Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms (2010)
Published in Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds. Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011.
ABSTRACT: In this essay, Nadine Naber interrogates the ways that Arab diasporas remake “Arab culture” in the United States and the significance of this process to the issues of sexism and homophobia. Her analysis focuses on middle-class Arab immigrant discourses and the Arab American social movements to which she has belonged. Naber proposes a feminist approach that locates diasporic notions of “culture” within the historical legacies of European colonialism and Orientalism and the contemporary experiences of displacement, immigration, racism, and assimilation. Here, she argues that “culture” is “political.” This approach considers how issues that are seemingly “internal” to our communities (such as sexism and homophobia) emerge with and through a range of “external” forces. From this standpoint, Naber calls for alternatives to social movement frameworks that subordinate gender or sexuality or both to a private-cultural-communal domain and mark gender and sexuality as secondary to the more pressing issues of our times—such as war and racism. Working beyond the notions of distinct and separate internal-private and external-public domains, she finds a sense of liberation from the fear of “washing our dirty laundry in public” that has haunted many Arab and Arab American feminist projects in the United States.