Arab America

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.