by Tony Zeoli | Jul 12, 2024
Nadine Naber’s Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism provides context, cultural understanding, and criticism for what it means to be an Arab American and activist for both insiders and outsiders within the Arab community and academe. This text uses quantitative and qualitative investigation, which will appeal to women’s studies centered in both the social sciences and humanities. A reader less familiar with Arab America gains a working historical knowledge as well as a sense of the diversity within this community and readers more familiar with this community gain insights that challenge what they believe to be true.
by Tony Zeoli | Jan 6, 2024
adine Naber’s Arab America focuses on an Arab American community of young adult activists in the San Francisco Bay Area and explores the complex set of diasporic identities they grapple with. Many have grown up with immigrant parents insisting that they maintain allegiance to a conception of Arab culture set in direct opposition to American culture, which is associated with degeneracy, moral bankruptcy, and sexual deviance. Naber notes that this insistence puts particular pressure on Arab women to adhere to heterosexist norms of family duty and sexual responsibility. At the same time, Arabs are subject to Orientalist and imperialist attitudes in American culture, based on the impression that oppressed women need saving by American heroes, which serves as a justii cation for American military interventions in Arab lands. The Arab assumptions largely reverse the polarities of the Orientalist ones but still enable imperialist visions of Arab women as oppressed, thereby leaving that larger racist framework intact. What Naber aims to understand, then, is how individual young adults, especially women, navigate various “articulations of Arabness” related to family, religion, gender, and sexuality to maintain a sense of belonging in America without abandoning allegiance to the Arab community.
by Tony Zeoli | Jan 6, 2024
by Tony Zeoli | Jan 6, 2024
Arab and Arab-American Feminisms is an explosively oppositional book that crosses sanctified boundaries of nationality, religion, sect, ethnicity, class and sexuality to challenge America’s ‘war on terror’ in both its external and internal forms. The book was conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, when American hostility towards Arabs and Muslims was being made manifest in actions as weird as a school principal stripping a 16-year-old schoolgirl of her ‘Free Palestine’ t-shirt and as crude as the message ‘Get the f*** out of the USA … NOW!!!!’, sent to scholars who denounced the Israeli war on Gaza. The editors have brought together a cross-section of articulate women – academics, poets, community activists, performance artists, fiction writers – to tell their experiences of silencing and ‘speaking back’. These personal narratives are held together by a cogent historical critique of American racism and a structure that highlights themes such as ‘Living with/in empire’, ‘Activist communities’ and ‘Home and homelands’.
by Tony Zeoli | Jan 6, 2024
While commentators have heralded the election of Barak Obama as the start of a new era in which race and color are no longer determinative factors, the jury is still out as far as Arab Americans are concerned. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, a Bush administration official said that a second attack would lead to the rounding up of Arab Americans, just like Japanese Americans during World War II. In Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11, we have a book that provides disturbing evidence supporting this shocking assessment.
by Tony Zeoli | Dec 28, 2023
In Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, Nadine Naber traces the historical, political, and community-building experiences of Arab Americans living in the San Francisco Bay area with impressive attention to the cultural, religious, and generational heterogeneity of her interlocutors. An important aspect of this timely ethnography is the fact that Naber compellingly demonstrates that the transition of Arab Americans from “model minority” to “problem minority” predates 9/11, a date now associated with the genesis of anti-Arab attitudes and heightened Orientalism. This is critical to Naber’s analysis, as we get to understand that “Articulating Arabness” in the Bay area was firmly grounded in two main instances of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East: the ongoing U.S. support of Israeli militaristic control over Palestine, the occupied territories, and Palestinians living in Israel and the first Gulf War. More significantly, these forms of U.S. international imperialism are always-already complementary to domestic racialization practices that criminalize people of color more generally.
by Tony Zeoli | Dec 12, 2023
Varied concepts of Arabness exist in the world and especially so in the world’s only remaining economic and military superpower, the United States of America. These concepts may have driven much of the USA’s involvement in the Middle East and the Arab world, even before the most recent past and especially the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the USA. A framework of analysis called Orientalism, dominated much of western scholarship on Arabs and other Asian peoples through essentialist representations that renders them incompatible with western civilization. It is against this background that Naber analyses middle-class Arab American families and Arab and Muslim social movements, through what she calls an interrogation of ‘the dichotomies that ensnares Arab communities as they clamor for a sense of safety and belonging in the United States”.
by Tony Zeoli | Dec 9, 2023
The post-9/11 era has seen a flurry of academic interest in the Muslim diaspora to North America and Western Europe. Although based on research in the 1990s, Nadine Naber’s Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism is representative of a stream of critical writings that have been prominent in this literature. Indeed, to those familiar with the burgeoning scholarship on Muslim diasporas, the theoretical themes of her book will not come as too much of a surprise. Rather than new conceptual insights, the book’s particular strength lies in the multilayered portrait it offers of the history and development of Arab American community life.
by Tony Zeoli | Dec 5, 2023
“The impact of Orientalism, I began to see, was everywhere. Our Arab community had a plethora of cultural and political organizations that put on musical concerts, festivals, banquets, and a range of political organizations that focused on civil rights issues and homeland politics. And yet, there were no resources for dealing with difficult issues in our families and communities” (p.4). It is this silence on what happens in the diaspora and the “bifurcated existence” of her generation of Arab Americans that motivated Nadine Naber to make the Arab American community in San Francisco’s Bay Area the subject of her scholarly research. In Arab America, she undertakes an exploration of the articulation of “Arabness” in America as it evolved in middle-class Arab American families and antiimperialist social movements within the community.
