United States, presumably to exploit that Islamophobia into book sales and lecture fees (“Khouri,” incidentally, means “priest” in Arabic). At one point she says of Islam, “I’ve never found it surprising that a religion founded by vicious warriors and scarred by centuries of bloodshed contains such endorsements of violence, and then wraps it in the dignity of ‘honor’—and of law—without a qualm.”25 In another widely quoted passage, she writes, “It is safe to say, I believe, that Islam is a totalitarian regime operating under the guise of a religion. The Koran is its manifesto, claimed by Islam to provide guidance for all that is needed for a person’s spiritual and physical well-being.”26 That this passage would become among the most cited from Honor Lost bespeaks with an almost shocking crudeness the phony story’s ability to affirm and then attempt to assuage the anxieties of America’s Christian majority. It likewise supports the propensity of would-be objective commentators to subsume Arab cultures within a rigorous type of Islamist violence disseminated by those commentators with equal rigor. Yet Honor Lost is most problematic—and, for many of its eager American readers, convincing—when Khouri brashly invents Arab cultural attributes based on either melodramatic rumination or a biologically determined epistemology.27 Amman’s Muslims would certainly be surprised to learn that “[l]ife in Dalia’s home was basically like life in all Muslim homes in Amman, regardless of class, money, or neighborhood. She wasn’t permitted to eat at the same table with, or at the same time as, the men in her household. She was to cook the meal and quietly serve it to them. Only when they had finished and left the room were she and her mother allowed to eat the leftovers.”28 Comparably, “All Arab men are taught that it is their responsibility to discipline the women in their lives, and that the best way to do so is through corporal punishment.”29 Conversely, American readers predisposed to anti-Arab racism found evidence for their predisposition when Khouri suggests that “in the Arabic culture love is not associated with anything beautiful; it is a means of control.”30 These same readers might have shuddered at the deeply wounding nature of this heartlessness when a wistful Khouri explains, “When I see people on the street free and open with their affections, holding hands, hugging

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and kissing, I catch myself thinking it is wrong and shameful. And yet I yearn to be that free, and to feel comfortable with it.”31 (A corrective note: in Jordan, it is common for male friends to hold hands publicly, displays of affection unthinkable in most parts of the United States.) I do not wish to dwell on the fact that Khouri’s lies and generalizations were accepted by nearly all publications that chose to review it, regardless of their political leanings, as evidence of Arab barbarity; I merely want to point out that in terms of its sensationalized narrative and its condition as an artifact of con artistry, Honor Lost is uniquely instructive even if it is not unique as either a fraud or a stereotypical document. It instructs us primarily on the influence of geopolitics on the publishing industry, but also on the multiple uses and effects of stereotype, the propensity of desire to overcome and eventually define truth, the emotionality of the act of reading, and the complicity of popular culture in the machinations of capitalist voracity and foreign policy. The multiple uses and effects of stereotype are particularly noteworthy, for even retrospective articles reflecting on the hoax reinforced some of the stereotypes that allowed the hoax to succeed in the first place.32 Stories in the Australian and American press, marveling at the clarity of hindsight, recalled that Khouri drank wine comfortably, thus implying that Arab women necessarily abstain from alcohol and are inauthentically Arab if they partake in supposedly Western customs (or, for that matter, if they demonstrate agency).33 Articles and commentaries also admitted that Khouri’s Westernized behavior should have tipped them off to the fact that she was dishonest about her background, thus implying that authentic Jordanians live in goat-hair tents devoid of plumbing and electricity. In reality, conscious readers should have been tipped off instead by the plethora of conspicuous stereotypes that Khouri imparted stoically as cultural exposition. The absence of such an admission indicates that the important lessons of the Honor Lost hoax have yet to be truly comprehended. The hoax also demonstrates the foolishness of ignoring Arab American voices, which popular and, in some cases, academic discussions do frequently. To be more precise, it demonstrates the foolishness—or possible strategic ingenuity—of substituting actual Arab and Muslim discourses (no matter their politics, which doubtless would be varied) with those invoked only to reinforce preexisting notions of Arab and Muslim incivility. The point here is not that Arab Americans have no criticisms of male Arab aggression or the institutionalized oppression of women in the Arab World; any quick survey of Arab American

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scholarship will reveal that nobody condemns such behaviors and practices more diligently.34 Nor is the point that Arab American scholars have some magical ability to divulge authentic cultural knowledge or feel some responsibility to portray Middle Eastern cultures favorably despite whatever evidence exists to the contrary. The point is that Arab American scholars help form the cultural apparatus that supposedly is under discussion; to ignore them, then, is to automatically omit critical perspectives. Moreover, in most cases Arab American scholars have real-life experience in the Islamic World and thus are equipped intellectually to detect both falsehood and romanticization; many also are more guarded than are American exceptionalists against stereotype and generalization, having at least an ontological interest in not dehumanizing themselves. I would argue that Arab Americans are so often disregarded in the United States because many of us challenge the commonsensical assumptions that form the rationale of American hegemony in the Middle East. We also remain in many cases a foreign or at least unfamiliar presence and thus are excluded readily from established intellectual paradigms. In any event, to disregard Arab Americans in discussion of Islam and the Arab World is simultaneously to risk essentialization under the guise of disinterest. In fact, only one corporate media review panned Honor Lost, and I hope not to be too causal in speculating that the reviewer’s ethnicity had something to do with it. (I likewise hope that it is not too causal to point out that none of the initial investigations into the veracity of Honor Lost was conducted by an American individual or newspaper.) An Iraqi American reviewer for USA Today, Yasmine Bahrani, questioned the sincerity of Honor Lost but stopped short of accusing Khouri of lying, having had no evidence to substantiate such an accusation. Bahrani did point out, though, that “Khouri’s story raises a number of issues it never resolves.”35 Bahrani further pointed out a number of contradictions that one need not have been raised in the Middle East to detect: the father traditional enough to commit an honor killing “allowed his daughter to assume such a non-traditional— and potentially compromising—role to begin with”;36 unisex salons are rare in Amman and their existence, in any case, would seem to belie the mentality that allows for honor killings; “Khouri asserts that the kingdom’s Christians must pay a special poll tax . . . but it hasn’t been imposed in Jordan in decades”;37 Khouri “explains Muslim concepts of purity by using the Urdu word for pure—pak—a word Arabs do not use and cannot even pronounce”;38 the author’s life should not be in danger if she comes from the Christian elite of Amman, where honor killings rarely occur. The grandest indictment to be made,

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then, in the aftermath of the Honor Lost hoax is not necessarily that the American liberal intelligentsia was so thoroughly fooled, but that the book reached such a wide audience of Australian and American women who rightly felt horrified by what it describes, thereby unwittingly institutionalizing stereotype in myriad local environments and developing a concept of gender equity in opposition to, and thus inspired by, the image of terrorized Arab women.

Reinventing the Simulacrum Honor Lost belongs to a transnational and multiethnic tradition that has served myriad sociopolitical functions. The very act of transmitting information about foreign cultures is bound to involve some misrepresentation no matter how well-intentioned the writer transmitting the information (or the native providing it). For this reason, the personal narrative—a long-standing form of cultural translation (and, in many ways, cultural production)—is one of the most exploited genres in the literary marketplace. It can be, depending on authorial choices and publishers’ marketing schemes, a genre reliant on what an imagined audience expects its author to have experienced; the author, in turn, often accrues an abundance of storytelling material attached to market forces that target specific demographic sensibilities. Let’s look briefly at the “transnational and multiethnic tradition” I cited in the previous paragraph, for it indicates that cultural translation is more nuanced than mere essentialization and more than merely an act of misinformation. Personal narratives sometimes assume vastly different forms based primarily on vastly different authorial intentions, although local and international politics also influence how ethnic subjects are to be (mis)represented. In the case of notorious Indian hoaxer Jamake Highwater, for instance, Highwater did not recount tales from Indian Country as an interloper but pretended to be Indian and therefore imparted supposedly authentic information. This type of narrative is common in Native literary history—as exemplified by the popularity of Asa (Forrest) Carter,39 the former KKK wizard turned Cherokee memoirist, Nasdijj, the ostensible Navajo memoirist,40 and Carlos Castaneda,41 the bestselling New Age guru— and induces cultural misrepresentation not necessarily through an essentialized gaze but through an ostensibly physical transformation in which the author imposes a stereotyped reality on the same world the author claims to inhabit.

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Other styles of American nonfiction, however, demarcate the author from those the author represents (or at times demarcate the author from his or her own audience). This type of nonfiction also often reinforces stereotyped expectations because even if the author aspires to objectivity, a number of factors—the author’s cultural biases and personal politics, the publisher’s marketing strategy, international relations—will likely render the final product little more than predetermined conclusions superimposed on an indigenous cultural landscape. Modern books about the Arab World such as Geraldine Brooks’s Nine Parts of Desire42 and Judith Miller’s God Has Ninety Nine Names 43 fit into this paradigm, as does, more conspicuously, Jean Sasson’s popular series about oil sheikhs and desert princesses. The counterpoint to this type of nonfiction is the investigative piece in which the author is demarcated from the community he or she represents, but pretends to belong to that community for the sake of journalistic discovery (John Howard Griffin’s and Grace Halsell’s forays into Black America exemplify this version of fake authenticity, as does, outside of color lines, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed).44 Yet another style of cultural translation in the American literary tradition involves stereotype as the byproduct of poetics, including the creative undertakings of Herman Melville and Mark Twain, who both attempted to unravel the American imagination in the unexplored mystique of the Holy Land. As Hilton Obenzinger observes in his seminal analysis of the authors, “Melville and Twain were well aware of how much Palestine was a particular ‘mania’ in the minds of so many Americans, and the fascination, along with the ambivalence and ironies with which they regarded such intense involvement with ‘sacred geography’ configure their own texts [Clarel and Innocents Abroad] in decisive ways.”45 The fascination Obenzinger discusses has long been a force in the production and reception of narratives that purportedly illuminate foreign spaces, although no foreign spaces have so fascinated (or terrified) Americans as the Arab World and Indian Country. Forays into these territories have played a defining role in the development of American literature, a reality Khouri exploited. And because of geopolitics, such forays into the Arab World have increased dramatically in the past few decades, another reality Khouri exploited. Khouri the storyteller knew how to spin a tale that would reverberate with modern Western sensibilities, particularly with Western women drawn to tales of heroic and subjected foreign women, and Khouri the charlatan saw in the manipulation of those sensibilities an excellent business opportunity. But neither the storyteller nor charlatan in

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Khouri could have performed so fantastically without the various traditions highlighted above. Although cultural translation has always defied aesthetic or even generic categorization, it has—in all its forms, whether memoir, poetry, or journalism—influenced the way Americans construct images of Eastern societies. And all personal narratives belonging to this tradition tap distinctly, sometimes unconsciously but often explicitly, into a particular cultural or political sensibility, a fact that usually determines where an author will travel and how that author will represent the people and places he or she encounters. The topical dimension of narratives that purport to impart cultural information is one reason they have comprised a commercially successful genre in the United States for over two centuries, and why publishers are now rushing to print wholly stereotyped accounts of Westerners in the monumentally simplistic Middle East. As Gillian Whitlock notes, “The idea that Islamic life narratives enter the West from the East—Middle, Central, or Far—and circulate to shape public opinion, reinforce stereotypes and present plots ‘custommade for our times’ suggests their potency as propaganda.”46 Khouri exploited these forces by positioning herself not as a traveler but as a native who fled the country where her narrative occurs. She invented a story with the ability to convince women in Western societies that whatever patriarchal indignities they experience are far preferable to the savagery of the Arab male. The following assertion, for instance, plays into fantasies of American enlightenment: “[Jordan is] a male-dominated world with very limited and controlled ‘freedoms’ for women.”47 This statement is demonstrably false, but believable in the United States because it corresponds with the misrepresentations of the Arab World promulgated ceaselessly in ostensibly disinterested commentary. Or, as Whitlock puts it, The hoax either misrepresents or concocts a trauma so that attention is drawn to the social, political and affective work of testimony—to its function as rhetorical effect, and a strategic response to an historical and social situation. These questions about what testimony is doing here and now as a commodity re-route what may seem to be the appropriate ethical response to narratives of trauma and abuse, in this case, attention to the practice of honour killing.48

Honor Lost, then, is apropos of theoretical multitudes. On the one hand, it highlights the inherent problem of textual representation. As Laura Browder puts it, “Both the reader and the writer of an ethnic autobiography understand the implied contract: the memoirist is not

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telling his or her own story as much as the story of a people. In order to be heard, the ethnic autobiographer must often conform to his or her audience’s stereotypes about that ethnicity.”49 On the other hand, Honor Lost complicates Browder’s implied contract because Khouri not only wrote stereotyped material, she also invented an essentialized narrator in order to validate the stereotyped material as authentic. The implied contract in Honor Lost, therefore, is paradoxical, as Khouri reinforced a set of cultural forces that demanded ostensible authenticity. Honor Lost thus connotes how textual representation often succumbs to what Browder calls “the tradition of American self-invention”50 and helps manufacture the stereotyped paradigms on which it later becomes dependent; or it “suggests how ‘right discourse’ can be used in bad faith in these times.”51 It would be impossible to fully appreciate Khouri’s hoax without assessing some of the cultural forces I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Whitlock argues that “[a] literary hoax is a definitive event; it brings to light the social, political and ethical investments of narrators, readers and publishers in life narrative.”52 No literary hoax can succeed without the perception of an imagined audience and a corresponding perception of the audience’s expectations. Nor can the literary hoax succeed without the authorial inventiveness it requires to exploit such expectations. Yet these expectations often are overlooked in analyses of literary hoaxes, given secondary billing to the exploitation perpetrated by the phony author (or material, if that is the case). If Arabs were not so horridly misrepresented in numerous aspects of American society, however, Khouri would have had no ability to invent a persona capable of exploiting sociocultural expectations. This ultimately is the point most worthy of our attention if we are to understand properly how Honor Lost faked its way to international prominence. In perpetrating her hoax, Khouri earned her credibility by legitimizing a long-standing American fantasy that its moral and cultural superiority can be substantiated vis-à-vis the barbaric East.53 This argument relies on the assumption that Arabs not only are misrepresented pervasively in the United States, but are misrepresented pervasively because the United States would relinquish its self-image without that misrepresentation. Honor Lost is a cultural artifact more than a mere literary hoax. It arose from the literary marketplace that granted Khouri credibility based on her ability to fulfill the needs and desires of today’s fantastical cultural forces in the United States. These needs and desires are inseparable from geopolitics and will only be exacerbated as the United States continues to involve itself further in

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the Arab World, thus strengthening the cultural forces that consign Arabs to the discursive simplicity of American foreign policy and that position them perpetually as the epistemic Other. A huge industry exists today based solely on providing to eager readers evidence of Arab intellectual and cultural inferiority. This industry draws much of its readership from the female Western demographic that Khouri and her publishers targeted, the same demographic that tunes into talk shows and documentaries that endeavor to expose the oppression of women in Eastern societies. We also have in Honor Lost an interesting example of how the notion of author as cultural translator functions. Anishinaabe essayist and novelist Gerald Vizenor and Arab American poet and literary critic Lisa Suhair Majaj have both been adamant in asserting that authors can never serve as viable cultural translators, and that even if they could such a role would be undesirable. Majaj, for instance, offers advice to Arab American authors by claiming that “we need not stronger and more definitive boundaries of identity, but rather an expansion and a transformation of these boundaries. In broadening and deepening our understanding of ethnicity, we are not abandoning our Arabness, but making room for the complexity of our experiences.”54 Majaj refuses to commodify identity as an expendable icon defined by the literary marketplace, a prudent refusal in light of Khouri’s faux authenticity. Nor does she reduce Arabness to a singular essence, as Khouri does throughout Honor Lost, preferring instead to infuse notions of Arabness with diverse characteristics, thereby rendering the act of cultural translation impossible. Likewise, in discussing phony Indian author Jamake Highwater, Vizenor points out that Highwater “may have opened doors with his spurious identities, but he also stole public attention, and his bent for recognition may have closed some doors on honest tribal people who have the moral courage to raise doubts about identities.”55 In his critique, Vizenor describes something of a hyperreality in which the simulacrum asserts more authority in representing Indians than do Indians themselves. The result is a marginalization of Indian voices that do not correspond with simulated notions of Indianness (a process, like the misrepresentation of Arabs, attached historically to geopolitics). Actual Indian voices, which are too diverse to ever describe in the singular, are therefore derided as inauthentic or ignored because they do not conform to invented reality. As a result, the literary marketplace for Indian authors is narrowed dramatically because actual Indian experiences sometimes are deemed incomprehensible by readers and editors.

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Honor Lost exemplifies a comparable situation for Arab American writers, for in choosing books about Islam and the Arab World most American readers do not want stories about the complexities of dayto-day life in the Middle East and migration to the United States (the focus of much Arab American literature), but prefer instead a simulated version of Middle Eastern reality in which irrational men engage in domestic abuse and subservient women silently mourn their hellish fate. Such preferences are abetted by the correspondingly ubiquitous stereotypes promulgated in popular culture, in movies and newscasts particularly. These stereotypes are themselves abetted by the need politically to manage perceptions of Arabs in the service of what is euphemistically dubbed the national interest. We can say, then, that Khouri’s narrative is not so much a journey as a projection, and that Khouri’s role as a double traveler has further enervated the imaginary but essential boundary separating the simulacrum from reality.

Arab American Interventions It would be helpful to explore briefly what sort of interventions might reduce the possibility of performances like Khouri’s (and those of other potential literary hoaxers). The easiest solution, of course, would be for authors to be honest about their identities and exacting in their writing, but, unfortunately, such a solution is simplistic and unrealistic; authors universally will become exacting when everybody on the globe becomes honest.56 Another solution would be for publishers to more thoroughly investigate their authors’ personal and literary claims, but this solution too is simplistic and unrealistic, for publishers ultimately are concerned with profitability; due diligence and a concerted effort to ameliorate stereotype would do little more than interfere with this objective. We are left, then, with speculation about our own, to use a controversial term, responsibility as literary authors and scholars, both to condemn literary hoaxes and, more important, to help create a dialogic intellectual culture in which forgeries are detected more readily. If some of us are uncomfortable conceptualizing ourselves as having any sort of fixed “responsibility,” a wariness I share, then it might be useful for us to re-envision the problem of literary hoaxing as affecting our interests as members of a profession devoted to the study of literature and the cultures within which literary production occurs. If, in other words, authorial con artistry is able to occur because of cultural forces affecting production in the literary marketplace, then literary scholars are at least partly implicated in the process of marketing

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sanctified cultural imagery. We are partly implicated because we cannot be removed from that process no matter how much some of us would like to believe we occupy a purer, more organic position. A better approach will acknowledge that belonging to a particular process confers on us some sort of power, however muted or miniscule, to alter its machinations. Let me limit this reflection to the issue of Honor Lost and the particular stereotypes it reinforced in the American imagination. Although the point is by no means trenchant, I assign some complicity to Khouri’s ability to hoodwink Americana to a profession that has failed to adequately incorporate the voices of Arab Americans and that has correspondingly failed to identify in academe and popular culture the sort of racism Khouri articulates and communicate its dangers to broader audiences. Is it part of the purview of literary scholars to do such things? Yes, for three main reasons: (1) the so-called culture wars and their affect on our ability to work freely have been the topic of numerous articles, books, and conference panels, yet few examinations of the culture wars interrogate the anti-Arab racism now central to their existence, thereby circumscribing the movement to preserve free expression and ensuring its ultimate failure; (2) the production of literary criticism and critical theory, however marginal its producers sometimes consider themselves, plays an important role in the literary marketplace, and so the literary marketplace could conceivably evolve toward the influence of critics who collectively have the ability to inscribe as legitimate certain texts and denigrate as worthless those that reinforce dominant stereotypes; and (3) even if the two previous points are unduly totalizing (if sincere), we must still consider the goal of any critical project, whatever else it is, as a largely edifying undertaking that enhances the reader’s understanding of a particular text, textual tradition, or sociocultural moment, or that problematizes epistemological certainties—and we cannot offer such a consideration if we do not concurrently acknowledge at least a tacit commitment to foster a literary culture in which phenomena like Honor Lost become unthinkable. I am arguing essentially against comfort, an emotion that, when unpacked and analyzed, usually warrants distress. Progressive, highly educated literary critics tend sometimes to take comfort in their openmindedness in the face of increasing American fundamentalisms, but comfort ultimately is an unsatisfactory derivative of antidogmatism. The dogmatism we reject personally and professionally, in other words, should induce us to deem criticism inescapable from the very sociocultural systems we scrutinize, as our theoretical formulae attempt to convince us. If we cannot escape the sociocultural systems

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we scrutinize and if we acknowledge, as Honor Lost forces us to do, that racism is both present and prevalent in American society, then it is philosophically impossible to claim that we have nothing to do with the dissemination of that racism. It is equally unconvincing to claim that we have no ability to alter the sociocultural systems that produce racism; if this is the case, then we must admit that the past thirty years of critical theory have been pointless. The comfort I denounce, then, is the illusion which tells us that individually rejecting racism is reason enough to self-identify as antiracist. A burgeoning Arab American Studies has had much to say about these matters, and I imagine that if, as I advocate here, the area study continues to develop it will, or should, continue to have much to offer by way of the demystification of literary stereotype. In any case, it is an area study, however fledgling and disorganized, that has included as part of its mission the destruction of both anti-Arab racism and the acceptance in sectors of academe of that racism as objective thought. It is therefore an area study worth watching in the coming years. One project worth undertaking for both Arab American and non-Arab American scholars is analysis of the culture wars currently engulfing universities in order to identify the extent to which anti-Arab racism either inspires various controversies or informs the perspectives of some of their participants. Such a project would go a long way toward determining the uses and usefulness of criticism as a participant in broader political issues. Honor Lost is an appropriate starting point, because it was not an isolated event (I refer to it consciously as an “event,” because the book, at least symbolically, had transglobal implications). It came into being only because the conditions in the United States encouraged, or demanded, its existence. These conditions should occupy our attention because our work is intertwined with their proliferation even while our self-styled anti-imperialist ethics belie them. Such are the strange circumstances of geopolitical encroachments and simulated representations. There are numerous ways we might turn our attention to literary con artistry inspired by the desire—nay, need—to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims, but, just for now, we all might emulate Saeed and avoid complicity in this dehumanization by taking refuge in the footnotes of our sacred traditions.

Arab American Observations Norma Khouri exemplifies the literary fictions about Arabs and Islam circulating seemingly unfettered in the United States. These literary fictions contrast starkly with the sort of fiction crafted by Arab

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American writers and other honest artists. Yet the fictions masquerading as truth appear to appeal to the majority of American literary consumers. I have discussed Khouri, then, because all the things Khouri signifies about the United States are in dire need of a cultural and historical corrective. This corrective, incidentally, already exists. It defines the body of modern Arab American literary fiction. The literary texts produced by Arab Americans provide the footnotes to our sacred traditions. They also provide our community a transgressive intertextuality that connects the vocabulary of art to the commonplaces of lived experience. Khouri claims that Honor Lost cannot and should not be conceptualized as fiction or as a novel. But even if it were a novel, it would have been a poor one, for the story relies on caricature to generate interpersonal conflict rather than on the nuances of gendered expectations in Jordan. In other words, if Honor Lost were a novel, I would have written this chapter, anyway.57 And the fact that it is replete with complete fiction but packaged as a true story affords us the opportunity to briefly assess some better examples of fiction produced by Arab Americans. I believe strongly in the viability of the Arab American novel as a site in which the cultural diversities and complexities of Arab America can be articulated and then assessed by people interested in understanding this ethnic community beyond the perspective of stereotype and the crudeness of marketing stratagems. Honor Lost set back Arab Americans because it revealed to us the type of simulated ethnic subjects many Americans want us to become; but it also provides us an opportunity to reject simulated ethnic performances and communicate to our American peers that the Arabs inhabiting the American imagination hardly resemble the Arabs who subsist in the world that humans actually inhabit. It is worth reiterating that Khouri’s invention of Arab culture marketed as faithful reality belongs to a long-standing tradition of cultural simulation in the United States, a tradition that has for centuries involved ethnic minority communities and that began to affect Arabs as the United States came into physical and political contact with the Arab World and with Arab Americans through immigration and, later, legislative initiatives related to the so-called war on terror. Perhaps one example gleaned from a personal experience will suffice to illustrate that this tradition, although gradually aimed at Arab Americans, continues to involve its original victims. In 2004, the regional state university at which I taught at the time hosted a widely publicized display of Edward S. Curtis’s photography. Curtis (1868–1952), a native of the town in which the university is located, is one of the most

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famous U.S. photographers, known for his ability to luminously capture human portraits in natural settings. These supposedly “natural settings,” however, portrayed Indian Country and in some cases amounted to simulated poses that Curtis arranged based on the myth of the noble Indian at peace with nature and the notion, popular in his day, that Indians eventually would die off because of American encroachment. Curtis has thus been accused in recent years of stereotyping his subjects based on a romantic altruism to record a pure way of life that would inevitably succumb to the westward march of progress.58 That the university proudly displayed Curtis’s photography was not necessarily problematic, for public celebration of a prominent artist is certainly within the purview of any university’s mission. It was highly problematic, though, that it chose to market the exhibit under the title “Visions of a Vanishing Race,” and did so without seemingly any awareness of its irony given that the university in which the exhibit was to appear is actively recruiting Indian students. The glossy promotional flyer distributed to announce the event had the title superimposed on one of Curtis’s renditions of an Indian on horseback riding into the sunset, a pose that Curtis was particularly fond of and that exhibits the philosophical symbolism of his romantic lament. Objections from a small but highly active student group, the Native American Cultural Awareness Association (for whom I served as faculty advisor), went largely ignored, and few professors on campus seemed aware of the harmfulness of conceptualizing Indians as a vanishing race trapped in an imaginary past. I would argue that the marketing scheme for the Curtis display was deemed effective and subsequently generated little controversy because the notion that Indians inhabit a quixotic universe of beadwork and horseback, and that this ostensible way of life will eventually disappear, is one of the major cultural referents Americans have traditionally utilized to make sense of Indians. This referent, which dates at least to the Puritan settlement of New England, is the exemplar of cultural simulation in North America.59 It created a environment in which a majoritarian desire for knowledge about the epistemic Other was expressed not through analysis of the Other based on autochthonous cultural frameworks but through incessant projection of what the majoritarian society wanted the Other to be based on how the Other could supplement the majoritarian society’s psychological needs and political aspirations. Arab Americans increasingly are affected by this sort of performance in opportune invention. It is up to Arab Americans, then, to disseminate

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the lessons wrought by the Honor Lost hoax, because if we don’t place it in the framework of its historical antecedents and its broader contemporary implications then it will continue to be viewed not as a systematic problem abetted by widespread misrepresentation but as an isolated occurrence undertaken by a dishonest individual. I indicated earlier that I view the development of Arab American fiction as a potential counterpoint to the fictions about Arab Americans that circulate pervasively in today’s United States. To be sure, this is a shaky argument, conferring to novelists a responsibility they neither requested nor likely desire, and ascribing to the genre of fiction a rather politicized engagement. By the same token, many novelists seem eager to engage political topics in their art, particularly the topics that influence communal misrepresentations. The situation I describe is slippery theoretically and can probably best be resolved by a discretion in which critics make varying judgments based on the individual texts under discussion. More generally, though, I would like to focus not so much on a novel’s intent, but on its effect. This move allows us to redirect our discussion away from political engagement and direct it instead at textual interplay. Or, to put it differently, I would argue that the existence of a body of Arab American fiction is itself a counterpoint to the fictions about Arab Americans that circulate pervasively in today’s United States because that body of fiction evinces a broad cultural apparatus that reflects various Arab American realities. The point is not so much to get people like Norma Khouri to quit engaging in hoaxes; as long as a large number of Americans remain exploitable by deifying cultural fictions there will be con artists happy to exploit them. The point is to reveal the truth—in whatever form it may take—encapsulated in Arab American fiction so the sort of environment that demands the existence of a Norma Khouri is rendered obsolete. We can take, for instance, Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection, a novel that does not shy away from violence in the Arab World or from reflection on gender roles in both the Near East and United States. Unlike Khouri, however, Ward creates a rich setting in which fundamentally human undertakings elicit a wide range of character choices that are familiar to readers as sincere, whether they are painful, as they often are, ambiguous, tentative, aggressive, or magnanimous. Ward invents a world that doesn’t merely recreate an imagined landscape; an actual landscape instead acts as the basis of her invented one. In The Bullet Collection, Ward treats gender as a foundational issue in the organization of societies in the Near East, but isn’t reduced to the patrimony of a Western gaze. Correspondingly,

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multiethnic and national perspectives—American, Lebanese, Armenian, Italian, Syrian—come together in the story, often resulting in discordance but just as often in a patchwork in which the complexities of the characters’ existence can be expressed outside the limits of expectation. Indeed, the storytelling dynamic Ward infuses into the narrative precludes temporal and philosophical simplicity, as when the main narrator, Marianna, realizes, “I would never know the truth, not the real truth, because it had become so altered by the telling.”60 Later, Marianna laments, “Nowhere is home, I tell myself. There is no such thing.”61 The disjunctions Marianna comes to accept, like the disjunctions in KOOLAIDS, are important dimensions of the Arab American experience in North America and can never ethically be reduced to mere lamentations of gender inequity or invitations for Arabs to enter into modernity. Like Ward, Diana Abu-Jaber highlights issues of gender and violence in her first novel, Arabian Jazz. The violence exhibited in Arabian Jazz is multidimensional, touching on such things as the burial of infants, the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the physical abuse of Arab American (and Onandogan) characters. (Abu-Jaber’s fictive insinuation that infanticide occurred in Palestine inspired some negative reaction among certain readers, who noted that no historical evidence justifies Abu-Jaber’s insinuation, a clear example of discursive heterogeneity and of the ability of fiction to provoke serious conversation.) Explorations of gender also are multidimensional and find expression in both American and Middle Eastern settings. Based on my own affections as a reader, though, I tend to read Arabian Jazz as something of a migratory story that captures with great verve and humor the nuances of passage from the Arab World to North America. (I would guess that most Americans who are children of Arab immigrants likewise respond to this dimension of the novel.) In creating a framework for migration and the cultural and spatial variances it inevitably produces, Abu-Jaber conceptualizes it as impetus for human progress and communication. Movement of body and spirit is a recurring theme for sisters Jem and Melvina and their immigrant father, Matussem: Who was her father, Jem wondered, in this country without shadows? Matussem flickered thin in the family mind, every step always the first, poised over his drums, raveling beats through the air, telling story after story through them, like Shahrazad, giving life. When we wasn’t telling fables, the girls heard their father’s stories about his childhood, about the way the enchantment of America had eventually drawn him across

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an ocean. “Every week the same movie! Flash Groodnan! Flash Groodnan! American spaces ships!” he said. “All the kids wanted to hear about. America.”62

Matussem’s frame of reference for comprehending the world is through the medium of story, a long-standing Arab mode of communication, and a means to find the sort of enchantment in imaginary new worlds that draw human travelers across oceans. The story, Abu-Jaber informs her readers, offers life. It then becomes the embodiment of its offering. It is this process of speaking life into existence that confers meaning to the inhabitants of her novel and to the readers who encounter them in its pages. I offer these summations of Ward and Abu-Jaber because the existence of their fiction ultimately is an excellent response to the fictions disseminated by Khouri. The Bullet Collection and Arabian Jazz are quite different in pace, theme, and setting, and yet both novels embody the diversities that have come to define the Arab American literary tradition. Both novels, more important, approach cultural and aesthetic phenomena with a rigorous honesty evident in the tenor of their narratives. For this reason, they are comparable despite being different. This comparability derives not from the intents underlying their authorship, but from the effects of their authorship in a literary space of their own creation. This distinction ultimately separates The Bullet Collection and Arabian Jazz from Honor Lost; all three are examples of fiction, but one of them failed to create a literary space in which it could subsist on the merits of its authorship. With the amount of stereotype about Arab Americans in existence in the United States, I am wary of suggesting that Arab American scholars work actively to demystify texts like Honor Lost that tap into deep-seated cultural misgivings because such an endeavor might occupy so much time that no effort will be available to focus on more important features of Arab America, such as its literatures and cultural diversities. I will therefore modify that suggestion and urge my peers and colleagues to actively demystify the environment that induces the deep-seated cultural misgivings exploited by texts like Honor Lost. How might this goal be accomplished? It is impossible to provide a sweeping answer, but reasonable perhaps to speculate that we can attain at least minor success simply by highlighting the reality of our fictions and the fact of our diversities.

CHAP TER

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Escaping Inadequate Spaces: Anti-Arab Racism and Liberating Fictions

Throughout this book, I have been referencing various instances of racism directed at Muslims, Arabs, and Arab Americans without producing a sustained analysis of it, something I will do in the first part of this chapter. In the second part of this chapter, I will evolve the analysis of anti-Arab racism into a discussion of Joseph Geha and Laila Halaby, two authors who explore the dialectics of acculturation and integration in Arab America. Such a methodology attempts to highlight how social phenomena in Arab America are appropriated into thematic dynamics in Arab American fiction. I am interested in determining how popular images of Arabs in the United States influence perceptions of the Arab American community; and how, in turn, these perceptions are either contradicted or re-imagined by Arab American writers who explore the complex positioning of the Arab in American society and therefore offer examples of fiction that liberate Arab America from the limitations of established perception. Geha and Halaby do not merely write fiction that liberates an ethnic community from the established perceptions that confine it to a limited space; they write fiction whose mere existence challenges the fictions about Arab America that allow commentators in American society to reinvent the limited space to which Arab Americans frequently are confined. This space is an important feature of Arab America in two senses: it has helped define the community to nonArab Americans and it has inspired significant artistic and academic responses that attempt in different ways to broaden established perceptions about Arab Americans. The artistic attempts are of special interest because we cannot assume in all cases that they are attributable to authorial intentions, and so critics are tasked with assessing how

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interplay among outside notions of Arab America and Arab American exposition of the same community function inevitably (but never unknowingly) within disputed epistemological locations.

The Mythos of National Pride Since 9/11, Arab Americans have evolved from what Nadine Naber once described as “ ‘the invisible’ racial/ethnic group”1 of the United States into a highly visible community that either directly or indirectly affects America’s so-called culture wars, foreign policy, presidential elections, and legislative tradition. Although diverse religiously, culturally, geographically, economically, and politically, Arab Americans generally have been homogenized in various American discourses as an unstable Southern/Third World, that is, foreign, presence. Also after 9/11, patriotism in the United States has been defined in the public sphere as acquiescence to geopolitical interests masquerading as moral imperatives. In turn, most Americans who would consider themselves patriotic formulate the mores of their national self-identification in opposition to the sanctified mirage of Arab barbarity. The Arab is an ethnic icon manufactured painstakingly in the United States since the nineteenth century, an icon that was expedited into political eminence after 9/11. The Arab thus exists both consciously and unconsciously in the philosophical contradictions evident in notions of American exceptionalism and its exclusionary reality. Likewise, Arabs in the United States have inherited a peculiar history of exclusionary self-imaging developed during hundreds of years of dispossession and ethnic cleansing in North America that gathered further momentum from within the institutions of slavery, segregation, and an especially resilient anti-immigration mentality. Anti-Arab racism is, as a result, fundamental to American race relations. Seven years before 9/11, Ronald Stockton surveyed archetypes of the Arab image in cartoons and other examples of popular culture and concluded that “an exceptional proportion of all hostile or derogatory images targeted at Arabs are derived from or are parallel to classical images of Blacks and Jews, modified to fit contemporary circumstances.”2 Based on Stockton’s argument that anti-Arab racism is derivative, it would be foolish to conceptualize anti-Arab racism as a byproduct of 9/11. A more responsible conceptualization will locate anti-Arab racism within a heterogeneous and multitemporal complex of historical factors, although it is clear that 9/11 stratified preexisting attitudes about Arabs (both positive and negative), thereby transforming Arab Americans into discursive tropes invoked to justify various political agendas. 9/11 provided left-liberals and multiculturalists an opportunity

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to reference violence against Arabs (and those identified mistakenly as Arab) to argue for inclusiveness and tolerance, and later to argue for the less admirable cause of electing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, himself a purveyor of anti-Arab racism. On the other hand, conservatives, particularly neoconservatives, invoked 9/11 as evidence of Arab perfidy, and later as evidence of the need to retain George W. Bush to protect “us” from “them”—given the context, “them” is a chilling pronoun spoken inevitably without nuance or modification, acting as the epistemic Other employed to define the White, Christian “us.” We would be foolish to construe as newfangled this sort of xenophobic hysteria denoting a supposedly vanquished racism, nor is it particularly wise to attribute it to a rightwing lunatic fringe. Democrats during the 2004 elections also pandered to Americans’ fear of Arabs. 9/11 provided an ostensibly empirical pretext to legitimize anti-Arab racism, but in no way did 9/11 actually create anti-Arab racism; 9/11 merely validated it. Indeed, if we return to Stockton we find countless examples of anti-Arab racism before 9/11 that recall nineteenth-century anthropological essentialism. Likewise, in the same year Nabeel Abraham documented an extraordinary range of “racism, prejudice, and hate violence” toward Arabs that transcends “the activities of fringe white supremacists and race groups.”3 Abraham’s study helped pioneer analysis of Arab American alterity, but is particularly noteworthy because it is one of the first scholarly articles to cohesively utilize the term anti-Arab racism. (Stockton, by contrast, concerns himself largely with stereotype and negative imagery, although he explores the Othering of Arabs in much of its historical complexity.) Central to my thesis, Abraham suggests “that anti-Arab racism in contemporary society is not only a fringe phenomenon, but extends to mainstream society as well.”4 This suggestion is germane in the post-9/11 United States, where a preexisting anti-Arab racism evolved from a troublesome but politically immaterial phenomenon into a discursive participant in countless issues of great national import (e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, elections, support for Israel’s garrison occupation, homeland security). Let’s look momentarily at the features of this anti-Arab racism, keeping in mind that those features precede 9/11 and were in many cases strengthened by it (the following observations arise mainly from detailed surveys of American print media from 9/11 through 2004): ●

Anti-Arab racism is, as Stockton illustrates, derivative, “piggybacking” the racism introduced to the New World with the dispossession of Indigenes and the enslavement of Africans, and

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later deriving an origin in the historical animosities at play throughout American history among the White majority and various ethnic groups, including Jews, Hispanics, and Asians. Anti-Arab racism, like all sociopolitical phenomena, is also unique, having developed its discrete qualities based on what Hilton Obenzinger calls a “Holy Land mania”5 in the nineteenth century inspired by the travelogues of Protestant missionaries and writers such as Mark Twain, John Lloyd Stephens, William M. Thompson, and George Sandys. Travel narratives to the Arab World have long been tainted by stereotypes inscribed methodologically into supposedly neutral anecdotes of discovery, methodologies still apparent in travel narratives by Geraldine Brooks, Judith Miller, David Pryce-Jones, Jean Sasson, and, infamously, Norma Khouri, the con artist whose fabricated tale of an honor killing in Jordan was assessed in chapter 3. These stereotypes, in the nineteenth century and today, merely fulfill the stereotyped expectations of American readers, indicating that the audience’s role in the travel narrative is as crucial as the foreign topographies transmitted to the audience by a mythically curious adventurer. Historically, this adventurer writes his audience’s expectations onto the places he is discovering on the audience’s behalf. As Steve Clark notes, “Travel reference is to do with world-coherence: the book projects a world, and it is the ethics of inhabiting that alternative domain that are primarily at stake.”6 Anti-Arab racism now is symbiotic with geopolitics. The mythos of national pride generated by American politicians and marketed as a peculiarly violent patriotism would lose its rhetorical power without their manufacturing a fear of the irrationally hostile Arab. Although geopolitics have always played a crucial role in both the creation and justification of various forms of American racism, they are more explicitly at play in the legitimization of anti-Arab racism after 9/11. In fact, anti-Arab racism gained a moral validation the moment the American capitalist system came into contact with the resources of the Arab World, just as that racism grew out of a long-standing xenophobia the moment the first Arab arrived in North America. Anouar Majid points out how this economic activity often manifests itself philosophically, writing, “The wellmeaning journalists and scholars who think that capitalism is the solution to extremism are in fact prescribing the wrong medication. Capitalism, or its dominant euphemism, globalization, is what produces extremism.”7 He further illustrates that globalized


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paradigms for transcultural interchange fail if we do not challenge the very assumptions on which those paradigms generate their authority: “Yet not to challenge ‘globalization’ is to nourish the conditions for more violence and terror, not simply along the fault lines of cultures and religions, but across the entire globe and within all nations.”8 This argument, increasingly common in analyses of American racism, attempts to be a corrective to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “the imperial imagination.”9 Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s notion of the mutual construction of identity, Tuhiwai Smith notes that the development of a majoritarian identity can only occur through the marginalization of minorities, an opportunity that Arabs have endowed White Americans in the United States historically and that Arab Americans endow patriotic Americans today.10 Unlike other forms of racism in the United States, anti-Arab racism finds mainstream expression in nearly all print and visual media. This is not to make the foolish argument that racism against other ethnic minorities is muted or exists only outside the mainstream of the United States, but to identify a distinction among anti-Arab racism and its various counterparts by highlighting issues of access and accountability. Anti-Arab racists— including, one could argue, a great many elected politicians— have access to vital forums in the public sphere, where they frequently air derogatory opinions about Arabs with little, if any, public outcry. In fact, I would argue that airing derogatory opinions about Arabs has actually enhanced the appeal of numerous public figures, among them Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, Daniel Pipes, Don Imus, Ann Coulter, Steve Emerson, Stanley Kurtz, and Bill O’Reilly. This lack of accountability, more evident in discourse about Arabs than any other ethnic group with perhaps the exception of Natives, strengthens what Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor calls “manifest manners.” Vizenor writes, “Manifest manners court the destinies of monotheism, cultural determinism, objectivism, and the structural conceits of savagism and civilization.”11 The “structural conceits” Vizenor critiques have long consigned Arabs to biologically determined fantasies of Eastern barbarism. The biggest progenitors of anti-Arab racism in the United States today are Zionists (both Christian and Jewish), a fact that further enables us to situate anti-Arab racism in the framework of foreign settlement and its attendant manifest manners. Whereas most American Jews subscribe to multiple, competing versions of

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Zionism, some racist and others liberatory, Christian Zionists have overwhelmingly transformed anti-Arab racism from social phenomenon into theological pathology.12 We do well to remember that Christian Zionists sustain a Messianism in existence in North America since the days of Cotton Mather and have now translated their covenantal sophistry into a newfangled foreign policy mandate—with, of course, the aid of their Israeli and American Zionist beneficiaries, both willing to ignore their end-times fate for the sake of a fragile alliance catering to the worst aspects of Henry Kissinger’s realpolitick. This foreign policy mandate would be unfeasible without a profoundly embedded anti-Arab racism accepted as natural by both Zionists and much of the American public. Although anti-Arab racism is evident most conspicuously in the eras of modernity and postmodernity, it is a premodern phenomenon. I noted in the previous paragraph that we can trace its origin to the early settlement of North America if we contextualize it within certain expressions of American exceptionalism. Before the establishment of the United States, however, geopolitical interventions off the Barbary Coast can be seen as direct antecedents of modern and postmodern anti-Arab racism. As Majid observes, “Barbary corsairs seriously affected U.S. vital commercial interests and consumed the best minds of the new nation. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson were authorized by Congress under the Articles of Confederation to deal with the Muslim ‘terrorists,’ as Gaddis Smith recalls the episode.”13 Noting that “Muslim pirates once were declared enemies of the human race,”14 Majid does not decontextualize these conflicts from the modern animosities among Americans and Arabs, a sensible approach that allows us to identify more precisely the machinery of both Orientalism and Islamophobia by interrogating the foundations of anti-Arab racism. Anti-Arab racism sometimes has the ability to reduce Arabs to tropes that are invoked to rationalize or mystify various political agendas. In today’s globalized marketplace (of both finances and ideas), Arabs often hold an irresistible appeal to those wishing to disguise their own interests as pragmatism or construe them as universally beneficial. This situation has produced contradictory narratives that cannot be comprehended without simultaneously considering the scope and function of anti-Arab racism. If, for instance, a company stands to profit from the occupation of Iraq, that company likely will support the occupation and spin the


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support as commonsensical or altruistic. In so doing, it will either directly or obliquely foster anti-Arab racism. If the same company, however, stands to profit from normalized American relations with the dictatorial Saudi royal family (which is the case with Boeing, Halliburton, Bechtel, ExxonMobil, and numerous other corporations), then that company likely will romanticize or favorably stereotype Arabs and correspondingly spin such portrayals as commonsensical or altruistic. This favorable stereotyping also fosters anti-Arab racism (sometimes directly but often implicitly). These variegated features of anti-Arab racism illustrate that it is heterogeneous functionally and philosophically. It is foolish to reduce it merely to ethnic or religious acrimony. Although anti-Arab racism is in many ways transcontextual, as are all forms of social exchange, it can be located most frequently (and fruitfully) in the spaces of American history in which the ideology of common sense competes with claims of commonsensical intuition.

The Underpinnings of National Pride About the effects of 9/11 on Arab Americans, Carol Khawly of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) writes, The horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 have had a severe impact on our nation’s traditional openness to immigrants and nonimmigrants. Immediately after the attacks, the Arab-American community and those immigrants from the Arab or Muslim worlds, experienced an unprecedented backlash in the form of hate crimes, discrimination and various civil liberties violations. . . . The [American] government also instituted a series of discriminatory policies and administrative measures, which targeted specific immigrant communities in the United States, mainly the Arab-American and South Asian communities.15

Khawly’s report is useful materially, but poorly conceived methodologically. Though acts of discrimination against Arabs and South Asians (among others) undoubtedly increased after 9/11, we fail to identify the scope of the problem by employing public relations gambits that assess discrimination solely in the context of the event that induced it. A better approach will question the “nation’s traditional openness to immigrants and non-immigrants” and the purportedly “unprecedented backlash” Khawly condemns.

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One wonders, first of all, toward which groups the “nation’s traditional openness to immigrants” was directed. Nineteenth-century Irish and Italians? Early-twentieth-century Syro-Lebanese? Eastern European Jews? Ethnic Japanese after Pearl Harbor? Vietnamese Americans during the invasion of Indochina? South Asians and African Muslims in the decade before 9/11? In reality, the American polity has been quite inhospitable to immigrants since the first days of the United States. This isn’t to say that immigrants haven’t succeeded in various ways in the United States throughout its history, or that hospitable acts do not occur frequently; I would like to suggest instead that totalizing the history of immigration, particularly immigration from the Southern Hemisphere, as traditionally peaceful distorts not only the historical record, but also any proper understanding of the backlash against Arab Americans that Khawly hopes to end. We are best able to understand anti-Arab racism across sociopolitical boundaries and, more immediately, in a continuum that acknowledges the cyclical orientation of American history. In so doing, we might recognize why anti-Arab racism exists rather than merely where it exists and in what capacity. Our methodology in this quest must begin with the moment Europeans landed in North America and continue until we encounter the latest Israeli settlement constructed illegally in Palestine. Ania Loomba has made some useful comments on the probity of comprehensive historical analysis. In Colonialism/Postcolonialism, she writes, “Despite their belief in the social grounding of ideas, many intellectuals are not willing to abandon the notion of a human subject capable of knowing, acting upon and changing reality. But innocence and objectivity do not necessarily have to be our enabling fictions. The more we work with an awareness of our embeddedness in historical processes, the more possible it becomes to take carefully reasoned oppositional positions.”16 In a slightly different framework, Satya P. Mohanty suggests that “we need to be wary of those overly abstract universalist visions of morality or social justice which focus on only the most general features that the various social groups (or individuals) have in common and exclude consideration of relevant particularities, relevant contextual information.”17 Loomba and Mohanty both theorize the possibility of meaningful social critique despite the deterritorialization of meaning wrought by Western postmodernism and poststructuralism, a possibility both authors believe to be viable if advocates of meaningful social critique engage the totality of historical movements rather than enabling notions of disinterestedness or objectivity.


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Indeed, I would argue that feigning objectivity in any critique of anti-Arab racism merely strengthens the racism. If cultural criticism throughout the twentieth century has illustrated anything of value, it is that racism and its modes of exploitation are interconnected with a host of ancillary concerns—capitalist voracity, religious discourse, sexual anxiety, historical competition—that both consume and substantiate the racism.18 Those ancillary concerns have created in the United States a national pride predicated on the convergence of patriotism and a Messianic foreign policy akin to the nineteenth-century European quest for Empire—a national pride, then, that invariably is committed to the proliferation of anti-Arab racism because without that racism its existence has no convincing justification (and its practitioners no ideological certainty). Racism, as writers from Elizabeth Cook-Lynn to bell hooks have illustrated,19 is never limited to particular social or discursive movements, nor is it ever rooted in consistent sites of cultural or linguistic production. Any comprehensive survey of popular opinion in the United States over the past decade (a time frame that purposely straddles 9/11) will demonstrate that the blatant anti-Arab racism of the political Right is, using a vocabulary appropriate to specific political agendas, reinscribed continually in the discourse, or at least the ethos, of mainstream and progressive media. For instance, left-liberal publications such as Dissent, Tikkun, The Nation, and MoveOn.org have been guilty of expressing racist attitudes either in the form of support for Palestinian dispossession or by totalizing all Arabs and Muslims as potential terrorists; or the racism arrives subtly by precluding Arabs from speaking on their own behalf. A similar guilt is shared by mainstream (supposedly liberal) publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, and Slate.com, who, given their corporate obligations, cannot realistically be expected to attack anti-Arab racism when it is so fundamental to the interests of American capitalism (and to the survival of the publications). Of major concern to this chapter is the recognition that, in keeping with the seminal work of Louis Althusser20 and Terry Eagleton,21 we cannot seriously interrogate racism by attributing it solely to one political ideology without analyzing how the racism is interpolated through a multitude of discourses to the benefit of various ideologies. Beyond this intercultural observation, we can say that anti-Arab racism has specific historical dimensions that render it unique even as it has been an inheritor of countless tensions and anxieties. Some of those dimensions—travel narratology, Orientalist scholarship, imperialism— have been discussed by others in some detail;22 the dimension

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I invariably find most interesting is the relationship of anti-Arab racism with settler colonization, both in the New World and Holy Land. This relationship indicates that a centuries-old Holy Land mania in the United States not only facilitated what Cook-Lynn calls anti-Indianism,23 but has allowed the anti-Indianism to evolve into support for a new Messianic conquest that positions today’s Arabs in a fascinating theological continuum. If Natives were the first victims of racism in North America, then Arabs, the new schematic evildoers, are merely the latest to be the first.

The Disaggregation of National Pride It can be said rather trenchantly that syncretism is a definitive—or, more accurately, indefinite—feature of anti-Arab racism. We can best understand that syncretism by examining it in the context of some theoretical propositions about racism and the recent globalization of American society. According to the tenets of contemporary literary theory—or, critical theory, depending on one’s tastes—various sorts of fragmentation paradoxically define an increasingly globalized community: cultural, geopolitical, intellectual, religious, and so forth. That is to say, analysis cannot be so easily compartmentalized into universalistic paradigms because the globalized marketplace has precluded isolationist worldviews even while it nurtures a wide range of economic and political inequality. Racism, itself continually in transit, needs to be contemplated in the framework of this reality. To examine the societal underpinnings of anti-Arab racism, then, is to immediately acknowledge that we have decompartmentalized a seemingly concrete institution (the terms attitude or mentality might work in place of institution, but I prefer institution because it demands the recognition of societal in addition to discursive factors). Vincent B. Leitch takes up these issues in his book Theory Matters. Although Leitch doesn’t concentrate in any specific way on racism, he offers some observations about both theory and society that would assist in any serious exegesis of racism in general and anti-Arab racism in particular. Noting a “wider disorganization characteristic of Western societies in recent decades,” Leitch argues that today’s critical paradigms in turn connote “a form of disaggregation that renders pastiche arguably our dominant organizational mode.”24 Essentially, Leitch alerts us to the reality that just as the world is disorganized, or disaggregated, our analyses of it invariably assume something of a postmodern intertextuality that itself intimates disorganization. Leitch’s argument adopts an interesting element when we render it mobile, as we are able to do when contemplating the origin and


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evolution of anti-Arab racism. I would argue that anti-Arab racism has pervaded the very discourse of national fulfillment in the United States; as such, it has become a disaggregated institution, or a series of institutions, at play—sometimes subtly but often explicitly—in a host of purportedly tangible certainties, such as patriotism, religious devotion, and the national interest. Since I believe that anti-Arab racism is indispensable to those who disseminate it (on both the Right and Left), it would be unwise to homogenize its indispensability by attributing it solely to, say, Christian Zionists, when all available evidence suggests that it tacitly recreates itself in countless discourses focused in some way on patriotic obligation. In this sense, the disaggregation underlying anti-Arab racism bespeaks a remarkable versatility. At the very least, anti-Arab racism is common, and in its commonplaces we are faced with the totality of all that is fundamentally American. The Arab American community fits into these complicated equations with more immediacy than foreign Arabs and non-Arab Americans. The vigilantly synthetic American consciousness would, in its present form, be impossible without the by now tired strategy of demonizing the Other—in this case Arabs, all of whom, according to the totalized pronoun usage common in the United States, are terrorists. On the other hand, the painstakingly manufactured images of an innately terroristic Arab World would be impossible without the dialogically opposed images of all-American communities, which increasingly are being defined according to attitude and behavior rather than simply by ethnicity (although the Whiteness and Christianity underlying this imagery has by no means dissipated). Where, then, do Arab Americans fit in this transglobal dialectic? The most accurate response may be nowhere. For this reason, Arab Americans are the exemplars of globalized disaggregation. Arab American disaggregation facilitates anti-Arab racism, for politicians invoke Arab Americans to justify draconian legislation intended to curtail civil liberties, but simultaneously to extol the American values that mystify imperialism in the Arab World. If we trace anti-Arab racism to the settlement of the New World, however, we are confronted with more than disaggregation and unstable dialectics. We are in the presence of tradition. This particular tradition has survived over 500 years and regenerates itself despite repeated predictions of its extinction because racism has always been fundamental to the survival of the American polity. The United States has advanced to a stage in which anti-Arab racism most expediently facilitates the invention and fulfillment of a corporatized national interest. It bears mention that George W. Bush would not have won

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reelection in 2004 without the existence of anti-Arab racism, and that his opponent, John Kerry, attempted vigorously to compete by manufacturing his own version of anti-Arab racism vis-à-vis the issues of civil liberties, foreign policy, and Israel’s settlement of the occupied territories. The fact that Bush’s anti-Arab racism rarely went mentioned and that Kerry’s was virtually unseen underscores the fact that it is prevalent to the degree of normalcy today in American society. Indeed, the interests of U.S. corporations in the Arab World contribute significantly to the globalized economic models that render many sectors of the American Left and Right complicit in the dissemination of anti-Arab racism. But how, we might ask, does this racism function morally, the major question I have thus far ignored? Kwame Anthony Appiah offers some insight into this question by highlighting what he considers racism’s two primary moral dimensions, extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic racists, Appiah writes, “make moral distinctions between members of different races because they believe that the racial essence entails certain morally relevant qualities.”25 Extrinsic racists believe that people of different backgrounds acquire certain inborn characteristics that warrant appropriate treatment (or mistreatment)—Arabs, for instance, are born terroristic and therefore need to be treated accordingly, with either wariness or force. Intrinsic racists, on the other hand, “differentiate morally between members of different races, because they believe that each race has a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence.”26 Intrinsic racists, then, are similar to pluralists as they are defined by David Hollinger;27 they approach various interactions based on the moral status they assign their own group in opposition to those they imagine of others. Appiah’s categories, first of all, are not mutually exclusive, nor are they comprehensive. They do, however, permit us to identify some of the moral underpinnings of anti-Arab racism, which in many ways is similar to a range of better-known racialist dogmas spanning nineteenth-century cultural anthropology to twentieth-century colonial discourse. We can say, perhaps too obviously, that anti-Arab racism is both extrinsic and intrinsic, an acknowledgment that helps us to disengage it a bit from contemporary notions of patriotic duty or national destiny. Anti-Arab racism often is extrinsic, as evidenced by the inexcusable popularity of the late Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind,28 a positivistic analysis of Arab behavior not unlike Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous The Bell Curve,29 or even Ales Hrdlicka’s field work in Indian Country.30 Intrinsic racism,


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however, is no less a factor, as evidenced by the moral valuations employed by American Messianists who have invented a hierarchized moral taxonomy, with the Arab as evildoer and the Jew positioned strangely as the hero who nevertheless must ultimately succumb to a preconfigured truth. Years ago, Amilcar Cabral noted that “culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated.”31 Cabral’s conflation of political desire and cultural manifestation is no less true today, even across space and time, which indicates that a moral paradigm of enlightenment indeed creates the reality of American domination of the Arab World, and, to a lesser degree, its marginalization of Arab Americans. But this marginalization is now contested in Arab America in oblique and explicit fashion, with one site of contestation, the genre of literary fiction, offering a particularly valuable range of insight into migration and marginalization. Joseph Geha and Laila Halaby might be considered Arab American fiction writers par excellence among the small collection who focus specifically on these phenomena.

Exploring Americana with Joseph Geha The issue of anti-Arab racism helps frame analysis of Arab American fiction because it casts light on the social circumstances in which communal self-images arise and thus influences at least indirectly the daily happenings that become literary themes. One of the more conspicuous themes to be employed in Arab American fiction is immigration, which has a long-standing relationship with racism in the United States. Joseph Geha and Laila Halaby both explore the movement of people from the Arab World to North America and in so doing they recreate the tensions that come into existence when supposedly alien cultures encounter those established through a nationalistic imagination. As a result, their fiction taps into some of the most fundamental components of how America is invented as a national entity and how, in turn, Americanness often is defined. I’d like to focus for a moment on this theme of immigration and its relationship with the broader tradition of Arab American literature. Although I am about to assess the dynamics of immigration in the work of two well-known Arab American authors, I am leery of inadvertently transporting the Arab American literary tradition into the category of “immigrant literature,” and of encouraging others to do the same. I dispute the labeling of this tradition as “immigrant

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literature” on pragmatic and epistemological grounds more than on philosophical grounds. Take me, for instance. Although I am a literary critic, I occasionally write a creative essay, which transforms me into an “author.” I would further self-identify as an “Arab American author”—fair enough, I imagine, since my father emigrated from Jordan and since I grew up surrounded by Arab immigrants and Arab Americans. I would never, however, self-identify as an “immigrant,” because I’m not one. I was born and raised in the United States; I speak English (and write in it) with a conspicuously American style; and my Arabic is, at best, middling (I have a passive understanding of it, which means I can understand it when it is spoken but have difficulty speaking it). There is a logical fallacy evident in this situation that extends to numerous situations beyond my own—the quandary, in fact, extends to every author who would self-identify as “Arab American” but not as “immigrant,” and so we have to explore seriously how these disjunctions disrupt certain taxonomies. I am aware that advancing a proposition in the framework of a personal concern often results in unwitting totalization, so I would like to note that my leeriness of an “immigrant” categorization extends beyond technical issues. I’m also concerned about issues of connotation. Whether we like it or not, the adjective “immigrant” connotes an Otherness, a not-quite-belonging, an in-between state of being, an alterity that is difficult to overcome—and I’m more interested in interrogating literature than in spending time attempting to alter terminological connotations. Other ethnic communities—Jews, Italians, Chicanos—have transcended categorization as “immigrant,” and I find in this transcendence a worthwhile goal for Arab Americans, who write frequently about immigration, true, but also write about myriad phenomena at play somehow in the American polity. Basically, categorizing Arab American literature within an “immigrant” rubric begs the question of when the literature will outgrow the categorization. The answer is simple: as soon as Arab immigrants have children who begin to write. “Immigrant literature” has a long history in the United States, and is still taught in English courses around the country. This history has involved numerous ethnic groups: Italians, Japanese, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, Jews, Chinese. “Immigrant literature,” however, is a transethnic classification; that is, courses arising from within this rubric use texts from a variety of ethnic and national traditions that are temporally specific, engaging the act of immigration and its many consequences both in the United States and the so-called mother countries. Arab American texts often will fit into this sort of


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rubric, but also into countless other rubrics that preclude the Arab American literary tradition from remaining limited to the consequences of immigration—Sitt Marie Rose, for example, the foundational text of modern Arab American fiction, doesn’t deal in any way with immigration, nor does Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki’s Fields of Fig and Olive (although her novel Tower of Dreams deals with immigration—to Kuwait from the United States, a fact that further complicates the conventional posture of “immigrant literature”). It can be a productive enterprise, then, to view individual Arab American texts as “immigrant,” but much more difficult to encapsulate the entire diverse Arab American literary tradition within such a classification. I prefer to tend to issues of immigration as they arise individually and not to systematic analysis of immigration as either a foundational or contemporary taxonomy. Essentially, I am advocating a more complex approach to Arab American literature, one that seeks the totality of its expression, a task that will require much more analysis than this book can accommodate. It’s wise to remember in any case that all literary categorizations have gaps and variables (including “Arab American”) and so it is probably not a good idea for critics to engage issues like categorization incessantly because Arab American literature has grown quite sophisticated and now offers us more interesting questions. As Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash note, it is fruitful to explore “what adjustments Arab-American writers are making, both in their own selfimage and the understanding of their Americanness, now that their Arabness has become more visible and is gaining a seemingly lasting presence.”32 The ultimate goal, according to Mattawa and Akash, is one that enhances the desire to engage Arab American literature in all its complexity: “Arab-American destiny will continue to come under Arab-American control so long as the image of the Arab-American comes increasingly under the control of Arab-American writers.”33 Lebanese American author Joseph Geha has had much to say about Arab immigration to the United States and the attendant questions that arise about Arab American destiny. His 1990 short story collection Through and Through: Toledo Stories is a remarkably adept portrayal of (mainly Christian) Arab American communities in Toledo and Detroit, and through its conflicts and character developments it explores profoundly the relationship of Arab immigrants with preexisting notions of Americanness. When Geha first began writing he had little interest in discussing either “immigrant” themes or Arab American characters. Only after a writing instructor suggested to him that he explore his background in his fiction did he draw inspiration

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from the community in which he was raised.34 This turn toward his origin is reflected in many of the scenes in Through and Through where characters sometimes feel caught between Arab cultural expectations and American norms of behavior. Many of the characters born in the United States also have a difficult time convincing their peers that they are properly American. One of Geha’s essays, “Where I’m From—Originally,” casts light on the philosophical implications of this type of situation. Geha starts his essay with a quote: “You’re not from around here, are you,”35 then goes on to describe a mild discomfort, or perhaps annoyance, at the conversation piece: The man puts it like a statement, but I recognize the question that’s being implied. Having lived “around here” [Iowa] for nearly a dozen years, I also know that if I don’t answer as expected, I’ll be leaving the door open for the outright questions that are certain to follow: “Where are you from?” and “No, but I mean, where originally?” Asked openly, I ought to add, in a friendly spirit. Even so, I’m still not used to it. I try a smile.36

The scene evolves into a verbal play in which Geha, recognizing both the sincerity and implied meaning of his colleague’s inquiry, refuses to answer straightforwardly, noting, “It’s not as if this man’s curiosity isn’t understandable. After all, I don’t look like I’m from around here; ‘here’ being a part of the country that is more familiar with a blond Scandinavian/Irish/German mix than with the olive skin and black curly hair common to people from Lebanon.”37 Geha later describes a 1971 visit to Zahle, Lebanon—“the town where I’m from— originally”38—and encountering locals who posed to him the same question as his compatriots in Iowa. Geha thus highlights an in-between state in which Arab Americans are not quite Arab according to their ethnic brethren in the Arab World and not quite American according to their co-national peers in North America. This sort of in-between state frames many of the conflicts that arise in Through and Through and speaks directly through the use of an artistic medium to many of the social concerns interrogated frequently in Arab America. The notion that Americanness entails specific physical characteristics and cultural practices is of particular importance, for it informs the majoritarian impulses in the United States that have always precluded a valid multicultural national identification. It is no accident that Geha encounters these impulses in exchanges with people of European origin. Nor is it an accident that


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he only hesitantly entertains these impulses despite their polite intentions because he understands that to entertain them is simultaneously to Other himself according to the dictates of an exclusionary nationalism that will render him an outsider until it, or he, finally disappears. Fictively, this type of situation arises most explicitly in the story “Almost Thirty.” The story touches on the difficulties Arab Americans sometimes experience in running up against established notions of Americanness. It also reveals that we should never assume that integration into U.S. cultural norms is a desire among all Arab immigrants, for in the story Arab American characters work consciously to avoid becoming completely “American,” a decidedly undesirable identity according to their ethos. The narrator, Haleem, for instance, informs readers that Braheem Yakoub’s “nephew Habeeb took over [Braheem’s] store. In later years Habeeb would be the first of our family to marry an American, and Aunt Afifie would refuse to go to the wedding, saying that Habeeb had become crazy like the Americans.”39 Haleem also recalls that his father, Rasheed, “would grumble and devote long Arabic curses to the snow of this country, how it never stopped coming, how it stayed when it came, until my mother would tell him to hold his peace, or at least curse in English for the children’s sake.”40 In another scene, Haleem and his cousin George “drove to a tavern near the university. It was closing time, but the bartender let us in. I knew him from school. His name was Johnny O’Dwyer, and I used to joke with him about being half Irish, half French, half English, and half German—like every American I ever met.”41 In these passages, the term American assumes a distinctly racialized connotation, as when Habeeb Yakoub, an American citizen and therefore American by any meaningful criteria, is castigated by other American citizens for marrying an “American,” which in this context really means “White American,” or perhaps “non-Lebanese American.” This connotation is an inverted example of majoritarian notions of Americanness that conflate national identification with Whiteness. Likewise, although Haleem’s interaction with Johnny O’Dwyer obviously is hyperbolic, it draws from the same set of assumptions that equate Whiteness with being properly “American.” These implied categories of Americanness, which ascertain meaning based on shared group assumptions among both the American and Lebanese American characters, guide the people Geha describes in his nonfiction as earnestly questioning his actual nationality. The implied categories also help create a space for the emergence of an Arab American community because members of this community are unable to attain the cultural and physical characteristics that

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facilitate complete assimilation. These characteristics ultimately attach themselves to Whiteness, because Haleem, who served in the American military, enjoys drinking in bars, and marries two different White women, might otherwise be considered quintessentially “American.” He is prevented from being identified quintessentially as such because he doesn’t look “American,” participates in strange rituals such as the debkee (a popular Near Eastern dance), and speaks Arabic with George when he wants privacy in public settings. This reticence to accept the Other as one’s own functions inversely, as when Haleem and George both marry “American” women: “The family received our wives, but not easily. After all, they were Americans.”42 “Almost Thirty” thus explores the coalescence of an Arab American identity not through conscious preference, but through the social circumstances that usher those excluded from proper Americanness into the comforts of ethnic affinity. Another notable feature of Through and Through is its realism, both aesthetically and historically. Beyond “Almost Thirty,” for instance, the Lebanese immigrant communities Geha portrays gradually become Americanized despite the disapproval of their elders, usually the original immigrants. Yet even this seemingly trenchant process of Americanization is complicated, because it assumes or demands an evolution toward behavioral lifestyles that are predetermined and thus prerequisites of cultural naturalization in the United States. To become Americanized in this capacity, in other words, is merely to fulfill an invented (and often shallow) cultural imperative that, philosophically speaking, should have little to do with national identification. Geha’s intricate plotlines encourage us to read identity outside the boundaries of these conventional perceptions, and they reveal that Americanization is not so much a progression toward a fixed ideal, but a historical byproduct of immigration that often is mistaken for abandonment of a nostalgic past in favor of a better future. As Michael W. Suleiman observes, The main characters in [Through and Through] are ordinary people living ordinary lives. They face the problems of all new immigrants, namely, the struggle to survive and prosper; adjustments to a new and unfamiliar environment; the fight to preserve traditions; and the inevitable erosion of these traditions as children are Americanized and seek new values. Much as they try, they are unable to maintain the use of Arabic, and the children begin to marry outside the ethnic and religious community. The families adjust, albeit reluctantly. Often, what is presented is only a taste of the old country—food, music and folk dancing.43


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Suleiman further notes that Geha’s “Arabs came to America to start new and better lives. Chain migration is the clear pattern. Family support is essential.”44 These passages highlight how Geha’s use of realism fictively recreates an actual historical trajectory in which Arab immigrants gradually became (and continue to become) integrated into American life (a turn of phrase that in my mind works better than usage of the noun American or the adverb Americanization). Geha was the first modern Arab American fiction writer to comprehensively employ this sort of structure, which has, the New York Times suggests, become common: “Like all immigrant groups, Arab-Americans have a sense of doubleness, feeling torn between their parents’ traditions and their new culture. In the black-white division of American racial politics, their added burden historically has been the perception of them as black or, at the very least, as occupying an indeterminate place in the country’s racial mix.”45 As a result, “[l]ike writers from other immigrant groups—Asians, Hispanics and before them, Jews and Italians—the Arab-American writers’ themes are cultural conflict and, especially, family.”46 The Times’s assessment is correct but only in a rather limited framework. Not all Arab Americans have a sense of doubleness in such an explicit way; some have a sense of tripleness and others have crafted for themselves a singular identity to which they cling proudly (American, Arab, Muslim, Lebanese, and so forth). More crucial, I think, is the fact that most Americans of all ethnicities probably exist with a distinct sense of doubleness, so using the concept as a point of critical departure in analyzing Arab American literature might simply result in liminality. And though it is true that cultural conflict and family issues have inspired Arab American literary thematics (more so in fiction than poetry), this sometimes is true only if we base such recognition on superficial reading habits. I prefer to look also into how the aesthetic frameworks in which cultural conflict and family issues function, a move that will force us to acknowledge that Arab American fiction derives its vitality from more than mere sociologica. For example, in the story “Holy Toledo,” which takes place in the Little Syria neighborhood of East Detroit, Geha presents a cultural dialectic laden with symbolism about the vastness and mysteriousness of America. The story, set in the 1950s, focuses on eleven-year-old Nadia Yakoub and her nine-year-old brother Mikhail (Mikhi), whose American mother has died and whose Arab father abandoned them abruptly, leaving them in the care of their uncle Eddie, a naval veteran, and his aging mother, who is referred to as Sitti, the Arabic word for

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grandmother. “Holy Toledo” is largely about its characters’ personal quests: Nadia’s quest to find an evil eye amulet belonging to her grandmother (which turns out to be hanging from Uncle Eddie’s neck and which symbolizes a broader quest for belonging); Mikhi’s quest to escape his provincial environment and explore the promise of Americana; Uncle Eddie’s quest for a comfortable space to exist in the United States; and Sitti’s quest to coerce her grandchildren to adhere to a rigid family hierarchy inspired by her fading memories of the Old Country. In “Holy Toledo,” Little Syria acts as an extension of the Middle East and isn’t quite considered to be part of the United States by either the Arab or non-Arab characters. From her window, Nadia could see the dome of the Maronite Catholic Church and the onion shaped twin steeples of the Greek Orthodox. Farther up Congress there were shops that sold woven artifacts and brass from the old country. They had food, too, things that couldn’t be found anywhere else in Detroit; pressed apricots, goat cheese, sesame paste and pine nuts and briny olives. (“The food, that’s what I missed most [when enlisted in the Navy],” Uncle Eddie said. “The Americans, they don’t know how to eat.”) And there were the ahwa shops too, where old men sat all day amid tobacco smoke and the bitter smell of Turkish coffee.47

The neighborhood is treated as a tourist attraction by local women, particularly by the young women the Arab American characters refer to as “college mums” because of their dress and manner of speaking: A few even dressed in trousers, like men. And they were always excited about something, always smiling as they pointed out this or that to a companion who’d never been there before, exclaiming too loudly about the inlay work on a cedar music box or the smell of a foreign spice, and always asking, “Oh, and what do you call this?” as if they’d never seen a barrel of olives before. The shopkeepers would smile back at them and say olives in Arabic, and the college mums loved that, chattering on and on as they spent their money. By early afternoon they would begin leaving—silly women—and always Nadia wished that she were one of them, returning with them into that huge strangeness, America, luring her despite the threat it seemed to hold of loss and vicious homesickness.48

It is the strangeness underlying the myth of America that attracts Nadia in the moments when she wishes to escape Little Syria, a situation that speaks to a dual form of immigration. The characters treat


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Little Syria as a locale outside of America proper, and it is thus a place for Americans to travel to see and purchase foreign and exotic items; and it is a place that, to Nadia and Mikhi, represents an extension of the Old World whose boundaries must be traversed if they are to enter the America that exists in their imagination, an image fed substantially by the many outsiders who visit the neighborhood and who are as exotic to the children as the Arabic goods are to the tourists. Nadia and Mikhi are already émigrés, but they dream of emigration in the same fashion as some of the people still in the Near East. The symbolism of “Holy Toledo” informs this layered perception. The evil eye amulet that Nadia and Mikhi seek will, if found, result in affirmation from Uncle Eddie and Sitti. If unfound, it will remain a source of tension among the children and their guardians. More important, the amulet represents to the children a journey into the familiar but unknown and is therefore bound metonymically to their imaginative encounters with a mysterious and magical Americana. During their search, Nadia turns to Mikhi, whose “head was down, eyes on the trunk beneath him. Brass and black leather, one side of the trunk was crayoned with writing from forty years ago. Their father had once pointed out to them the different languages—Turkish, Arabic, French, and finally, in English, the yellow and blue admittance stamp of Ellis Island, New York.”49 The children’s unhappiness is inscribed in the presence of the amulet, of which Uncle Eddie is in possession, a fact that causes the children to realize that its symbolic qualities are unable to transform their reality: “And the charm, all the good luck of it hanging there at Eddie’s throat the while time they were searching, seemed forgotten; its luck granted or not—both Sitti and Uncle Eddie were acting now as if it never mattered in the first place.”50 The children’s recognition that the amulet will not release them from provincial limitations comes to fruition when Sitti falsely accuses Mikhi of giving her the evil eye, the sort of action the amulet is intended to prevent, and compels Uncle Eddie to belt him and his sister if she does not corroborate Sitti’s accusation (she doesn’t). Mikhi is belted first, and “Nadia would be next. Calmly, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine America, how it will be, and what they should take with them when they go.”51 This passage, which closes the story, indicates that Nadia has been liberated from her illusions about the symbolic transformative power of the amulet but has retained—even strengthened—her illusions about the America she imagines to exist outside the boundaries of her household and neighborhood. In this sense, “Holy Toledo” is a wonderful example of the cultural

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complexities often exhibited thematically in Arab American fiction, but it is also something of a quintessential American coming-of-age narrative in which young characters dream about the promise of the America that exists outside their field of vision. For this reason, I would not argue that the story is framed by a sense of doubleness; it is inspired instead by a recognition that dreaming about the mysteries of Americana has long been fundamental to American fiction, and the origins of the myths that induce the mysteries can be appropriated by the same ethnic communities that usually function as the exotic counterpoints through which the myths generate their imaginative power. “Holy Toledo,” in other words, is both quintessentially American and Arab American because there would be no such thing as a mythical Americana without the presence of Arab Americans who facilitate the myth even as they are excluded from it. All of the stories in Through and Through, with the possible exception of the final story, also titled “Through and Through,” comment in some way on dialectics within and among Arab American and majoritarian communities (and sometimes, as with “News From Phoenix,” which has Jewish characters, with other minorities). Yet the feature of Through and Through that inevitably captures my attention is not its strikingly realistic settings or its re-creation of typical immigrant historical trajectories, but Geha’s impressive craftsmanship as an author of fiction. His style is almost classically Aristotelian, with characters developing emotionally and intellectually according to the neatly wrought environments in which Geha situates them. He invents stories without any postmodern gimmicks and takes care to present details in which the most pertinent moral questions in the stories often can be found. Unlike, say, Alameddine’s KOOLAIDS, which frequently shocks readers into contemplating moral and philosophical questions, Geha creates plainspoken, realistic environmental and interpersonal dynamics in which moral and philosophical questions come into existence subtly—sometimes softly—but never independently of his characters’ always-familiar evolutions. It is unnecessary to ascribe a qualitative evaluation to the different styles employed by Geha and Alameddine (and other Arab American novelists who likewise present a more experimental style). The different styles speak to the diversity inherent in modern Arab American fiction and make engagement with that fiction more interesting and meaningful. While Through and Through never achieved a large readership and seems to be something of a forgotten text in the modern American tradition, it should be read more widely by those interested in technically impeccable realistic fiction and the complex process of


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becoming and belonging among newcomers in the United States. For the technical dimension of Geha’s writing that is most impressive is the omnipresent conflict between the reality of America and the myth of Americanness that renders the imagined “America” inaccessible, and often unreal.

Transgressing East and West with Laila Halaby Like Geha, Palestinian-Jordanian American Laila Halaby employs a realistic style in her first novel, West of the Jordan, a multivocal work about the Salaama family scattered, like most modern Palestinian families, throughout the West Bank, Jordan, and the United States. West of the Jordan is an example of internationalized American fiction, as it takes place in the Near East as well as the United States. Its title, in fact, indicates that it is a transgressive text: the word “West” functions alternately as a geopolitical space, a private aspiration, and a philosophical marker. This space west of the Jordan, comparable to the spaces represented in Through and Through, is one in which an imagined “America” comes into conflict with a community whose existence challenges its ideals and assumptions. Unlike Geha, however, Halaby sometimes engages geopolitical questions directly, especially the colonization of Palestine, and tends to social issues—domestic abuse, infidelity, religious observance, assimilation—relatively frequently as they are dictated by her aesthetic imperatives (Geha focuses on the same issues, but does not highlight them outside of limited narrative scopes). West of the Jordan also belongs to a broader tradition of diasporic Palestinian literature that now is written in multiple languages but that nonetheless is bound together loosely by some emphasis, however variegated, on the land of Palestine.52 (Geha, Adnan, and Alammedine also belong to a parallel tradition of diasporic Lebanese literature bound together loosely by some emphasis on Lebanon, a tradition that also is quite varied in language and location.)53 Other Arab American fiction writers of Palestinian origin such as Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki, Shaw Dallal, and Diana Abu-Jaber partake as well in this Palestinian tradition.54 This fact connotes another form of internationalization in Arab American fiction, one that explores a transnational Palestine from within a globalized nation. Like much Arab American literature, West of the Jordan evinces something of a diasporic consciousness and in turn explores the theme of exile, a theme most frequently assessed in the scholarship and

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personal nonfiction of the late Arab American writer Edward Said.55 This sort of focus, according to Salim Tamari, is not uncommon among writers of Palestinian origin: The decisive marker of contemporary Palestinian identity . . . has been the politics of exile. This is rooted in a social feature of the Palestinian experience, namely the fact that the bulk of the Palestinian leadership, intelligentsia, and professionals—who played a critical rose in the formulation of Palestinian national consciousness out of the refugee experience in the 1948 and 1967 wars—were either expelled or exiled, or (as in the case of Mahmud Darwish) chose exile.56

As Tamari suggests, the invention of a national entity called Palestine, despite the lack of a geopolitical space with the same name, was done largely by Palestinians in exile, in both the West and Arab World. In this sense, Halaby, who approaches Palestine as an actual locale and an aspiration in West of the Jordan, has contributed to a long-standing practice of recreating Eastern spaces—in this case Palestine—in Western settings. The novel develops according to the alternating first-person narration of four women, all first cousins: Hala, Soraya, and Khadija, who live in the United States, and Mawal, who remains in their ancestral village of Nawara, in the West Bank. Although each of the four characters shares an identical cultural origin and belongs to the same extended family, each is vastly different than the other three in disposition and personal circumstance (and sometimes in outlook). Soraya, for example, is considered by other characters in the novel to be the most Americanized based on the way she speaks and dresses, and, more important, her supposed promiscuity (Soraya indeed is sexually active, but many of the Arab American characters base their allegations of promiscuity on little more than her suggestive dancing at weddings and other gatherings). Mawal, on the other hand, is overweight and much less adventurous and is perceived by her cousins as traditional because of her location and modest behavior. The contrast between Soraya and Mawal says much about the way behavioral habits often are interpreted as ethnic or national characteristics and then become explainable as such. Soraya’s promiscuity, for instance, is construed as quintessentially American behavior; Soraya, therefore, is described as being Americanized although, technically speaking, she is just as “Arab” as anybody else in the novel. The perception, in any case, arises from the assumption that promiscuity is immoral and things that are immoral obviously cannot be Islamic or


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Middle Eastern in origin. The same perception works inversely to assume that piety and modesty are fundamentally Islamic and Middle Eastern, and so the Arab American characters who evince these traits are considered to be in touch with their ethnic origin, whereas Soraya has abandoned it. Such expectations are gendered and so it is the women characters who are asked—indeed, forced—to shoulder the responsibility of preserving cultural traditions based on the existence of largely superficial principles that conceptualize “America” as an ubiquitous culprit. Soraya explains, “My mother is disappointed that I am not a good daughter, but she won’t admit that she has anything to do with it and says instead that I have a weak spirit and have been ‘taken in by the lie that is America: freedom, freedom, freedom.’ ”57 Soraya, however, may well have a better understanding of what is “Arab” than the people who disparage her lack of cultural awareness. In fact, she is able to understand it well enough to manipulate the corresponding notions of Americanness through which Arab narratives often generate meaning, and through which, conversely, “America” can be invented: “She’s Arabian,” they say at my high school as I pass them. “In her country they don’t have furniture or dishwashers, only oil.” I tell them what they want to hear, which is nasty stories about young men sticking their things into goats and some twelve-year-old girl being carried off on a camel to be third wife to old Shaykh So-andSo and the five oil wells my father owns.58

This passage, which illuminates Soraya’s propensity for tricksterism, is more than a bit of comic relief (although it certainly is funny). It draws its meaning from very real cultural forces that Halaby’s readers, whether or not they are Arab American, are likely to recognize as starkly accurate. Indeed, it is not too difficult to imagine Norma Khouri saying to herself something alarmingly similar in the moments before she decided to write Forbidden Love. Mawal, on the other hand, envisions a demystified version of the United States, one that is stereotyped as voracious and lacking the innocence of life in Nawara despite the presence of the Israeli occupation: “You will find many women here grieving over sons and husbands who have forgotten them, or grieving over the evils that country has introduced their sons to, like drugs and drinking and loose women and gambling.”59 Mawal’s complaint arises from the same context that induces some of the Arab American characters to blame Soraya’s location for her supposedly unsavory behavior. In that

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context, “America” is given quite more credit than it deserves regarding its actual power to transform vis-à-vis its perceived coerciveness. In any event, the perception of a corrupting behemoth west of the Jordan is the image through which understanding of the United States often is generated; the Lebanese immigrants disparage its corrupting power in much the same way in Through and Through. Mawal is clear in her disappointment: “You would think our village was in love with America with all the people who have left, like America is the best relative in the world that everyone has to visit. America is more like a greedy neighbor who takes the best out of you and leaves you feeling empty.”60 Khadija occupies the metaphorical crossroads of Arabness and Americanness more visibly than any other character. Her father, a partially employed automobile mechanic, fulfills every imaginable stereotype of the abusive Arab male. Like many abusive men, he blames his behavior on a loss of dignity arising from circumstances outside his control: “My father,” Khadija explains, “has many dreams that have been filled with sand. That’s what he tells me: ‘This country has taken my dreams that used to float like those giant balloons, and filled them with sand. Now they don’t float, and you can’t even see what they are anymore.’ ”61 His situation destroys the myth, circulating widely in both the United States and Arab World, that America is a land of milk and honey where money can be earned easily with a little cleverness and hard work, a myth derived from the venerable Ragged Dick metanarrative, which also suggests that anybody who is poor is at fault for his or her own poverty. Not so with Khadija’s father. He works hard but remains poor. And he blames himself for failing to secure the sort of life that is narrated in the myth of America, in turn releasing his frustrations on Khadija and his wife. As a result of her father’s abuse, Khadija is far more timid than Soraya and sensitive about her ethnicity. This sensitivity results at one point in a sobering exchange that highlights the fallacy inherent in majoritarian notions of exceptionalism, and the competing fallacy inherent in pluralistic demands of racial exclusivity: Mr. Napolitano, my social studies teacher, makes fun of everyone’s name. He calls me DJ. It makes me laugh. He expects me to know more than the other kids because my parents are not American, though there are lots of other kids in the class who aren’t American themselves. I want to scream at him that I am just as American as anyone here. Ma and I have the same argument, only she gets really mad: “You are Palestinian,” she says in Arabic. “You are Palestinian,” I tell her in English. “I am American.”


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“You are Palestinian and you should be proud of that.” “Ma, I can’t speak Arabic right, I’ve never even been there, and I don’t like all of those dancing parties. I like stories and movies. I can be American and still be your daughter.” “No! No daughter of mine is American.”62

Though the exchanges between Khadija and her teacher and mother probably register as familiar to anybody who grew up the child of immigrants in the United States, and thus are, like many of the exchanges in Through and Through, strikingly realistic, there is some irony in them worth brief mention. Although Khadija, born and raised in the United States, quite logically argues against the conflation of nationality and ethnicity by claiming to be “just as American” as anybody else, she also seems accidentally to make the same conflation in noting that “there are lots of other kids in the class who aren’t Americans themselves.” Just as Khadija is unwilling to conflate American nationality with ethnicity (which would be a White ethnicity), she is unable to separate Palestinian ethnicity from Palestinian nationality, even though, as her mother realizes, the two are distinct entities (especially given that at present there technically is no nationstate of Palestine on which to predicate an institutionalized Palestinian nationality); the same is true, of course, with the terms German, Chinese, and Italian, a recognition that would allow Khadija to conceptualize herself as American and Palestinian simultaneously. Some of the conflicts Soraya encounters validate Khadija’s reticence to identify as Palestinian, although between the two Soraya has a more sophisticated manner of drawing from multiple identities as each best accommodates a particular strategy or predicament. Whereas Khadija’s sheltered life causes her to remain guarded against her ethnic origin because of its association in her mind with her father’s abusiveness, Soraya’s outgoing lifestyle causes her a different sort of wariness, one inspired by the existence of anti-Arab racism. In fact, many of the issues I assessed in the first part of this chapter regarding the integration of anti-Arab racism into the American consciousness affect Soraya during certain points in the narrative, and are explored periodically throughout the novel. At one point, for instance, Soraya goes to a bar with one of her lovers, Walid, whose mother, Um Radwan, lives in Nawara. While there, they experience a vitriolic example of anti-Arab racism that highlights its derivative nature and its propensity to totalize minorities as a homogenous threat to majoritarian supremacy. Soraya has misgivings about the bar as soon as they arrive: “White name, white

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customers, white neighborhood.”63 She and Walid soon are accosted by a group of intoxicated men after they are heard speaking Arabic: “ ‘Speak English!’ a red face shouted in whiskey breath.”64 When Walid and Soraya stand up to leave, the following scene transpires: “Hey you fucking Mexicans. Chickenshit boy running away from us?” “We’ve had our fill and we’re leaving,” replied Walid like he thought there was no problem, which he didn’t. “You speak English pretty good for a wetback. Just remember, this aint’a Mexican joint. You go somewhere else to drink your cervezas and hang out with your puta.” The whiskey man and his friend crumbled in heavy laughter, still not charged enough to fight, but well on their way. Walid held my elbow and guided me past them and out the door. “Fucking Mexicans!” “We’re not Mexicans!” I shouted. “We’re Americans.”65

Soraya’s protest sets the drunkards off and they beat Walid as soon as he exits the bar. When a police officer arrives to file a report she discusses the event with Walid: “So they beat you up for being Mexican?” the policewoman asked. “We’re not Mexican.” “You got beaten up for being Mexican and you’re not Mexican? What are you?” “Palestinian.” “Well you got off pretty lucky then.” The policewoman was quiet for a minute. “That jacket sure makes you look Mexican.”66

I would argue that Walid and Soraya’s experience is the archetypal, though often unspoken, initiation into the process of Americanization. This Americanization occurs ironically through an ushering of the Arab American characters into the familiar minority categories whose existence helps induce a majoritarian self-image that is fundamental to the invention of the “America” Soraya and Walid inhabit. Indeed, the policewoman indicates that being Mexican is preferable to being Palestinian because, albeit detested, the Mexicans are at least more familiar participants in the institutions that define Americanness. It never occurs to her in attempting to comprehend the ethnic merry-go-round that Walid might simply be American. His garb and brown skin mark him as something different from the policewoman and the perpetrators of the crime, which makes the crime perpetrated against him at least comprehensible if not outwardly acceptable. This comprehensibility renders Walid much more “American” than any passport possibly could.


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When Soraya, shaken by the incident, goes back home she fantasizes that the beating had occurred in an American movie, in which case Walid would have knocked those guys to the floor and we would walk off without a scratch, my heroic prince defending my honor . . . but that’s not what the American movie would show, would it? Instead it would show the super American guy knocking the scummy Arab flat on the ground, like what happened. Sill wishing . . . that I were a superhero like in those cartoons where she comes in and wipes out the bad guys and still looks great. But there aren’t any Arab ones, are there? My hair is too dark, too thick; my skin is too far away from white to let me even pretend to be an American superhero.67

This sort of scene is the reason I believe that Soraya, despite her questionable—and at times confounding—personal choices (she appears to have a sexual relationship with her Uncle Haydar), is a positive and inspiring Arab American character. She provides the realism that acts as a counterpoint to Mawal’s isolation and Khadija’s inhibitions. She is a confident woman with an adventurous spirit and a knack for employing intuition rather than prescribed cultural logic in making decisions. As her fantasy just quoted indicates, Soraya understands exactly what it means to be an Arab in America. And she understands the deep-seated cultural forces that will forever prevent her from playing the role of superhero. Hala is the main protagonist of West of the Jordan and manages to transcend many of the interethnic conflicts that Soraya and Khadija encounter, although she deals subtly with cultural conflict throughout the narrative and must make difficult decisions that are indivisible from ethnic sensibilities (American, Arab, and Arab American). Perhaps her first experience with a specific cultural conflict came into existence when her father, Abu Jalal, a traditional Jordanian, and her late mother, Huda, a Palestinian from Nawara, disagreed about whether she should travel to the United States as a teenager to live with Huda’s brother, Hamdi, and finish her secondary education and then attend college. Huda was diagnosed with cancer when she persuaded Hala to move to the United States but kept quiet about her condition; she died when Hala was living in Arizona with her Uncle Hamdi and attending high school. Hala explains, “My mother was excited, perhaps because she thought I’d have a chance to finish what she barely started, or perhaps because she thought I’d have a freer education. Regardless, I was terrified at the thought of being away from my family, even though the idea of going to America—the America my mother had only tasted—was exciting.”68

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Neither Huda nor Hala (or any other woman character in West of the Jordan) is much like the cloaked, anonymous Muslim woman often represented in American popular culture. The Muslim woman in American popular culture usually is an entity without agency, an oppressed specimen to be treated with pity, a shrouded mystery whose existence invokes righteous outrage. In West of the Jordan, as in the world that exists beyond the pitying liberal imagination, the Muslim woman is never one thing; she is extraordinarily varied, in charge of the environment surrounding her, and a thinking individual with agency as both a progenitor and consumer of ideas.69 Sometimes she deals with oppressive men, and sometimes she is oppressed (but no more, illogically speaking, than the Western woman). More often, though, she controls her own destiny by maximizing the liberties allowed her by the surrounding community, or she endeavors (usually successfully) to manipulate limitations into opportunities. This inventiveness allowed Huda to convince her skeptical husband and friends that her young daughter should go unaccompanied to another continent, and it allows Hala to retroactively validate Huda’s desire. Another indirect example of cultural conflict that Hala encounters relates to her Uncle Hamdi, who is an academic in Arizona and married to an American (i.e., White) woman, Fay, another academic. Hamdi and Fay are kind characters, but it is accepted within the Salaama clan that Hamdi has lost interest in the Arab World and has become completely “American.” Hala never was bothered by his tendency to assimilate so thoroughly into his American academic culture until she returns to his home from a long stay in Jordan and notices the décor: The house is decorated in high-class American style, no knickknacks, no faded pictures, and no Muhammad mosaics. Neat encyclopedia, nineteen matching volumes. High-class halogen bulbs. Chairs that make you cross your legs. Lush carpeting, even in the bathroom. No cold feet or need for clap clap clap slippers to wear in the house. The temperature is regulated between seventy-three and seventy-eight degrees, even though we are in Arizona and it is very expensive to do this. High-class American blah, no soul, no colors, only outside walls that wandered in and stayed. Show-off house with no heart or fancy bracelets.70

Hamdi has abandoned any outward attachment to the Arab World, an abandonment made evident in his lifestyle with Fay and in the adornment of their home. He is accepted by his colleagues as thoroughly


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Americanized and is happy to identify himself as such. Yet this situation, although it first appears to be little more than Hamdi exercising his own agency, reinforces the preponderance of the majoritarian attitudes that so egregiously affect Soraya and Khadija. Hamdi does not become American simply by choosing to identify as one. In order to identify as a proper “American,” he must abandon his attachment to those things, physical and psychological, that might identify him as “Arab”—any display relating to Islam, for instance, or marriage to a woman who is visibly Middle Eastern or Muslim. Uncle Hamdi, in other words, has to stop being “Arab” in order to become “American.” Soraya understands this reality and rebels against it, proclaiming, “I’m so sick of everything being haram [forbidden] and halal [permitted], but nothing in between. I am in between.”71 Khadija too comes to realize that abandoning all things Arab in order to become acceptably American is an unsavory reality, and one she is not ultimately prepared to accept; this realization is strengthened when she visits her American friend Patsy’s house and found that “[i]t was like walking into a TV show” in which everything felt alien and impersonal.72 The most powerful affirmation of multiplicity and in-betweenness arises from Hala, who spends much of the novel in Jordan, where she protects and appreciates what she learned in the United States and simultaneously cherishes many of the features of Middle Eastern life that are absent in Arizona. Hala is the most represented character in the novel and is thus the most complex, impossible to reduce to any invented ethnic or national category and intricate enough to render that type of category obsolete. Hala’s greatest conflict is the decision she must make whether to return to Arizona and begin college or marry Sharif Abdel-Hameed, a distant cousin on her mother’s side to whom she has been attracted since she was a child. Although she finds that as an adult she has fallen in love with Sharif, Hala ultimately chooses to return to the United States to attend college, a decision that doesn’t necessarily symbolize a privileging of the United States over the Middle East, for Halaby takes care not to force Hala into that sort of symbolic binary. Rather, the decision represents Hala’s embrace of the many constituent parts that form the individual whole. She has chosen an act that will lead to her intellectual enhancement and in so doing has defied traditional expectations, gender roles, and the nihilistic perceptions in the United States of Arab women. By choosing to pursue a higher education, Hala will evolve the best of what exists within her psyche as both Arab and

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American and will further amalgamate the two entities into an indefinable but inseparable grouping that is, above all, human with fundamentally human tendencies. Sharif helps affirm this coming together of supposedly antagonistic cultures when he semi-jokingly tells Hala right before she leaves Jordan, “Go off to your glittery America, rejoice in its prosperity, while our own country can be bought and sold.”73 He then gives her a gold charm of Palestine, which she places on her necklace so it can be in close proximity to her heart. As Hala waits for the plane to take off, she notices, “I am not at all nervous on this flight. There is no mystery and no worrying. No one is expecting a face I cannot offer. No, this flight is quiet.”74 The reason for her peace is difficult to attain but simple: “I am starting over, starting over.”75 This recognition allows all of Hala’s seemingly irreconcilable experiences and influences—Huda’s love and ambition, Abu Jalal’s aloofness and reluctant support, Sharif ’s affection, the promise of America, the magic of the ancestral land, Palestine—to at least temporarily come together: “My mother is always with me. My father has not abandoned me, and Sharif has introduced my heart to something wonderful.”76 Although there are myriad elements of West of the Jordan I have been unable for either spatial or methodological reasons to assess, I hope to at least have provided a sense of its philosophical complexity, especially as it relates to the problems of ethnic and national categorization and the influence of anti-Arab racism on majoritarian identity. I hope also that others will take up analysis of this novel, which provides seemingly infinite evaluative possibilities. For the novel is best described by one of its own recurrent metaphors: that of the roza (or thobe), an intricately embroidered dress unique to the Arab World for which Nawara is famous and which Mawal, the characters’ living connection to Palestine, weaves expertly. She describes the rozas as having “both Palestinian and western stitches and patterns”77 and notes that when she hears stories, as she does frequently, she “will keep them safe and do no more than stitch them into the fabric of our rozas.”78 Halaby exemplifies this ethic of stitching and storytelling, put rhythmically to verse by Mawal, the bearer and hearer of stories and thus the bridge to millennia of storytelling in ancestral Palestine: Stitch in red for life. Stitch in green to remember. Stitch, stitch to never forget.79


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In Conclusion: Here and There, Concurrently In the preface to her ethnographic study of an Arab American community in Worcester, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Boosahda recounts, Growing up as an American in a community of immigrants gave me firsthand insight and knowledge of traditions that I might not have gained otherwise. Although I was born and raised in an immigrant Arabic-speaking community, I took for granted the many ways its members integrated into mainstream America. With age and experience, however, I realized how difficult, painful, and awe inspiring the process of integration was. I am amazed at the abundance of resources and survival skills of these visionaries as they coped with their new environment. I am proud of my birth as an American and of my cultural Arab heritage.80

We see in exquisite detail the difficulties, painfulness, and inspiration of Arab integration into the United States in the fiction of Geha and Halaby. Boosahda’s passage intimates the realism evident in Through and Through and West of the Jordan, as well as, more important, their commitment to the realities and nuances of Arab American life in the United States. Both novels raise important questions about what it means to be an American in a country in which a majoritarian ascendancy still has enough power to determine what constitutes real Americanness, tacit criteria Arab Americans often are unable to fulfill by virtue of our hair colors, skin tones, languages, and, most conspicuously, religions, Islam especially.81 For this reason alone the two books are valuable contributions to a long history in American fiction in which authors of color have challenged with great skill the commonplaces of the majoritarian ascendancy that have so vigorously excluded them from real participation in American life. They are valuable, though, for other reasons, primary among them a commitment to aesthetic exposition of the diversities that exist morally, ethnically, and philosophically in Arab America. The two books highlight as well why I believe that literature has a real potential to inspire and then participate centrally in an Arab American Studies. If one of the main purposes of an Arab American Studies would be to assess as thoroughly as possible the multivalent processes through which an Arab American ethnic community came into existence and continues to exist according to ubiquitous but often unmentioned interaction among Americans of Arab origin and

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Americans of different origins (both majority and minority), then systematic analysis of Geha and Halaby automatically would help fulfill this imperative. More important, though, systematic analysis of these and other Arab American fiction writers would highlight a deep commitment to defining Arab America according to the beauty and idiosyncrasy of its daily cultural rituals, a commitment that should motivate those who choose to study Arab America outside the restrictive logic induced by the slowly declining predominance of a majoritarian gaze.

CONCLUSION

Multicultural and Monocultural Disjunctions

It is difficult to say what direction the study of Arab Americans will assume in the next decade. Even if one suspects (as I do) that a particular trajectory will ensue, it might be wise to discard the gamble of prognostication and consult historical patterns in order to actually influence rather than merely project and then observe an evolution. I will take the opportunity afforded me by this conclusion to reflect briefly on some of the issues I have raised and incorporate some relevant issues raised by others. In turn, I will offer a pragmatic discussion based on the agglomeration of those issues in a particular space that I now confidently refer to as Arab American. To be frank, I was rather ambiguous about what exactly to assess in this conclusion when, like an august Gilgameshian offering, a special issue of MELUS titled “Pedagogy, Praxis, Politics, and Multiethnic Literatures” arrived in my mailbox. Although the special issue deals very little with Arab Americans, it does raise a number of points that any Arab American educator would find valuable.1 In my mind the most provocative of its contributions is “Death to the Originary Narrative! or, Insurgent Multiculturalism and Teaching Multiethnic Literature,” by Jose L. Torres-Padilla. Drawing from Nina Baym’s analysis of the “Originary Narrative”2—Euro- and Anglocentricity in the study of American literature dating to the Whig influence on humanities curricula—Torres-Padilla suggests that “the Originary Narrative becomes the centerpiece of American literary study and intellectual thought because it is either being affirmed or subverted but never neglected,”3 a suggestion that I tried to prove accurate in this book by focusing incrementally on various notions of Americanness. Perhaps more apropos of my concerns, Torres-Padilla later argues that the teaching of multiethnic literature and the promotion of multiculturalism in general, whether in primary grades or at the university level,

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are clearly undermined by prevailing vestiges of monoculturalism and national cultural identity typified in ideological constructs such as the Originary Narrative. As multiethnic literature scholars and teachers, we have always worked with the understanding that a principal goal of dismantling the field could very well be supplanting the Originary Narrative, which, in turn, would contribute to the wider objective of reconceptualizing “national identity and culture” from within a more inclusive, multicultural perspective.4

Though the displacement of monoculturalism is a worthy goal, especially for the Arab Americans who continue unwittingly to furnish its legitimacy, it might be prudent to identify the subject of TorresPadilla’s passage. Surely not all “multiethnic literature scholars and teachers” have assumed as their “principal goal” the supplanting of the Originary Narrative.5 Nor is it likely that the following injunction will be universally heeded: “As teachers, we must subscribe to a guerilla-type offensive, sneaking from the shadowy margins in continual ambushes while hoping to dismantle the hegemonic stronghold.”6 I am nitpicking some of Torres-Padilla’s usage because I agree with him conceptually but not pragmatically. It is important for scholars committed to the cultures and literatures of their own ethnic communities not to totalize our own sensibilities, for our best chance to “dismantle the hegemonic stronghold” lies not in our ability to sneakily launch a rhetorical guerilla attack, but to account for our own overlooked diversities and then inscribe them methodologically in our conversations with those we imagine to be monocultural—and in the conversations we have among ourselves. This goal, I like to think, can be accomplished without validating the stereotyped gaze affixed continuously by monoculturalists to ethnic communities. Or, if I might alter Torres-Padilla’s metaphor, I don’t so much advocate guerilla offensives as I do the sort of treason that often results in mutiny. Carving a proper space in English Studies for the proliferation of minority voices means first gaining a point of entry into the proceedings of the field. Only then can we, to extend our metaphor, clear the temple of its impurities. If the ultimate goal is to eliminate attitudes of monoculturalism from ostensibly multicultural institutions (both physical and theoretical), then I will continue to remain in agreement with Torres-Padilla that it is a goal worth pursuing. I perhaps am remiss in implying that ethnic communities are marginalized indelibly in English Studies. (In any case I am growing rather weary of metaphor.) Let me then focus on the central theme of my argument: that Arab Americans as an ethnic community are marginalized indelibly in English Studies and nearly every other field in

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the Social Sciences and Humanities. Critics can situate Arab Americans in the same type of multiethnic framework I examined earlier, but eventually Arab Americans must be analyzed based on Arab American dispositions and aspirations. Situating Arab Americans in a multiethnic framework can facilitate a real comprehension of Arab America and thus allow its scholars to identify those dispositions and aspirations by transcending provincial inquiry. Ultimately, however, our marginalization is unique and cannot be accounted for using the commonplaces of metaphorical warfare. Nor is it always useful for those interested in diminishing Arab American marginality to rely on preexisting initiatives to achieve that goal. As Bonnie TuSmith and Sarika Chandra, editors of the MELUS special issue, observe, “[T]he kind of liberal multiculturalism that institutions have adopted as a corrective to the history of racism is not in itself free of racism.”7 This claim corresponds with some of James Kyung-Jin Lee’s assertions in Urban Triage, which we highlighted in chapter 1, particularly his skepticism about the probity of institutional multiculturalism.8 TuSmith and Chandra move beyond philosophical matters and also examine curriculum reform, a pragmatic issue with which I am profoundly concerned: Curriculum reform is part of a larger project that seeks to address issues of race and ethnicity, such as the hiring of ethnic minority faculty and the recruitment and retention of students of color. However, this additive approach to multiculturalism often does little to effect more substantive and much needed changes in higher education. Curriculum reform implemented as part of diversity initiatives has not produced better environments for ethnic faculty, for example. Altogether, a critique of institutional politics has concluded that the implementation of the worthwhile goal of inclusiveness has fallen short of its promise.9

Whether or not they have empirical evidence at their disposal, I would venture to guess that most minority faculty would support the claim that the “goal of inclusiveness has fallen short of its promise.” This failure is especially evident in relation to Arab Americans, who are underrepresented and under-studied in American universities, and stereotyped in many instances when actually discussed. We are faced, then, with a range of difficult questions in conceptualizing what an Arab American Studies should do (as opposed, at this point, to what it can be). My emphasis has shifted from theorization to action because TuSmith and Chandra demand convincingly that scholars of color shift emphasis precisely in such a direction. They imply that mere critique ultimately is of limited value and urge their

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readers to address practical matters that affect the daily working environments of students and educators. The other contributors to the MELUS special issue also focus in various ways on performance rather than pontification, suggesting, among other things, that tokenism can be overcome by more equitable hiring practices, that area studies must be funded more appropriately, and that monocultural hegemony is an omnipresent force that scholars of color should endeavor to dismantle.10 Any notion that these variegated issues can be resolved, or even assessed, without much difficulty is doomed to endlessly reiterate its own naiveté. I have surveyed those issues here, though, not because I wish to assess or resolve them, but to employ them as a necessary backdrop to the specific issues, examined throughout this book, affecting Arab Americans and the pursuit of an Arab American Studies. The first point worth mention is that Arab Americans are not, nor ever will be, an isolated ethnic group, and so if we are to explore some of the realities and aspirations of this community then we need also to appraise some of the broader questions of concern to all ethnic communities. Second, we are tasked with finding ways to usher or welcome Arab Americans into multiple spaces, especially those imagined to be hospitable; no spaces appear to be as hospitable as minority discourses and ethnic area studies. Third, we might acknowledge that performance arises from activities that have little to do with scholarship much more frequently than it does from scholarship itself. And finally, we can speak of our needs—always in the plural—as Arab Americans, as participants in a loosely bound collective that has things to say—important, worthwhile, necessary things—and will continue saying them whether or not others are available to listen. So, no, I am not much interested in launching a sneak-attack against the hegemonic stronghold. Neither am I exclusively concerned with the failed promise of inclusiveness or the failings of multiculturalism in general. Nor am I even purporting here to undermine monoculturalism and its many attendant mentalities. I am trying to do nothing more than speak as one Arab American who is slightly aware of the broader concerns affecting the subsistence of his selected community. And I am devoted quite ardently to configuring that speech in a way that might enhance the search for an Arab American Studies.

Above Metaphor, Beyond Literalism Where might an Arab American Studies lead us? The answer to this question, of course, depends very much on whom I mean by “us.” In general, I invoke this pronoun in writing to


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refer to myself and anybody who happens to be reading what I have written, regardless of creed, gender, or color. In this instance, however, I have in mind only Arab American readers, and I hope that readers of other ethnic backgrounds will forgive my exclusivity. The point here is not to encourage Arab Americans to speak only to Arab Americans (a desire that would in any case be impossible). The point is to encourage Arab Americans to gather our own diverse resources, both intellectual and institutional, and employ them to promote various types of inquiry into Arab America. Those resources, I hasten to note, include the many connections Arab Americans have been fortunate to make philosophically and materially with other minority communities. Let’s start with literature, a form of cultural expression I have explored throughout this book. The influence still exerted on the American humanities by Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, and other members of Al-Mahjar (the immigrants) indicates that Arab Americans long have articulated communal identities and sensibilities through the medium of literature. This point is supported by the existence in Arab America of institutions—Mizna, Al-Jadid, RAWI—that are devoted somehow to the exposition or dissemination of literature. It may be too causal to speculate that the profound cultural importance of poetry and other creative genres on the peoples of the Arab World might have something to do with the centrality of those genres in Arab America, but it also is unlikely that the similarity is merely a coincidence. Today, many of Arab America’s best-known representatives are authors, and many of its literary critics also are creative writers. These observations indicate that literature and literary criticism (if I can be permitted to use a term many consider quaint) will be vital to any pursuit of an Arab American Studies, or to the development of nascent subfields and programs of study. The ability, for instance, of fiction to highlight the mundane in Arab America along with the obvious and explicit intimates that in our community we cannot detach author from text or text from context. Nor can we realistically detach the reader from the narrative or the narrative from its unspoken influences in the spaces between Arab World and North America. This is all to suggest that Arab American literature transcends mere artistic value; it also entails a communal allure that discovers what it means to be Arab American and simultaneously informs Arab Americans of its discoveries. This sort of dialectic is precisely what an Arab American Studies should aspire to achieve. Practical concerns, of course, will limit the imagination of any supporter of an Arab American Studies. Issues such as funding,

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student recruitment and retention, faculty development, curriculum formation, philosophical approaches, and external hostility seemingly are insurmountable, and I have no concrete advice about how to approach these problems beyond the immodest suggestion that Arab Americans should nevertheless endeavor to formalize study of our community in American universities. The problems, it should be noted, are far from unique, and provide a necessary though inconvenient measure of curricular and political composition. To approach them in the microcosmic environment of higher education is potentially to transfer analysis into the far more intimidating macrocosmic society within which higher education exists. To put it as plainly as possible, Arab Americans can accept the comfort of being invisible or mere tokens for various political agendas when we are acknowledged. Or we can embrace the discomfort of speaking for ourselves. I offer this binaristic injunction without hesitation or regret. To draw from some earlier items, the mere presence of hoaxes such as that perpetrated by Norma Khouri make it crucial for Arab Americans to involve ourselves more explicitly in academic environments and in broader capacities in popular media. Certainly our involvement has been limited in part because nobody has invited us to participate in such institutions. No invitation, however, is necessary. Our involvement should arise from our own initiative; a concern for the sensibilities of those who exclude us amounts to little more than self-hindrance. My rigid opinion on this matter will change when those who exclude Arab Americans from representing ourselves cease to discuss us incessantly. Arab Americans must not continue to exist in the imaginary cultural vacuum that lends moral credence to the sort of fabrication for which Khouri was exposed; nor should we take comfort in the fact that Honor Lost eventually was discredited because there are tens of comparable titles making their way onto book club reading lists and hundreds slated to follow. Nothing will stop their release but a serious transformation in the majoritarian culture that continues to provide the literary marketplace an audience eager for stereotype and misrepresentation (or forgery, in some cases). The majoritarian culture, I would point out, will not transform itself. It never has done so in its 500-year history in North America. It was transformed only through the initiative of the degraded and uninvited. Indeed, the United States has been defined by an extraordinary creativity resulting not so much from the intellectual gifts of the dominant classes, but from the sheer genius always on the margins, pressing constantly on the center, always challenging it, sometimes undermining it, and, ultimately, redefining it. This, traditionally, has


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been the role of ethnic writing in the pre-American history of North American literature. Even from the margin, ethnic writing has helped define what would become, and in some cases still remains, the center. We should never lose sight of the fact that American literary history has never been as homogenous ethnically or aesthetically as curricular structures might lead us and our students to believe. This is the primary reason I support comparativist approaches to the study and instruction of Arab American literature. The justification for comparativism has been in place long before the word came into existence. To cultivate this justification, we need merely to examine the center in order that we might fruitfully explore the margin, resulting, hopefully, in the abandonment of old metaphors and the discovery of new literature. Another matter of concern is reflected in some of the arguments raised by Torres-Padilla and other contributors to the MELUS special issue. I am thinking primarily of the challenge of monoculturalism vis-à-vis flawed conceptions of multiculturalism. More specifically, we can examine that challenge in the contexts of the Arab American community and an Arab American Studies. I shall like to make an observation that both delineates methodological boundaries and expands our analytical range: monoculturalism is a force for which Arab Americans provide a moral apparatus. To be sure, our generosity is as unintentional as it is ostensible, but we must nevertheless confront the reality that monoculturalism would be quite less persuasive without the existence of Arab Americans, who frequently are invoked by monoculturalists to justify their rhetorical glorification of an imagined (and usually color-free) past. Or, to revert back to the use of metaphor, Arab Americans have become the new barbarians at the gate. This situation has allowed monoculturalists to champion an invented curricular purity by referencing what they perceive to be the objectionable influence of various multicultural phenomena, primary among them the visibility of Arab Americans and the humanization of Islam.11 There is nothing quite new about this sort of rhetorical strategy, for the evolution of any discipline, English Studies especially, will result in a self-professed old guard protecting vociferously the memory of a nonexistent past. The more important problem concerns the ethnic dimension of monoculturalism, which consistently assumes that ethnic communities are only legitimate in the framework of “political correctness” and are a destructive force with quite more power ascribed to them than what little they actually possess. This argument is reinforced by the fact that, as TuSmith and Chandra argue, multiculturalism, in its predominant configuration in American universities, has indeed been an ineffective alternative to its monocultural adversary.

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One of the signs of its ineffectiveness can be detected in its attachment to a political liberalism in the United States that all too often is itself hostile to ethnic minorities, Arab and Muslim Americans most explicitly. Another sign of its ineffectiveness is demonstrated by the dismal statistics that continue to be released about the hiring, retention, and promotion of minority faculty.12 Despite the depravity monoculturalists assign to English Departments as progenitors of multicultural gibberish—and despite the best efforts of many of the same departments to profess loyalty to multiculturalism—the sad fact is that nearly all English Departments continue to be overwhelmingly White. No style of hyperbole is more compelling than physical reality. Let me attach these variegated observations to Arab Americans by reflecting momentarily on another lesson drawn from my experiences, in this case not as an Arab ex-student but as an Arab ex-academic job candidate. I was fortunate enough coming out of graduate school to have received a fair amount of interest, enough interest, in any event, to have secured a campus visit in a desirable urban location at a university with a large population of minority and international students. Part of my stated academic interests included the study of Arab America, but I presented myself in quite a more comprehensive manner, and mentioned nothing orally or in writing about my ethnicity (nor, I should add, was ever asked about it directly by search committees). During the campus visit, I dined one evening with members of the search committee and other Humanities faculty. As we were completing our entrees, the person to my left noted casually, “You know, Steven, we have a good amount of Israeli students here.” I nodded my head, hoping that my suspicion of what the speaker had insinuated, or was preparing to insinuate, merely arose from my own mild paranoia. It had not. “Let me ask you: how would you approach these students should they enroll in your courses?” I considered a range of possible responses: ●

●

●

●

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“I would treat them the way I would treat any other student. Why do you think I would treat them better or worse than other attendees?” “Are you implying that Arab educators lack the ethics it requires to oversee a fair classroom?” “Do Israeli students need to be treated differently? Is there something wrong with them?” “How would I know of my students’ ethnic and national backgrounds to begin with unless I actively pursued that sort of information? I don’t actively pursue that sort of information.” “Do you vet White job candidates with these types of questions?”

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“If you hire me you will have Arab American faculty. How would you approach the Arab American faculty should you bump into one on campus or during social events?” “Unless this university has special computers that can detect students’ ethnic persuasions and then distribute the students to the appropriate professors, I really have no ability to influence the ethnic or national composition of my courses.”

But all I did was mumble something about ethics being important to me and cross the school off my list. The school also crossed me off its list. I was informed less than two weeks later that another candidate had accepted the job. I wondered if that candidate had been accused tacitly of bigotry and a lack of pedagogical ethics. I wondered, that is, whether that candidate was White. I felt pretty certain that I knew the answer. I can imagine that some readers already have objected on the grounds that in raising this observation I have engaged in precisely the same behavior that I condemn on the part of the search committee. More lenient dissenters perhaps are grumbling about the causality of my statement, and might prefer that even if I thought such things (as all humans tend to do) those deliberations in no way can be used in the service of a rational scholarly argument. These points certainly are valid, especially if they remain limited to their own logical inhibitions. I have other things in mind, mainly a desire to point out that the universities in which Whites participate are different than the ones housing minorities.13 I believe that acknowledging and exploring this difference, as uncomfortable as it tends to be, will necessarily play an important role in resolving—or at least confronting—the complex dialectic between multiculturalism and monoculturalism, as well as the documented failings of both attitudes. This move also might induce the acknowledgment that what often is familiar to White faculty as common and mundane isn’t always so transparently obvious to minority educators. Concern over how students might be treated, for instance, is a perfectly normal phenomenon—unless it simultaneously calls into question how some of their instructors might fare. I would like to suggest that in American universities a more comprehensive focus on Arab American literature and the attendant search for an Arab American Studies are crucial not only to the welfare of Arab American faculty but to the universities themselves. This suggestion is rendered more significant by the fact that, as I hope to have illustrated, Arab Americans never are removed from a host of pedagogical and theoretical questions even when we do not participate directly in them. The disconnect between the university inhabited by

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Whites and the one inhabited (way too infrequently) by Arab Americans warrants serious analysis uninhibited by romanticization or defensiveness—one that manages to transcend its own logical inhibitions. During a job search my ethnicity was made to be the basis of a line of questioning in which imagined cultural attributes rather than individual strengths became the object of concern; this example— which is in no way isolated, either in my experience or in the experiences of other Arab American scholars—indicates that ethnicity fails sometimes to transcend stereotype in the ostensibly idyllic university. When we contemplate what an Arab American Studies should do, then, our first priority will be to encourage the presence of Arab Americans in the spaces in which discussion of Arab America occurs—or in the spaces in which students and instructors stereotype Arab Americans. I am not arguing directly for a specific course of action in terms of formalizing the study of Arab Americans; I am arguing instead for the inclusion of Arab Americans in the process of formalization. I also want to encourage my colleagues in American universities to abolish the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims and to recognize the role that stereotype plays in the various initiatives to reform Humanities curricula in higher education. Is an Arab American Studies a comprehensive solution to any of these issues? It would be naively optimistic to answer in the affirmative. An Arab American Studies, however, might well be a local corrective wherever it can be established; and it has countless stories to tell and information to share about Arab Americans that currently are being ignored within university departments, whether they lean toward monoculturalism or multiculturalism. I see in literature, as much of the discussion in this book illustrates, a useful philosophical source to confront or even help resolve the various disjunctions between perceptions of Arab Americans and our heterogeneous realities.

Evaluating Failure and Success Etel Adnan, a seminal figure in Arab America, has had much to say recently about incorporating the study of Arab Americans into American universities. In a 2005 communiqué to RAWI, for instance, Adnan focused on the pragmatic dimensions of this pursuit, also using literature as her philosophical source: We need to be recognized as a group of Arab writers because the universities as well as the media, in the U.S., are more prone to acknowledge a “movement,” a “community of artists,” a trend or a collective achievement than millions of individual endeavors. For our contribution to American culture to be appreciated we need to make


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ourselves visible. Our ultimate goal is for this literature to be studied the way American universities have special departments, or at least academic courses, for, let’s say, Latin American Studies or Black Studies.14

In a subsequent communiqué Adnan elaborates on some of the cultural features that would be associated with an Arab American Studies: Americans of Arab origin or having migrated to this country are the inheritors of an unquestionably great civilization, one of the major forces that drove humanity to the present time. Such an inheritance gives us pride, yes, but carries a moral duty as well. I insist on the word “moral,” because we are not here to give lessons or manufacture obligations. No. Nevertheless everything, ultimately, is fragile. As books disappear if nobody reads them, civilizations disappear if people forget their history, forget their language, or languages, and lose interest. Everything of value needs attention. By getting together we may comfort each other in our love, in our certainty that our rich heritage is relevant more than ever.15

Adnan’s passages vocalize some of the assumptions underlying my analysis. The most important of these assumptions denotes that Arab Americans have a history that warrants dignity, a literature that intimates sophistication, a culture that exemplifies originality—affirmations that engender a diverse agglomeration of communal peculiarities not merely worthy of inclusion in existent paradigms but worth formal study on their own, vigorously and systematically. This formal study is best served avoiding the romance (or violence) of metaphorical demystification and the strictures of empirical literalism. It is also best served embracing the ubiquitous diversities that inevitably will accompany honest investigation into Arab America. Such an embrace will point us in the direction of truth, which we have consented already to emphasize perpetually. Where, then, might an Arab American Studies lead us? This is a question with the potential to eternally reinvent its own illogical candor. The trick to providing an answer, however unsatisfactory, is to acknowledge that if an Arab American Studies leads us anywhere other than our current position of enunciation then it will have been effective, which is not to say that it will have been either a success or failure. Success or failure can only be determined by a simple outcome in which it doesn’t necessarily matter whether an Arab American Studies leads us elsewhere, but matters instead whether it leads us—and not, this time, only Arab Americans—precisely where we want it to go.


Note s

Preface 1. Some of the contributors to the numbingly repetitive anti-“Theory” anthology, Theory’s Empire, argue against esoteric scholarship by advocating writing anybody can understand, an overcompensation that makes little sense to me. See further Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, eds., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 2. Stanley Kurtz, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, the late Rafael Patai, and Neil Kressel are scholars guilty of promulgating destructive stereotypes; media figures are many, including heavyweights such as Ann Coulter, Don Imus, William Kristol, David Horowitz, and Rush Limbaugh.

Introduction 1. It is understandable if the claim that some Jews might also be considered Arab American strikes readers as strange. However, though rare, there are a small number of American Jews of Middle Eastern background who retain various levels of identification as Arab. The most well-known of these people is Ella Habiba Shohat, whose essay, “Reflections of an Arab Jew,” has been widely circulated in the Arab and Jewish American communities. Available at ⬍www.al-bushra.org/ israel/reflection.htm⬎. Nissim Rejwan, an Iraqi Jew, has much to say about this phenomenon in his book Israel’s Place in the Middle East (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 2. A good example of working-class Arab American exposition is Joanna Kadi’s Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker (Boston: South End Press, 1996). 3. Arab Canadian writers include Rawi Hage, Issa Boullata, Leila Marshy, Mona Marshy, Kamal A. Rostom, and Barbara Nimri Aziz (who is now an American citizen). Famous Latin Americans of Arab origin include the actor Salma Hayek, the singer Shakira, and model Jamila Diaz-Rahi. My mother, a Nicaraguan immigrant, is also the child of Palestinian immigrants to Central America. She considers herself both Latina and Arab American, and speaks both Spanish and Arabic. The well-known poet Natalie Handal likewise identifies partly as Hispanic and employs that identification thematically in her poetry.

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4. Non-Arab writers, for example, who categorize themselves as Arab American or are categorized as Arab American include Patricia Sarrafian Ward (Armenian-Lebanese), Bookda Gheisar (Iranian), Hussein Ibish (Kurdish-Lebanese), Zabelle (Armenian-Lebanese), Martha Ani Boudakian (Armenian), the late Susan Atefat Peckham (Iranian), and Jack Marshall (Iraqi-Syrian-Jewish). 5. See further Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 6. See further Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 7. See further Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). In this book, Weaver does a good job of theorizing some intercultural issues that are useful to ethnic studies scholars. 8. See further Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Although Womack espouses an essentially pluralist position that endorses separatism (i.e., discrete Indian critical paradigms)—a position criticized by Elvira Pulitano in Toward a Native American Critical Theory—his emphasis on autochthonous communal models of scholarship is both sophisticated and worth serious attention. 9. See further Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. See further Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001). Going Native, though original in its line of argumentation, can be considered something of a companion to Philip Deloria’s earlier Playing Indian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 11. See further Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 12. See further Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). 13. See further Devon A. Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2003). 14. Warrior, Tribal Secrets, xvii, xix. 15. Womack, Red on Red, 8. Earlier, Womack writes, “[I]t seems foolhardy to me to abandon a search for the affirmation of a national literary identity simply to fall in line with the latest literary trend,” 5–6. 16. Suad Joseph, “Against the Grain of the Nation—The Arab—,” in Arabs in America: Building a New Future, ed. Michael W. Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 260. 17. In any case, scholars like Mohja Kahf currently are conducting research on Muslim American literature, a category associated with Arab American literature but far from identical. This development, if

NOTES

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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it continues to progress, likely will help cast light on the relationship of the Arab American community with the Muslim American community, which are not really demarcated from one another and share a number of cultural features and political concerns. See further, Catherine John, Clear World and Third Sight (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). John argues convincingly that Blackness is (mis)appropriated frequently in academic circles and used opportunistically by some scholars to enhance their own careers rather than enhancing Black communities. She thus advocates grounded analysis inspired by Black cultural traditions rather than by the verisimilitude of high theory. See further Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Although Majid’s book is concerned by and large with international affairs and global Muslim communities, he has many interesting things to say about ethnic identities in the United States. See further Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon, 2004). Like Majid, Mamdani is concerned with international affairs but grounds much of his analysis in the way notions of Muslim inferiority manifest themselves in the United States based on its unique histories. See further Donald L. Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). Fixico illustrates that it is possible to seek out ethnic discreteness without descending into essentialism. Peter J. Awn. “Being Arab American in New York,” in A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City, ed. Kathleen Benson and Philip M. Kayal (New York: Museum of the City of New York/Syracuse University Press, 2002), 89. These are all fiction titles. Good nonfiction titles, which span genres from memoir and autobiography to the essay, include Suheir Hammad’s Drops of This Story (1996), Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab (1997), Elmaz Abinader’s Children of the Roojme (1991), Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (2000), Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava (2005), Naomi Shihab Nye’s Never in a Hurry (1996), Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999), Joanna Kadi’s edited collection Food for Our Grandmothers (1994), and Susan Muaddi Darraj’s edited collection Scheherazade’s Legacy (2004). These novels, mostly out of print or difficult to attain, include Doctor Della Valle (1917), The Green Flag (1921), The Book of Khalid (1911), and The Lily of Al-Ghore (1914). Worthwhile titles include Michael Suleiman, ed., Arabs in America: Building a New Future (1999), Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (1985), Andrew Shryock and Nabeel Abraham, eds., Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

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(2000), and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s The Muslims of America (1993). 26. Jack G. Shaheen has done a yeoman’s job of documenting stereotypes about Arabs in American society, with a shocking amount of written material in existence as a result. See further, for instance, the encyclopedic Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001). See also my Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes from and What It Means for Politics Today (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006).

Chapter 1 Problems of Inclusion: Arab American Studies and Ambiguous States of Being 1. Jonathan K. Stubbs, “The Bottom Rung of America’s Race Ladder: After the September 11 Catastrophe Are American Muslims Becoming America’s New N. . . . .S?,” Journal of Law and Religion 19, no. 1 (2003/2004): 115. Jimi Izrael made the same analogy in his essay, “The New American Nigger: A Love Letter to Arab Americans,” published originally in Blackworld. 2. Stubbs, “The Bottom Rung of America’s Race Ladder, 116. 3. Stubbs, “The Bottom Rung of America’s Race Ladder, 117. 4. I incorporate American Muslim into Arab American for both technical and philosophical reasons. Islam spans a great many ethnicities in the United States (and internationally), but is associated popularly with Arabs, a nondescript ethnic group actually represented by numerous religions. Stubbs notes that his analysis extends to those perceived to be Muslim in the United States, which overwhelmingly is the case with non-Muslim Arab Americans. I am interested here, then, in understanding how Arab America came into being and evolves in the United States as a social, political, and ethnic unit, an interest that necessarily includes an assessment of the role of Islam in Arab American culture and in constructions of the Arab image in various discourses in the United States. 5. For the classic, and perhaps still most useful, analysis of territorialization and deterritorialization, see further Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 6. One of the more fascinating, albeit brief, analyses of majoritarianism and minority communities in the United States can be found in Giovanna Borradori’s interview with Jurgen Habermas in Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Habermas notes that the majority can reinforce its privilege by practicing tolerance in a “paternalistic spirit” and argues that “the act of toleration retains an element of an act of mercy or of

NOTES

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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‘doing a favor.’ ” To speak of any sort of minority empowerment, then, is more complex than many lobbyists and social activists are willing to acknowledge. See further Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 40–41. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (London and New York: Zed, 1999), 2. Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8. John, Clear World and Third Sight, 4. Regarding Arab Americans specifically, Dina Gavrilos has shown how this phenomenon functioned during the first Gulf War: “[S]tories about Arab Americans during the war were constructed in ways that ultimately maintained and reinforced the hegemonic construction of America as a unified imagined community through the inclusion of Arab American ethnic differences, not in spite of or through the exclusion of these differences.” See further Dina Gavrilos, “Arab Americans in a Nation’s Imagined Community: How News Constructed Arab American Reactions to the Gulf War,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (2002): 427. For an interesting analysis of Arab Americans (in Detroit, at least) and their post-9/11 legal status, see further Sally Howell and Andrew Shryock, “Cracking Down on Diaspora: Arab Detroit and America’s ‘War on Terror,’ ” Anthropological Quarterly 76 (2003): 443–62. Other useful analyses include John G. Douglass, “Raiding Islam: Searches that Target Religious Institutions,” Journal of Law and Religion 19, no. 1 (2003/2004): 95–114; and David Domke et al., “Insights into U.S. Racial Hierarchy: Racial Profiling, News Sources, and September 11,” Journal of Communication 53, no. 4 (2003): 606–23. The best study thus far of these juridical phenomena was conducted by David Cole, a legal professor at Georgetown University. See further David Cole, Enemy Aliens (New York: The New Press, 2003). See further Lawrence Davidson, “Debating Palestine: Arab-American Challenges to Zionism, 1917–1932,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 227–40. Important earlier texts include Eric Hooglund’s edited collection Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United States before 1940 (1987); Alixa Naff’s Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (1985); Gregory Orfalea’s Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (1988); Sameer Y. Abraham’s edited collection Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab American Communities (1983); and Abdo Elkholy’s Arab Moslems in the United States (1966). Some of these titles include Michael W. Suleiman’s edited collection, Arabs in America: Building a New Future (1999); Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash’s edited collection, Post Gibran: Anthology of

160

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

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New Arab American Writing (2000); Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001); Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock’s edited collection, Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (2000); and Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States (1997). See further Nabeel Abraham, “Anti-Arab Racism and Violence in the United States,” in The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 155–215; and Ronald Stockton, “Ethnic Archetypes and the Arab Image” in the same book, pp. 119–53. See further Yossi Shain, “Arab-Americans at a Crossroads,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 3 (1996): 46–59. See further Orayb Aref Najjar, “Can This Image Be Saved?: ArabAmericans and the Media,” in Islam and the West in Mass Media: Fragmented Images in a Globalizing World, ed. Kai Hafez (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999): 255–71. See further Nadine Naber, “Ambiguous Insiders: An Investigation of Arab American Invisibility,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 37–61; and Therese Saliba, “Resisting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and Activism,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 304–19. See further Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Two Worlds: Arab-American Writing,” Forkroads 1, no. 3 (1996): 64–80. See further Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Arab American Literature and the Politics of Memory,” in Memory and Cultural Politics, ed. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 266–90. See further Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Arab-Americans and the Meanings of Race,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States, ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 320–37; and Helen Hatab Samhan, “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab-American Experience,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 209–26. See further Linda S. Walbridge, “A Look at Differing Ideologies among Shi’a Muslims in the United States,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 53–68; Richard R. Jones, “Egyptian Copts in Detroit: Ethnic Community and Long-Distance Nationalism,” in Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream, ed. Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 219–40; and Nabeel Abraham, “Arab Detroit’s ‘American’ Mosque,” in Arab Detroit, pp. 279–312. See further Fatima Agha Al-Hayani, “Arabs and the American Legal System: Cultural and Political Ramifications,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 69–83; and “Legal Perspectives on Arabs and Muslims in U.S. Courts,” in Arabs in America, 100–12.

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25. See further Anne Rasmussen, “The Sound of Culture, the Structure of Tradition: Musicians’ Work in Arab Detroit,” in Abraham and Shryock, Arab Detroit, 551–72. 26. See further Lawrence Davidson, America’s Palestine (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001). 27. See further Evelyn Shakir, “Arab Mothers, American Sons: Women in Arab-American Autobiographies,” MELUS 17, no. 3 (1991/1992): 5–15. 28. See further Samia El-Badry, “The Arab-American Market,” American Demographics 16, no. 1 (1994): 22–28. 29. See further Alean Al-Krenawi and John R. Graham, “Culturally Sensitive Social Work Practice with Arab Clients in Mental Health Settings,” Health and Social Work 25, no. 1 (2000): 1–20. 30. See further Shams Alwujude, “Daughter of America,” in Abraham and Shryock, Arab Detroit, 381–90. 31. See further Elaine Hagopian, ed., Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2004). 32. See further Yvonne Haddad, Not Quite American?: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004); and The Museum of the City of New York, A Community of Many Worlds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002). 33. James Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xiv. 34. Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage, xiv. 35. Jeffrey Wallen, Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 13. 36. Wallen, Closed Encounters, 7. 37. See further Abd-l Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat, “The Ideology of Black Social Science,” in The Death of White Sociology, ed. Joyce A. Ladner (New York: Vintage, 1973), 173–89. 38. See further Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 39. See further Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 67–79. 40. See further Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); and Shadow Distance (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 41. See further Womack, Red on Red. Another title that explores Native literatures in the context of a specific national tradition—in this case Cherokee—also supports at least implicitly the construction of discrete critical models in Native America. See further Daniel Heath Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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42. Werner Sollors, “Comments,” in Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, ed. Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 152. 43. Sollors, “Comments,” 155. 44. Wolfgang Hochbruck, “Cultural Authenticity and the Construction of Pan-Indian Metanarrative,” in Siemerling and Schwenk, Cultural Difference and the Literary Text, 20. 45. Hochbruck, “Cultural Authenticity,” 26, 27. 46. See further Ward Churchill’s essay “Beyond Ethnicity?: Werner Sollors’ Deepest Avatar of Racism,” in Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians (San Francisco: City Lights, 1998), 137–47. 47. Katrin Schwenk, “Introduction: Thinking about ‘Pure Pluralism,’ ” in Siemerling and Schwenk, Cultural Difference and the Literary Text, 5. 48. My first book, to cite one example, is a comparison of Palestinians and Native Americans, and is a text that could be considered part of the transethnic structure Sollors advocates. 49. It is safe to say that ethnic area studies all acknowledge the role of geopolitics in the construction of racial tensions, as well as its influence on intercultural dialectics. For further reading see Weaver, That the People Might Live; Womack, Red on Red; Christian, “The Race for Theory; Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh, ed., Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002); John, Clear World and Third Sight; and Russell Thorton, ed., Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 50. See further Rob Kroes, “Americanization: What Are We Talking About?,” in American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader, ed. Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 323. 51. CAAS has gone about recruiting students of all backgrounds, although it takes seriously its mission to serve the Arab American community of greater Detroit, which necessarily entails providing both graduate and undergraduate education to its members. 52. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic define critical race theory in the following way: “The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and

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55.

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57.

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neutral principles of constitutional law.” Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 2–3. Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. Some titles in this field worth perusing include Robert J.C. Young’s White Mythologies (1990, 2004), Valerie Babb’s Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (1998), and Mike Hill’s After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (2004). Günter H. Lenz, “Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 465. John Carlos Rowe, “Postnationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” in Pease and Wiegman, The Futures of American Studies, 167. In The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism Chow affirms that people equate ethnic literature with communities of color and notes that others attempt to undermine that equation by pointing out that all humans, and thus all writers, belong to ethnic groups, thereby insinuating that the category of “ethnic literature” might reasonably be dissolved. Chow draws a number of relevant conclusions from this duality. First, she observes that insistence on ethnicity being a universal category devalues the communities that experience racism and have grown up around some form of philosophical or legal inequality. Second, she notes that, even though it has been invalidated scientifically, we still use a category of race to organize our perceptions of one another—the use of race often is implicit because it tends to become entangled with the vocabulary of ethnicity. And third, she suggests that the entanglement of race and ethnicity can lead to what she calls the ghettoization of ethnic literature by consigning authors of color— no matter the quality of the work they produce—into predetermined spaces within English curricula and literary marketing plans. See further The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). My conception of the aesthetic, like most of those in use today, is broader than the traditional usage arising from Enlightenment traditions; I have accepted the assumption that varying national and ethnic traditions necessarily employ various notions of the aesthetic and have different uses for it based on distinct cultural and historical phenomena. An Arab American aesthetic, for example, might include the prioritization of metered verse in poetic analysis or linguistic and geographical interplay in fictive literary criticism. Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 44.

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60. Some strong texts dealing with these issues have been written about ethnic studies and American Studies. See further Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 61. Although no book-length study of Arab American intellectual history has thus far been published, enough material exists, in my opinion, to warrant at least one attempt. Such an attempt might be modeled after Warrior’s Native intellectual history, Tribal Secrets.

Chapter 2 The Internationalization of the Nation: The Uses of the Lebanese Civil War in Arab American Fiction 1. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1. 2. Nye is the only American-born author to appear in Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, a fact that enables us to speculate that Palestinian is, at least tacitly, treated as an ethnicity more than as a nationality among Arab Americans. Such an outlook has likely contributed to the centrality of Palestine in much Arab American writing. 3. Majaj, “Two Worlds Emerging,” 65. 4. Other theorists have expounded on this sort of formulation in sophisticated ways. See further, for instance, Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 5. Lisa Suhair Majaj, “New Directions: Arab-American Writing at Century’s End,” in Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing, ed. Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash (Bethesda, MD: JUSOOR, 1999), 76. 6. Majaj, “New Directions,” 72. 7. See further Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2003). 8. I am aware that this argument may be met with some skepticism. However, in offering it I do not intend to separate the categories of Arab and Lebanese, for clearly Lebanon is culturally and geographically a so-called Arab nation (or at least it is geopolitically, like the twenty-one other nations of West Asia and North Africa that retain specific geopolitical designations that don’t necessarily clarify the inherent problems of staking out a particular Arab ethnicity transnationally and intercontinentally, or the various tendencies to search out discreteness at the local level). Rather, I am acknowledging that there

NOTES

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

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is a long-standing tendency in Lebanon to produce alternate identities and designations that create some separation among the Lebanese and their Arab neighbors (e.g., Phoenician or simply Lebanese). I also think it is important to acknowledge the specificity of Lebanese history as the Lebanese themselves often conceptualize it, an acknowledgment that recognizes the unique development of this small parcel of land nestled along the Mediterranean, which by all accounts has produced a unique hodgepodge of inhabitants. See further Shaw J. Dallal, Scattered Like Seeds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). See further Ibrahim Fawal, On the Hills of God (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1998). For a few examples of analyses of American literature beyond geopolitical boundaries, see further Elliott and Stokes, American Literary Studies; E. Dean Kolbas, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Alison Russell, Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2000). One could also include the African American literary tradition in the same excepted class as Native literatures, depending mainly on whether one would consider African Americans discrete on the grounds of forced passage to the New World or whether one would consider them vital to the evolution of the American polity and therefore quintessentially “American,” a debate that has divided Afrocentrists such as Molefi Kete Asante and poststructuralists and integrationists such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In the context of Asian American literature and criticism, Sau-ling C. Wong examines with rigor these pragmatic and theoretical issues, an examination that I consider helpful to those interested in how the issues might influence Arab American scholarship. See further Sau-ling C. Wong, “The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossing: Hauling Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices,” in Elliott and Stokes, American Literary Studies, 290–317. Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 12. See further Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Other themes include the aforementioned Israel–Palestine conflict, the process of assimilation and acculturation, racism and xenophobia, reflection on ancestral lands, and cultural exposition, all of which are common themes among immigrant authors and their descendants. It is ironic that among the critics today who produce politicized work is the venerable literary scholar Harold Bloom, known inside and outside of academe as a fierce defender of the purity of (almost exclusively Western) literature in the face of what he considers unacceptably proactive reading practices. Although Bloom remains one of the most

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

NOTES

insightful and sophisticated connoisseurs of the Western canon, he often reactively invokes the beauty of certain literary texts to rail against theoretical schools and political positions he finds unsavory. In How to Read and Why, for instance, he notes, “I intend no polemics here,” and then goes on to proclaim that “[h]istoricizing, whether of past or present, is a kind of idolatry, an obsessive worship of things in time,” supports “a yearning for canonical literary study that universities disdain to fulfill,” and condemns “the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism,” which “seem limitless.” See further Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), 24, 27. John Whalen-Bridge, Political Fiction and the American Self (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 4. Whalen-Bridge, Political Fiction and the American Self, 38–39. See further Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). See further Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. See further Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 518–36. About this phenomenon, Mohomodou Houssouba notes that in the novel an “unsettling psycho social picture confronts the reader with the problem of Arab unity, which the prevailing order of things negates. There is neither solidarity nor unity among Arabs.” See further Mohomodou Houssouba, “Ever Since Gilgamesh: Etel Adnan’s Discourse of National Unity in Sitt Marie Rose,” in Majaj and Amireh, Etel Adnan, 138. Houssouba observes, “The preoccupation of Sitt Marie Rose, who is abducted by Mounir and his Christian militia forces in the second part of the novel, stems from an understanding of local and regional history. The Palestinian refugee camp is the ‘open sore’ of the Arab world—a testimony to the betrayal of one member of the ‘family’ of the Arab nation,” “Ever Since Gilgamesh,” 142. In my mind, this text remains the definitive account and analysis of the Lebanese Civil War. See further Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Although it is a bit dated, this text provides an excellent account of the factors that allowed Lebanon to descend into confessional struggle, and it is much more astute than the more popular From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman. See further David Gilmour, Lebanon: The Fractured Country (London: MacDonald and Company, 1987). Houssouba, “Ever Since Gilgamesh,” 151. Houssouba, “Ever Since Gilgamesh,” 147. John Champagne, “Among Good Christian Peoples: Teaching Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose,” in Majaj and Amireh, Etel Adnan, 155.

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30. Champagne also suggests that “[w]hile students do seem to benefit from having done some research on the history of Lebanon in general and the 1975 civil war in particular, such research is not sufficient; students must also learn to address the way the transaction between subject and text we call reading is necessarily structured by a history always already inscribed into their own subjectivities, as well as in the text,” “Among Good Christian Peoples,” 154. 31. Literally, “boys” or “young men.” In Arabic, chabab generally refers to groups of young men, much like “the crew” or “the boys” in English. 32. Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, trans. Georgina Kleege (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1982), 60. 33. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 63. 34. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 64. 35. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 37. 36. For an interesting analysis of the historical dialectic between racism and sexism, and indeed of all the issues of racism I raise in this book, see further Albert Memmi, Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Although Memmi’s argument excludes many ethnonationalist states such as Israel that purvey racism institutionally, his critique of racism’s many social postures is illuminating, particularly his assertion that sexist and racist attitudes have long been intertwined because they share a common origin. 37. Memmi, Racism, 36. 38. Memmi, Racism, 45. 39. Houssouba observes that in the novel “the manipulation of point of view favors Marie Rose’s intellectual and ethical positions,” “Ever Since Gilgamesh,” 147. 40. Champagne, “Among Good Christian Peoples,” 168. 41. See further Houssouba, “Ever Since Gilgamesh,” 151. 42. Houssouba writes, “The narrator’s reflections on atavism generate a coherent commentary on social history. From Sumer to Canaan, the narratives of the past are distilled into a storyline of racial history,” “Ever Since Gilgamesh,” 146. 43. Sami Ofeish and Sabah Ghandour point out, quite rightly, that “[s]ectarian identification encourages individuals and groups to see power as something acquired only by adhering to one’s sectarian community.” See further Sami Ofeish and Sabah Ghandour, “Transgressive Subjects: Gender, War, and Colonialism in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose,” in Majaj and Amireh, Etel Adnan, 130. 44. Ofeish and Ghandour, “Transgressive Subjects,” 130. 45. See further Ofeish and Ghandour, “Transgressive Subjects,” 123; see also Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 46. Ofeish and Ghandour note that Lebanon’s National Pact, implemented largely by France, “included an agreement over Lebanon’s identity.

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47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

NOTES

The Maronite comprador sacrificed its notion of Lebanon’s primary attachment to the West, while the Muslim elite of the peripheries withdrew their insistence on unity with a larger Syrian or Arab nation. But with the development of a service-based economy, led after independence by the Maronite elite in association with western investments, the state and its ideology had a clear western tilt,” “Transgressive Subjects,” 125–26. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 8. For instance, see further her poetry collection The Indian Never Had a Horse and Other Poems (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1985). A paragraph later, as if to legitimize Adnan’s tacit referencing of New World colonization, the unnamed narrator remembers “a feeling I had one dawn in the indian pueblo at Taos.” For more information about the appropriation of Indian stereotypes in the American subconscious, see Deloria, Playing Indian, and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian (New York: Vintage, 1978). Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 57. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 33. Ofeish and Ghandour point out that “Mounir does not allow his reluctant realization of ‘woman as a worthy partner’ to overcome his sectarianism, for such a realization would alter the ‘old alliance’ of the patriarchal system, with it dominance of men over women, of the privileged over the deprived, of the powerful over the weak, of the sectarian over the secular,” “Transgressive Subjects,” 133. David Stannard’s controversial and polemical synthesis of New World colonization, which has now become a classic, bears out the veracity of my assertion. See further David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 55. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 57. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 58. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 55. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 57. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 59. Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 58. Sitt Marie Rose was inspired by a Syrian woman named Marie Rose Boulos. Wail Hassan, “Of Lions and Storytelling,” Al-Jadid 10, nos. 46–47 (2004). See further Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Other authors considered to have used pastiche include John Barth, Umberto Eco, Amy Lowell, Tayeb Salih, Wole Soyinka, J.M. Coetzee, and Gerald Vizenor.

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64. Mark Lindquist, review of KOOLAIDS: The Art of War, by Rabih Alameddine, New York Times, 26 July 1998. Available at ⬍www. marklindquist.net/koolaids.html⬎. 65. Lindquist, review of KOOLAIDS: The Art of War. 66. Stan Henry, review of KOOLAIDS: The Art of War, by Rabih Alameddine, Lambda Book Report, August 1998, 24. 67. KOOLAIDS, in my mind, most closely resembles Vizenor’s The Trickster of Liberty, a raucously funny novel that also blends genres and comments unforgivingly on contemporary issues affecting Native communities. 68. Rabih Alameddine, KOOLAIDS: The Art of War (New York: Picador, 1998), 188. 69. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 101. 70. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 101. 71. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 101. 72. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 103. 73. Saree Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity,” in The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 277. 74. Makdisi also writes, “[E]very memory of prewar life called attention to itself as a relic from what seemed to be a different world. At the same time, however, each such memory was faced with annihilation, as the physical or material world to which it corresponded was gradually and inexorably destroyed. What remained, then, as the everyday world of the war, was necessarily fragmented,” “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World,” 277. 75. Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World,” 278. 76. What Christianson meant by “extreme literature” is either a reworking or working over of established literary conventions, in turn creating a distinct type of work that defies comfortable generic classification. Some examples include Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1996) and Automated Alice (2000), Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House (1994), Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969), and Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). 77. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 7. 78. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 15. 79. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 11. 80. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 33. 81. As Roger W. Durbin suggests, “War, death, sex in a morally empty and meaningless world—when mixed on Alameddine’s palette, they make for fascinating reading. To make his point, Alameddine freely cites thinkers whose takes on life and death he finds laughably wanting.” See further Roger W. Durbin, review of KOOLAIDS: The Art of War, by Rabih Alameddine, Library Journal, 1 May 1998, 135.

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82. Edward Said discusses this phenomenon at length in Orientalism. See further Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). Mohja Kahf also has analyzed sexuality and the image of the Orient in the Western imagination. See further Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). At the 2005 Kallimuna Conference, hosted by RAWI, a vibrant discussion about Western misconceptions of sexuality and homosexuality in the Arab World occurred, with many participants arguing that American notions of rabid homophobia in the Arab World are in many cases projections of American intolerance. 83. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 151. 84. Gerry Smyth, “The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing the Border,” in Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, ed. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 43. 85. Smyth, “The Politics of Hybridity,” 46. 86. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 118. 87. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 86. 88. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 83. 89. Syrine C. Hout, “Of Fathers and Fatherlands in the Post-1945 Lebanese Exilic Novel,” World Literature Today 75, no. 2 (2001): 288. 90. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 40. 91. As Syrine Hout observes, “ ‘Fitting in’ in America without belonging there, and belonging in Lebanon without ‘fitting in’ there epitomizes his linguistic, emotional, and mental state of cultural in-betweenness,” “Of Fathers and Fatherlands,” 288. 92. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 28. 93. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 36. Emphasis in original. 94. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 46. 95. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 47. 96. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 53. 97. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformation in the Symbolic Construction of America (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 12. 98. Alameddine, KOOLAIDS, 14. 99. As Majaj points out, recourse “to essentialism, articulated most clearly through biological metaphors of cultural affiliation, often endorses nostalgia for an idealized, patriarchal ethnic past. However, contemporary Arab American writers increasingly critique this static conception of culture, turning to memory to negotiate an ethnic identity that is heterogeneous and engaged across cultural borders. In particular, current writers frequently interrogate the gendered assumptions implicit in essentialist models of ethnicity, articulating an affiliative model of identification in which ethnicity, reconstrued as a transformative engagement with the past, grounds and facilitates action in both present and future.” See further Majaj, “Arab American Literature and the Politics of Memory,” 267.

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100. In using the phrase “physically affected,” I mean geographically. The tragic 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barrack affected the United States tremendously, but the war never spread physically to the United States.

Chapter 3 Honesty Lost: The Strange Circumstances of Love, Death, and Norma Khouri 1. Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, The Ill-Fated Pessoptimist, trans. Trevor Le Gassick and Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Columbia, LA: Readers International, 1989), 44. 2. I disagree rather strongly with Iain McCalman’s assessment, offered in the New York Times, that “Ms. Khouri’s imposture doesn’t mean that she lacks literary ability. Had Forbidden Love been a novel, there would have been little fuss, for it is a good read.” I would point out that had the memoir been a novel, the same set of untenable stereotypes would still have existed and that Khouri indeed lacks literary ability, one of whose requisites—in my perhaps stringent mind, at least—is honesty. See further, Iain McCalman, “The Empty Chador,” New York Times, 4 August 2004, sec. A. 3. Ali Abunimah states the point well: “In the post-Sept. 11 era, Khouri’s book met a certain demand in the US and other Western societies, where the shortcomings and ‘backwardness’ of Arab and Muslim societies have become a focus of intense interest to which precious little genuine expertise is brought to bear. Indeed the desire to ‘rescue’ Muslim women has become a prominent theme in liberal justifications for US intervention in the region. This was most common at the beginning of the Afghanistan War.” See further Ali Abunimah, “A Hoax and Honor Lost for Norma Khouri,” The Daily Star (Beirut), 10 August 2004, sec. A. 4. McCalman, for example, reflects, “Over the last couple of years Norma Khouri and I have found ourselves among the same assortment of beginners performing at Australian literary festivals. During book-signing sessions, I would look wistfully at the long serpentine queues waiting for an endorsement from the hand that wrote Forbidden Love,” “The Empty Chador.” A 2003 Australian newspaper account notes that at an appearance in Christchurch, “it was a tale of courage Khouri had to tell and her address moved the audience of 450 people to a standing ovation.” See further Anna Claridge, “Audience Moved by Tale of Love and Death,” The Christchurch Press, 15 May 2003, sec. A. 5. Khouri writes, “These crimes [honor killings] do not receive international attention, though one woman reporter at the Jordan Times, an English-language weekly paper [sic] printed in Jordan, made a brave stance against these primitive customs, in the face of threats on

172

NOTES

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

her life, and began reporting on the crimes in the early nineties. Her reports have been chilling, and reveal that honor crimes are on the rise [sic].” See further Norma Khouri, Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan (New York: Atria, 2003), 197–98. As Abunimah observes, “The stereotype of helpless women in need of escape, which Khouri’s book has fed, renders these debates and struggles invisible, and disempowers the very women who are campaigning successfully for change from within,” “A Hoax and Honor Lost for Norma Khouri.” Seth Mydans, “A Friendship Sundered by Muslim Code of Honor,” New York Times, 1 February 2003, sec. A. Mydans, “A Friendship Sundered by Muslim Code of Honor.” Review of Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan, by Norma Khouri, Publishers Weekly Reviews, 27 January 2003, 251. Review of Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan, by Norma Khouri, Kirkus Reviews, 15 November 2003, 1675. Kristine Hunley, review of Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan, by Norma Khouri, Booklist, 15 February 2003, 1036. Emmy Chang, “Death by Sharia,” National Review Online, 7 March 2003. Accessed by LexisNexis, 18 February 2005. Ruthie Blum, “Murder She Wrote,” Jerusalem Post, 18 April 2003, sec. B. Irwin Savodnik, “Amman and a Woman: A Memoir of Misogyny in the Middle East,” The Weekly Standard, 16 June 2003. Accessed by LexisNexis, 2 September 2004. Savodnik, “Amman and a Woman.” Savodnik, “Amman and a Woman.” Khouri, Honor Lost, 1. Khouri, Honor Lost, 2. Khouri, Honor Lost, 3. Khouri, Honor Lost, 3. Khouri, Honor Lost, 4. Khouri, Honor Lost, 62. Khouri, Honor Lost, 193. Khouri, Honor Lost, 194–95. Khouri, Honor Lost, 60. Khouri, Honor Lost, 60. Khouri also had a knack for construing herself as indelibly courageous, as when she told NPR’s Madeline Brand, “You don’t do that [challenge men] there [in Jordan]. I called him [Dalia’s imaginary killer] a murderer. I told him that she was not the one to dishonor the family, that he was, and that her innocent blood would stain his hands and his name forever, and I vowed to get revenge.” See further NPR Morning Edition (with Bob Edwards), 17 June 2003. Accessed by EBSCO Host, 4 July 2005. Khouri, Honor Lost, 11.

NOTES

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

173

Khouri, Honor Lost, 31. Khouri, Honor Lost, 203. Khouri, Honor Lost, 203. Beth Davies, the organizer of the infamous Christchurch appearance in which Khouri left the audience in tears, had this to say when informed of the hoax: “She [Khouri] was totally compelling and we were absolutely convinced by her story. She was articulate, enthusiastic and knowledgeable with statistics, figures, and a photo of Dalia. Her passionate pleas about the plight of some women captured as us all.” Kristi Gray, author of the article, adds, “While a little embarrassed at being taken in by the deception, Davies believes Khouri has still raised awareness of the plight of many women in Muslim countries. She also said Khouri seemed to not be looking for financial gain and was not taking royalties for the books.” See further Kristi Gray, “Astonishment at Author Hoax Claim,” The Christchurch Press, 31 July 2004, sec. A. This story, and Davies’s embarrassingly apologetic response to being hoodwinked, indicates that some of Khouri’s victims seem to have learned nothing about the cultural forces that allowed the hoax to succeed—and indeed, some appear primed to be hoodwinked by the next hoax that comes along, which unfortunately is inevitable. See further, for instance, Jamie Walker and Hedley Thomas, “Clues Written in Sands of Hindsight,” Courier Mail (Queensland), 31 July 2004, sec. A. Some of the prominent theorists of Islam who are far from apologetic about mistreatment of women in the Islamic World (as well as in North America) include Mohja Kahf, Fatima Mernissi, Nawal ElSaadawi, Laila Ahmed, and Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Yasmine Bahrani, “Honor Lost Raises Troubling Questions,” USA Today, 25 February 2003, sec. D. Bahrani, “Honor Lost Raises Troubling Questions.” Bahrani, “Honor Lost Raises Troubling Questions.” Bahrani, “Honor Lost Raises Troubling Questions.” Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (1976), about a Cherokee boy coming of age in Southern Appalachia, became a widely taught book in the United States, and was even turned into a feature film in 1997. For a brief exposé of Nasdijj, author of, among other nonfiction, The Blood Runs Like a River through My Dreams, see further Sherman Alexie, “When the Story Stolen Is Your Own,” Time, 6 February 2006: 72. Castaneda is considered “authentic” in many communities in the United States, but most Indians dismiss him as a dilettante or even a con artist. See further Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (New York: Anchor, 1995). See further Judith Miller, God Has Ninety Nine Names (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

174

NOTES

44. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (New York: Owl, 2002). 45. Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), xii–xiii. 46. Gillian Whitlock, “Tainted Testimony: The Khouri Affair,” Australian Literary Studies 21, no. 4 (2004): 167. 47. Khouri, Honor Lost, 4. 48. Whitlock, “Tainted Testimony,” 173–74. 49. Laura Browder, Slippery Characters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 5. 50. Browder, Slippery Characters, 3. 51. Whitlock, “Tainted Testimony,” 175. 52. Whitlock, “Tainted Testimony,” 165. 53. Khouri, it should be mentioned, insisted on the veracity of her false story even after it was exposed as a hoax, telling Emma-Kate Symons of The Australian, “I will never call that book fiction and I will never call that book a novel.” She also claimed that “[t]he other people that do know, that did know Dalia, the other friends that I have in Jordan are still there.” See further Emma-Kate Symons, “Khouri Sorry, but Insists Book Is True,” The Australian, 18 August 2004, sec. A. 54. Majaj, “New Directions,” 77. 55. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 61–62. 56. This point is especially relevant given the vast media attention surrounding the 2006 James Frey fiasco, in which Frey was exposed by the investigative website smokinggun.com as having misrepresented his past in his bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. 57. The misrepresentation of Arabs in novels also is a long-standing tradition, made most infamous perhaps by Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958), and includes today Christopher Buckley’s purported satire Florence of Arabia (2004). 58. For a decent account of Curtis’s photographic depictions, see further Anne Makepeace, Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light (New York: National Geographic Society, 2001). 59. For some interesting discussion of this matter, see further Thorton, Studying Native America. 60. Patricia Sarrafian Ward, The Bullet Collection (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2003), 41. 61. Ward, The Bullet Collection, 61. 62. Diana Abu-Jaber, Arabian Jazz (New York: Harvest, 1993), 98–99.

Chapter 4 Escaping Inadequate Spaces: Anti-Arab Racism and Liberating Fictions 1. Naber, “Ambiguous Insiders,” 37. 2. Stockton, “Ethnic Archetypes and the Arab Image,” 121.

NOTES

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

175

Abraham, “Anti-Arab Racism and Violence,” 155. Abraham, “Anti-Arab Racism and Violence,” 160. Obenzinger, American Palestine, xii. Steve Clark, “Introduction,” in Travel Writing and Empire, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed, 1999), 2. Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy, 157–58. Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy, 158. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 22. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 25–26. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, vii. Much has been written about Christian Zionists, known also as dispensationalists, and their affects on culture and politics in the United States. See further, for instance, Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Gorenberg’s account makes a good modern supplement to Grace Halsell’s earlier book, Forcing God’s Hand, a short read that uses some journalism and personal exposition. See further Grace Halsell, Forcing God’s Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture—and Destruction of Planet Earth (Washington, DC: Crossroads International Publishing, 1999). Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy, 155. Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy, 156. Carol Khawly, “Impact of September 11 on Traditional Openness to Immigrants and Non-Immigrants.” American-Arab AntiDiscrimination Committee, 10 September 2002. Available at ⬍www. adc.org⬎. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 66. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History, 235. As Walter D. Mignolo claims, “[I]f scholarship cannot represent the colonized faithfully or allow the subaltern to speak, it can at least break up a monolithic notion of the subaltern and maintain an alternative discursive practice, parallel to both the official discourse of the state, for which maps represent territories and histories account for the truth of events, and the established discourse of official scholarship, in which the rules of the academic game are the sound warranty for the value of knowledge independent of any political agenda or personal interest.” See further Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 5. In my mind hooks’s most interesting commentaries on race and racism can be found in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Owl, 1997). See further Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). See further Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Blackwell, 1990).

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22. For a thorough overview, see further Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 23. See further Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 24. Vincent Leitch, Theory Matters (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 25. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13. 26. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 14. 27. See further David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 28. Patai’s offering is said to be used by officers at Fort Bragg as the basis of their “cultural instruction” as it relates to Arabs and Muslims. The book portrays Arabs as irrationally honor-bound, sexually aggressive, and devoid of real intellectual reason. See further Rafael Patai, The Arab Mind (Long Island City: Hatherleigh Press, 2002). For an excellent analysis of The Arab Mind, see further Brian Whitaker, “ ‘Its Best Use Is as a Doorstop,’ ” The Guardian (London), 24 May 2004, sec. A. 29. See further Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1996). For challenges to the bell curve theory, see further Steven Fraser, ed., The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 30. For more on Hrdlicka and his influence, at least on the Anishinaabeg, see further Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 31. Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 54. 32. Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash, “Introduction,” in Mattawa and Akash, Post-Gibran, xiii. 33. Mattawa and Akash, “Introduction,” xi. 34. This information comes from conversations I had with Geha in writing an article about Through and Through in 2001. 35. Joseph Geha, “Where I’m From—Originally,” in Townships, ed. Michael Martone (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 56. 36. Geha, “Where I’m From—Originally,” 56. 37. Geha, “Where I’m From—Originally,” 56–57. 38. Geha, “Where I’m From—Originally,” 57. 39. Joseph Geha, Through and Through: Toledo Stories (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1990), 38. 40. Geha, Through and Through, 32. 41. Geha, Through and Through, 41. 42. Geha, Through and Through, 46.

NOTES

177

43. Michael W. Suleiman, review of The Muslims of America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, and Through and Through: Toledo Stories, by Joseph Geha, Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1993): 71. 44. Suleiman, review of The Muslims of America and Through and Through, 71. 45. Dinitia Smith, “Arab-American Writers, Uneasy in Two Worlds,” New York Times, 19 February 2003, sec. E. 46. Smith, “Arab-American Writers, Uneasy in Two Worlds.” 47. Geha, Through and Through, 87. 48. Geha, Through and Through, 88. 49. Geha, Through and Through, 94. 50. Geha, Through and Through, 98. 51. Geha, Through and Through, 99. 52. As Salma Khadra Jayyusi writes, “[For Palestinians] there are problems of identity, even problems over the simple acquisition of a passport; Palestinian writers have to spend their lives either as exiles in other people’s countries, or, if they have in fact remained in their ancestral homeland, either as second-class citizens in Israel proper or lacking any citizenship at all under Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza. Because of the repressive conditions in many Arab states, there are, of course, many Arab writers who now live as voluntary exiles in the world at large, but many more such writers live, unlike the Palestinians, in their own sovereign states.” See further Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Introduction: Palestinian Literature in Modern Times,” in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2. 53. For a superb analysis of this Lebanese tradition, see further Salem, Constructing Lebanon. 54. I have argued elsewhere that Anglophone Palestinian writers, especially those in the United States whose numbers are rather substantial, should be considered a “fourth branch” in addition to the traditional “three branches” of modern Palestinian literature: writers inside Israel proper, in the Occupied Territories, and in exile throughout the Arab World. See further Steven Salaita, “Scattered Like Seeds: Palestinian Prose Goes Global,” Studies in the Humanities 30 (2003): 1–14. 55. See further Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999). The book is described on the inside front jacket as “an extraordinary story of exile.” 56. Salim Tamari, “The Local and the National in Palestinian Identity,” in Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Literature, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek and David C. Jacobson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 4. 57. Laila Halaby, West of the Jordan (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 24–25. 58. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 24. 59. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 15. 60. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 96.

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

Halaby, West of the Jordan, 61. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 74. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 58. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 58. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 59. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 59–60. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 60. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 9. Although it is now a bit dated, an excellent compendium of Muslim women’s sensibilities, which contradict starkly the sensibilities often attributed to them by American commentators, can be found in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima Qattan Bezirgan’s edited collection, Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). Halaby, West of the Jordan, 216. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 117. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 151. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 204. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 204. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 204. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 204. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 15. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 17. Halaby, West of the Jordan, 103. Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), xiii–xiv. It seems, however, that Orthodox Christianity has in the imagination of many Americans a mysterious and exotic undertone, a sort of alien Eastern rituality that some find strange and doctrinaire. I base this assessment primarily on my own experience as an Orthodox Christian in the United States, but it is evidenced, strangely but appropriately enough, in popular culture media such as the Friends episode in which the characters Chandler and Monica almost are married in haste by an Orthodox priest and in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which features an Orthodox wedding ceremony attended by baffled AngloAmericans. Islam is received with the same type of curiosity, but also with more outright hostility in film and editorial commentary.

Conclusion 1. While the lack of systematic discussion of Arab Americans is an unfortunate omission, it is offset by MELUS’s unquestionable commitment to domestic Arabs as individuals and communities, evidenced most clearly in a special issue devoted to Arab America in Autumn of 2006.

NOTES

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2. See further Nina Baym, “Early Histories of American Literature,” in The American Literary History Reader, ed. Gordon Hunter (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 80–110. 3. Jose L. Torres-Padilla, “Death to the Originary Narrative! or, Insurgent Multiculturalism and Teaching Multiethnic Literature,” MELUS 30, no. 2 (2005): 15. 4. Torres-Padilla, “Death to the Originary Narrative!,” 16. 5. For an incisive argument against many of the notions that underlie purported challenges to metanarratives, see further Tony Hilfer, The New Hegemony in Literary Studies (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). 6. Torres-Padilla, “Death to the Originary Narrative!,” 17. 7. Bonnie TuSmith and Sarika Chandra, “Pedagogy, Praxis, and Politics: An Introduction,” MELUS 30, no. 2 (2005): 4. 8. By “institutional,” I mean the type of multiculturalism that occurs formally in actual institutions, such as universities, and not the type of organic initiatives that arise at, say, the grassroots level. 9. TuSmith and Chandra, “Pedagogy, Praxis, and Politics,” 4. They note in the following paragraph, “A cursory survey will turn up many recent, documented cases of backlash against faculty and students of color who are perceived as directly aligned with and beneficiaries of multiculturalism. In sum, the teaching of multiethnic literary studies, which in the past thirty-odd years has progressed under far from ideal conditions, must now contend with even more sinister challenges and threats to its relative success,” 4–5. 10. See further, for instance, the following contributions: Gregory Jay (with Sandra Elaine Jones), “Whiteness Studies and the Multicultural Literature Classroom”; Billy Clem, “Pedagogy of a Radical Multiculturalism”; and Tina Chen, “Towards an Ethnics of Knowledge.” 11. The arguments against multiculturalism generally offered by conservative outfits such as CampusWatch.org, The National Association of Scholars, NoIndoctrination.org, and the Hoover Institute, and in publications such as The New Criterion and various anti-“Theory” anthologies, have a distinctly hostile, though subtle, conception of area studies and any instance of agency demonstrated by members of minority groups, Arabs and Muslims particularly. 12. The Internet has available many interesting statistics and analyses of minority hiring at the post-secondary level. At Washington University, for example, a 2004 report indicated that minority faculty hiring lagged behind the university’s stated goals. See further ⬍http:// admin.urel.washington.edu/uweek/archives/issue/uweek_ story_small.asp?id⫽2049⬎. Likewise, Harvard Magazine reported in 2002 that recruitment of minority and women faculty remained a nationwide problem. See further ⬍http://www.harvard-magazine.com/ on-line/030218.html⬎. diversityweb.org cites an important study by

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Daryl Smith, Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking Myths. See further ⬍http://www.diversityweb.org/Digest/F97/research. html⬎. 13. For an interesting discussion of this difference, at least as it affects African Americans, see further Gail L. Thompson and Angela C. Louque, Exposing the “Culture of Arrogance” in the Academy: A Blueprint for Increasing Black Faculty Satisfaction in Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2005). 14. Etel Adnan, “A Statement from RAWI President Etel Adnan,” RAWI Newsletter 33 (2005): 2. 15. Etel Adnan, “From RAWI’s President,” Kallimuna Brochure 3–5 June 2005: 3.

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Index

9/11, 8, 17–18, 21, 22, 24, 27–28, 110–11, 112, 115–16, 117 Abdul-Baki, Kathryn K., 13, 14, 55, 123, 131 Abraham, Nabeel, 3, 26–27, 111 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 9, 13, 52, 74, 107–8, 131 Adnan, Etel, 9, 14, 15, 57, 62–71, 73, 79, 82, 84, 131, 152–53 African Americans, 19, 110 African American Studies, 4, 25 AIDS, 72, 73, 75, 83 Akash, Munir, 123 Alameddine, Rabih, 9, 13, 15, 57, 64, 68, 72–84, 130, 131 Alfred, Taiaiake, 3, 30 Al Jadid, 147 Alkalimat, Abd-l Hakimu Ibn, 30 Althusser, Louis, 117 American Studies, 6, 25, 40–43, 46, 48 Amireh, Amal, 3 Anaya, Rudolfo, 59 Anti-Arab racism, 15, 19, 20, 21, 33–34, 102, 103, 110–21, 135, 140 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 120 Arab American Institute (AAI), 6 Arab American Studies, ix–x, 3–4, 5–6, 11, 19, 24–49, 51, 53, 54, 72, 103, 141, 145, 146–48, 149, 151–53 Arab-centrism, 37–38, 43 Arrabita, 14

Ashcroft, John, 113 Asian Americans, 19, 112, 127 Asian American Studies, 4 Awn, Peter J., 12 Bagain, Norma, see Norma Khouri Bahrani, Yasmine, 95 Barbary Coast, 114 Bauerlein, Mark, 53 Behdad, Ali, 41 The Bell Curve, 120 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 83 Blum, Ruthie, 91 Boosahda, Elizabeth, 141 Brooks, Geraldine, 97, 112 Browder, Laura, 98–99 Bush, George W., 111, 119–20 Cabral, Amilcar, 121 Carter, Asa (Forrest), 96 Castaneda, Carlos, 96 Center for Arab American Studies (CAAS), 28, 36, 40 Cervantes, 45 Champagne, John, 66, 69–70 Chandra, Sarika, 145, 149 Chang, Emmy, 90–91, 92 Chin, Frank, 59 Chow, Rey, 44 Christian, Barbara, 30 Christian Arabs, 6, 7, 8, 65–66, 92, 95, 123 Christianity, 7, 8, 22, 119 Christianson, Scott, 78 Churchill, Ward, 31

194

INDEX

Clark, Steve, 112 Clifford, James, 23–24 colonial discourse, 120 cooke, miriam, 13, 55 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 3, 30, 117, 118 cosmopolitanism, 32–33, 35 Coulter, Ann, 113 creolization, 34–36 critical race theory, 41, 43 cultural anthropology, 120 Cultural Studies, 28, 36, 42, 48 Curtis, Edward S., 104–5 Dallal, Shaw, 55, 57, 131 Davidson, Lawrence, 26 DeLay, Tom, 113 Deloria, Philip, 3 Deloria, Jr., Vine, 30 Eagleton, Terry, 117 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 97 Emerson, Steve, 113 Ethnic Studies, 10, 15, 25, 31, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 146 Fanon, Frantz, 70, 113 Fawal, Ibrahim, 57 Ferraro, Thomas J., 21 Fisk, Robert, 65 Fixico, Donald, 11 Fraser, Nancy, 62 Geha, Joseph, 13, 15, 74, 109, 121, 123–31, 141–42 Ghandour, Sabah, 70 Ghosh, Amitav, 59 Gibran, Kahlil, 14, 147 Gilmour, David, 65 Gilroy, Paul, 53 Griffin, John Howard, 97 Habiby, Emile, 87 Halaby, Laila, 13, 15, 55, 64, 109, 121, 131–42

Halsell, Grace, 97 Hammad, Suheir, 9, 52 Handal, Nathalie, 52 Hassan, Wail, 75 Hazo, Samuel, 52 Henry, Stan, 76 Herrnstein, Richard, 120 Highwater, Jamake, 96, 100 Hill, Mike, 45 Hispanics, 19, 23, 112, 122, 127 Hochbruck, Wolfgang, 31–32 Hollinger, David, 120 hooks, bell, 117 Hosseini, Khaled, 59 Houssouba, Mohomodou, 65, 69–70 Hout, Syrine C., 81 Hrdlicka, Ales, 120 Huhndorf, Shari, 3 Husseini, Rana, 88–89 immigrant literature, 121–23 Imus, Don, 113 Indians, see Native Americans Islam, 6–8, 9, 18–19, 22, 42, 43, 67–68, 90, 93, 95, 100, 103, 141, 149 Islamophobia, 39, 93, 114 Israel, 56, 111 Israel-Palestine conflict, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61 Jameson, Frederick, 75 John, Catherine, 11, 23–24, 30 Joseph, Suad, 6 Kahf, Mohja, 9 Kaldas, Pauline, 13 Keenan, Thomas, 52 Kerry, John, 111, 120 Khawly, Carol, 115–16 Khouri, Norma, 15, 87–108, 112, 133, 148 Kimball, Roger, 53 Kissinger, Henry, 114 Kramer, Hilton, 53

INDEX

Kroes, Rob, 34–35 Kurtz, Stanley, 113

Noble, Francis Khirallah, 14 Nye, Naomi Shihab, 9, 14, 52

Lalami, Laila, 13 Lee, James Kyung-Jin, 28–29, 145 Leitch, Vincent, 118–19 Lenz, Gunter H., 43 Lindquist, Mark, 76 Loomba, Ania, 116 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 53

Obenzinger, Hilton, 97, 112 Ofeish, Sami, 70 O’Reilly, Bill, 113 Orientalism, 114 Originary Narrative, 143–44 Owens, Louis, 3

Majaj, Lisa Suhair, 3, 30, 35, 53–54, 100 Majid, Anouar, 11, 30, 59, 62, 112–13, 114 Makdisi, Saree, 77–78 Mamdani, Mahmood, 11 manifest manners, 113 Marston, Elsa, 14 Mather, Cotton, 114 Mattawa, Khaled, 3, 9, 13, 123 McCarus, Ernest, 26 Melhem, D.H., 52 MELUS, 143, 145, 146, 149 Melville, Herman, 97 Middle East Studies, 25, 47 Mihesuah, Devon, 3 Miller, Judith, 97, 112 Mizna, 147 Mohanty, Satya, 62, 116 monoculturalism, 144–46, 149, 150, 152 Mukherjee, Bharatee, 59 multiculturalism, 15, 28–29, 44, 45, 48, 143–45, 149, 150, 152 Murray, Charles, 120 Naber, Nadine, 110 Nasdijj, 96 Native Americans, 19, 30, 31, 41, 70, 89, 96, 100, 104–5, 118 Native American Studies, ix, 3, 4–5, 25, 26, 40–41 neoconservatives, 9, 25

195

Palestine, 56, 64, 107, 116, 131, 132, 140 pastiche, 72, 75, 118 Patai, Raphael, 120 Pipes, Daniel, 113 pluralism, 32–33, 35, 120 Pryce-Jones, David, 112 Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. (RAWI), 14, 62, 147, 152 Rania, Queen of Jordan, 93 reader response theory, 66 Rihani, Ameen, 14, 147 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 70 Rowe, John Carlos, 43 Said, Edward, 7, 30, 52, 59, 132 Salem, Elise, 55 Sandys, George, 112 Sasson, Jean, 97, 112 Savodnik, Irwin, 91 Schwenk, Katrin, 30, 32 Serageldin, Samia, 13 Shakespeare, 45 Shakir, Evelyn, 3 Shryock, Andrew, 3 Siemerling, Winfried, 30 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 21, 62, 113 Smyth, Gerry, 80 Sollors, Werner, 31–32 South Asians, 18, 19, 23, 115, 116 Southern Hemisphere, 116 Soyinka, Wole, 59 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 53 Stephens, John Lloyd, 112

196

INDEX

Stockton, Ronald, 27, 41, 110, 111 Stubbs, Jonathan K., 17–21, 32–33, 41 Suleiman, Michael W., 3, 126–27 Tamari, Salim, 132 Tan, Amy, 59 Thompson, William M., 112 tokenism, 146 Toliopoulos, Norma, see Norma Khouri Torres-Padilla, Jose L., 143–44, 149 Turki, Fawaz, 52 TuSmith, Bonnie, 145, 149 Twain, Mark, 97, 112

USA PATRIOT Act, 24, 111 Vizenor, Gerald, 30, 76, 100, 113 Wallen, Jeffrey, 29–30 Ward, Patricia Sarrafian, 13, 73, 106–7, 108 Warrior, Robert, 3, 4 Weaver, Jace, 3 Whalen-Bridge, John, 61 Whiteness Studies, 42–43 Whitlock, Gillian, 98, 99 Womack, Craig, 3, 5, 30 Zionism, 113–14

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Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Twentieth-century American literary naturalism: an interpretation

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the 21 Century)