Arab America

Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism

Nadine Naber

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814758885
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Arab Americans are one of the most misunderstood segments of the U.S. population, especially after the events of 9/11. In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement. Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.

1
From Model Minority to Problem Minority

In the 1990s, Arab immigrants who had come to the Bay Area between the ’50s and the ’70s spoke about their early years in America with a sense of nostalgia reminiscent of conventional immigrant stories. They dwelled on positive experiences about their homelands and idealized their first years in their new country. Yet these immigrants had a distinct story about the past and the present—one that sheds light upon changing geopolitical relations between the United States and Arab- and Muslim-majority countries throughout the Cold War era and on the way these relations crept into the daily lives of Arab Americans in profound ways. In 1999, Jamal, a Jordanian who came to the Bay Area in the 1950s, told me, “At that time [in the ’50s] there was no ‘the ugly Arab’ or ‘the bad Arab’ or ‘the Arab terrorist.’ American society wasn’t the way it is now. They [Americans] opened their homes to us. I felt it later on, after twenty years in San Francisco. It was really nice in those early days.”

Scott Kurashige, analyzing the status of Japanese Americans after World War II, uses the term “model minority” to refer to a racial-ethnic status in which group members find acceptance from white America by proving that they are model American citizens, an ideal that he argues is dictated by the American state (2010, 204). Many Arab immigrants with whom I worked narrate stories in which they too were perceived as model minorities. They recall an America in which they enjoyed a general proximity to whiteness and a sense of acceptance within white middle-class America up until the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period in which the United States was consolidating its growing imperial interests in the Middle East and North Africa.¹ As the Soviet Union (soon to collapse in the summer of 1991) withdrew from the world stage, the possibility of a full-scale U.S. military intervention in the Middle East opened up. This occurred almost immediately with the Gulf War, commencing in the spring of 1991. Developments in U.S. intervention in the Middle East paralleled an intensification of U.S. imperial expansion on a global scale in the 1990s. Throughout the 1990s, U.S. policy shifted toward more openly militaristic forms of expansion and a commitment to strengthening economic neoliberalism on a global scale (Foster 2005; Duggan 2003; Ong 2006).

In the 1990s, the period framing this book, Arab immigrants of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s and their children met the expansion of U.S. empire in the Middle East through their encounters with the stories the U.S. government, the corporate news media, and Hollywood tell about the Middle East, stories that reinforce the interests of the U.S. state. U.S. imperial discourses of the 1990s can be understood in terms of the new U.S. Orientalism, a discourse that constructs an imagined “Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim” as the enemy of the nation as a justification for imperial expansion.² Over the years, the ways in which Arab immigrants, followed by their children, have articulated Arabness, have been entangled in the shift in their status from model minority to problem minority. Their articulations of Arabness range from ethnic accommodation or what I term, in chapter 2, the politics of cultural authenticity to the politics of anti-imperialism, the focus of chapters 3, 4, and 5. The politics of cultural authenticity and the politics of anti-imperialism represent two poles along a spectrum of articulations. Here, I map the local and global conditions in which these two poles of Arabness in the Bay Area were produced while tracing the multiple articulations in between. Cultural authenticity, by supporting an accumulation of wealth through hard work and an avoidance of associations with the decolonizing and anti-imperialist political movements of Arab homelands in U.S. public space, provides Arab diasporas with a framework for maintaining their middle-class U.S. socioeconomic status. The politics of anti-imperialism, while still at times deploying the logics of liberal multiculturalism, prioritizes the aim of ending U.S.-led war and domination in the Arab region and elsewhere. Several interconnected factors helped birth these articulations of Arabness: ongoing diasporic relationships to the homeland(s), an expanding U.S. empire, and changing immigrant and racial politics in the Bay Area, in California, and in the United States.

Articulations of Arabness are best understood through the concept of diaspora.³ Seen through the lens of diaspora, “cultural identity is hyphenated, wherein the hyphen does not mark a simple duality between two distinct cultural heritages.” The hyphen between the categories “Arab” and “American” “emphasizes the multiple local and global conditions that shape identity” and happens when different narratives of nations, classes, genders, generations, sexualities, and so on collide with one another as “interstices” or “third-space” (Bhabha 1994, 224).⁴ Yet my interlocutors’ stories reflect a distinct diasporic state of consciousness, a sense of belonging to a diaspora of empire.⁵ Many people with whom I worked spoke out of a tacit knowledge that Arabs or Muslims living in the United States have been forced to engage with U.S. imperial discourses in their everyday lives, discourses that associate Arabs and Muslims not with the U.S. nation but with real or fictive places outside the boundaries of the United States, and against which the United States is at war. While transnational cultural studies often invokes the way in which diasporic immigration traces a route back to the formerly imperial metropole, my theorization of the “diasporas of empire” emerges against the highly invasive and shifting relations of power central to contemporary U.S. neocolonialism and imperialism. Here, empire inscribes itself on the diasporic subject within the domestic (national) borders of empire.

Methods and Terms

Virtually no scholarly research exists about Arab immigration to the San Francisco Bay Area.⁶ I gathered the accounts I narrate in this chapter by spending time among community-based networks, listening to people’s stories, and scouring through community-based publications. Between January 1998 and August 2001, I conducted participant observation within community-based organizations and at community-based events and gatherings that brought together Arab immigrants from Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. Most early Arab immigrants who set up Arab community-based collectivities in the Bay Area were from these countries. From that time until 2008, I conducted interviews with fifteen women and men who came to the Bay Area between the 1950s and the 1970s. These individuals were either heavily involved in Arab cultural politics or community-based organizations or had engaged with them from a critical perspective. All of the men were married. Four out of seven women I worked with were unmarried; three had been divorced and one self-identified as queer. This lopsided gender structure reflects a pattern in which married immigrant women of this generation were more involved in domestic forms of labor and less involved in community-based leadership compared to their male counterparts. Community-based publications authored by organizations such as the Ramallah Club, St. Nicholas Church, and the Arab Cultural Center provided me with additional material.

There exists a major discrepancy between U.S. Census and Arab American community-based accounts of the population size of Arab Americans (El-Badry 1994; Zogby 2000). Afaf Laffrey et al. argue that the U.S. Census’s underestimation of the number of Arabs in America results from the absence of a category for Arabs on the U.S. Census’s short form and that many Arabs are reluctant to disclose their country of origin or ancestry even on the long form (1991). As a result, it is difficult to estimate the population size and other demographic details about Arab Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. I use the term “immigrants” as shorthand to refer to diverse immigration experiences, ranging from forced displacement (Palestinian refugees) to migration for socioeconomic mobility.⁷ I use the term “Arab American” for people who live in the United States and who trace their ancestry to one or more of the twenty-two member nations of the Arab League: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. I often use the word “Arab” and couple it with “Arab American” (e.g., “Arab and Arab American”) to acknowledge the fluid and changing ways these terms operate in people’s lives and to recognize people who do not have the privilege of U.S. citizenship or who do not identify with an American national identity.

Throughout the book, the terms “Arab” or “Arab American” remain contested and take on different meanings depending on the context. At times, individuals use “Arab” as a cultural and linguistic term to refer to persons from countries where the primary language is Arabic. Another definition, influenced by the Arab nationalist movements that peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, assumes that Arab is also a national identity and that Arabs share a language and a common cultural and imagined national community. Since 1945, nations whose primary language is Arabic have combined to form the Arab League, and official international discourses consider members of the Arab League to be the Arab nations.

In response to U.S. racial discourses that construct an imagined “Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim enemy,” some critics, while recognizing its arbitrary and fictive nature, use similar designations to refer to the diverse people targeted by this racial schema (Volpp 2003a; Maira 2008; Rana 2007). My interlocutors often use the terms “Arab” and “Muslim” to refer to the people who share similar experiences with this racial schema as they recognize that these categories do not map onto each other. The six countries with the largest Muslim population are Indonesia (170.3 million), Pakistan (136 million), Bangladesh (106 million), India (103 million), Turkey (62.4 million), and Iran (60.7 million) (Central Intelligence Agency 2009). None of these countries is considered Arab. Arab countries include a diversity of linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups. Religious groups include, but are not limited to, Christians, Jews, and Druze. Non-Arab ethnic minorities include, but are not limited to, Kurds, Amazighs, and Armenians. Thus, there are many challenges that come with efforts to name Arab immigrants and Arab Americans. The religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of the Arab region gives at least some insight into why the federal government as well as Arab individuals and communities have found reaching a consensus over who is an Arab and what constitutes Arabness to be a particularly arduous task. Suad Joseph writes,

There are Palestinians, Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Saudi Arabians, Bahreinis, Qataris, Duabis, Egyptians, Libyans, Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Sudanese, Eritreans, and Mauritanians; there are Maronites, Catholics, Protestants, Greek Orthodox, Jews, Sunnis, Shia, Druze, Sufis, Alawites, Nestorians, Assyrians, Copts, Chaldeans, and Bahais; there are Berbers, Kurds, Armenians, bedu, gypsies, and many others with different languages, religions, ethnic, and national identifications and cultures who are all congealed as Arab in popular representation whether or not those people may identify as Arab. (Joseph 1999, 260)

Ever since the late 1880s, when the first significant group of Arab immigrants came to the United States, the terms of identity have been contested and shifting.⁸ The first significant group of immigrants was from the Ottoman provinces of Syria, Mount Lebanon, and Palestine. The federal government classified the early immigrants along with other Ottoman subjects as originating from “Turkey in Asia” (Samhan 1999, 216). Immigration reforms that were passed in 1893 led to the classification of Arabic-speaking immigrants as “Syrians” after 1899 (216). These identity categories diverged from the familial, village, or religious modes of categorization through which early immigrants tended to identify (Majaj 2000, 321). The end of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and the emergence of distinct Arab nations that are often referred to collectively as the “Arab world” marked another shift in the identity terms deployed by both the federal government and Arab individuals and communities. For example, Alixa Naff argues that for early immigrants from Mount Lebanon, an area formerly located within the Ottoman province of Syria, the term “Lebanese” was given political legitimacy in the 1920s as a national label or identity and was adopted by most immigrants originating from Mount Lebanon (1985, 2).

On the level of federal government racial categories, a 1978 classification scheme located Arabs within the broader rubric of “persons originating in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa” (Samhan 1999). In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget, in collaboration with various Arab American community organizations, noted a lack of consensus about the definition of an Arab ethnic category and suggested that further research be done to improve data on this population group. Census 2000 added the classification “Arab ancestry” in a separate part of the census to obtain specific information about persons from the Middle East and North Africa who identify an Arab ancestry. The federal government and the major national Arab American community organizations have yet to reach a consensus on the appropriate term for immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries. Within the field of Arab American studies, scholars have tended to refer to immigrants from the Ottoman province of Syria before 1920 as Syrian and to post–World War II immigrants as Arabs or Arab Americans.

Some Arab and Arab American activists contest the terms “Arab” or “Arab American,” arguing that these terms are nationalist, exclusionary toward non-Arab minorities in the region, and limited for purposes of coalition building beyond Arab communities. Collectives of feminist and queer activists across the United States have proposed the geography-based term “Southwest Asian and North African” (often referred to as “SWANA”) to include non-Arab minorities, transcend patriarchal and homophobic nationalisms, and expand alliance building between people from Arab nations and other nations in the region, such as Iran, who share similar histories with U.S. imperialism and war. Others have privileged religious identities such as Muslim or Muslim American over the nation-based label “Arab American” on the grounds that their primary loyalty is rooted in faith and the divine.

Elders and Old-Timers: The Conditions of Early Immigration

Most Arab immigrants of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s knew someone already living in the Bay Area when they arrived through family- or village-based networks. Many of these immigrants referred to themselves and their peers as the old-timers. They initially worked in factories and did menial jobs such as painting bridges and cleaning businesses and gravitated toward one another. Although most did not intend to stay, a range of factors made it increasingly difficult for them to return to their countries of origin. The 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel meant the displacement of approximately seven hundred thousand refugees. Some of the Palestinian old-timers were among these refugees. Since then, the Israeli state has denied Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes or villages (Aruri 2001). For other Palestinian old-timers, the ongoing conditions of Israeli military occupation and expansion made returning to Palestine increasingly unviable. Most Lebanese old-timers considered themselves visitors until the onset in 1975 of the Lebanese civil war, which contributed to a shift in their perspective, and they began to view themselves as residents. Many found the idea of returning to Lebanon after the civil war unimaginable. Nadya, a Lebanese woman who had been actively involved in leftist Arab movements in the Bay Area, was the director of a cultural arts program at a multiracial community organization in Berkeley in 2008. She told me she migrated to the Bay Area in the 1960s on her own, planning to stay only temporarily. She returned to Lebanon in the 1980s, after the civil war began. She recalled,

I thought that was it, I was going back home to Lebanon. I gave away all of my stuff in San Francisco, got rid of everything, packed up my suitcase, took my clarinet, and went home. I got pregnant after being married in Lebanon. And then—the war. After spending a couple of nights in a shelter while pregnant, all of a sudden came the fact that I had this baby with me—and I said, I’m not gonna risk that life.

Nadya returned to the United States to stay. Old-timers who did not come in a context of war remained in the Bay Area as a consequence of the imbalance in socioeconomic opportunities in the United States compared to their countries of origin. The old-timers came to the United States during a period when dominant U.S. discourses were emphasizing racial integration and, to a large degree, assimilation (Brodkin 2002). Most of them were not exceptionally wealthy in their homelands and came primarily from families involved in trading and agriculture. Most often, their extended family members pooled funds so one or two family members could migrate to the United States. After their arrival, relations with other Arab immigrants who had already established themselves in the Bay Area allowed them to develop the means to invest in business entrepreneurship within a few years.

One old-timer celebrated the idea that “anyone can make it in America.” His perspective reflects a key pillar of dominant U.S. nationalism of this period that inspired the migration of his generation to America. Most old-timers spoke to me about Arab histories in the Bay Area from the standpoint of immigrants who were, like them, entrepreneurs or business professionals. They spoke to me in celebratory ways about their elders—the Arab immigrants who came before them and had been coming to the Bay Area since the early 1900s. Many of their elders, after working as peddlers, became store owners and manufacturers. The old-timers were particularly inspired by the few elders who went on to become producers, theater managers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The elders had paved the way for newcomers like my interviewees to establish small businesses. For instance, the elders advanced newcomers money for a small fee.⁹ Together, the experiences of the old-timers and their elders shaped what became the dominant middle-class Arab immigrant narratives that circulated the Bay Area in the 1990s, which heralded the socioeconomic success of predominantly male Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian immigrant business entrepreneurs.¹⁰ This coincides with a broader pattern in scholarly and community-based histories that privilege this story over others—such as the stories of poor immigrants, women, queers, or social justice activists.¹¹

The old-timers inherited a great deal from the elders, who were predominantly Christians from Mount Lebanon and came from Greater Syria at the turn of the twentieth century (Naff 1985; Suleiman 1999; Shakir 1997; Aswad 1974). Paralleling patterns of migration from the Arab world to the United States in general, the elders came to the Bay Area in the early 1990s out of economic necessity and for personal advancement. The old-timers were heavily influenced by their elders’ immersion within white middle-class America. Many elders had become financially successful and rarely faced obstacles in white middle-class settings. At the same time, the relationship of Arab Americans to whiteness is complex and has been changing and contradictory. Before 1940, the position of Arabs with regard to race in the United States, in terms of immigration and naturalization, was unclear and often contested. This was a period in which the U.S. government used racial schemas to allow citizenship and eligibility for naturalization. The U.S. government did not permit immigrants who were not determined to be “white” by law, and as the outcome of court decisions, to become U.S. citizens. Before the 1940s, Arabs were classified both as white and not white, depending on various court decisions, as different judges and courts came to different conclusions about the “race” of Arabs. In the 1940s, however, the United States Census Bureau determined that Arab Americans were to be treated like European immigrant communities, effectively categorizing them as “white” in the eyes of the U.S. government (Samhan 1999; Majaj 2000).

By the 1960s and ’70s, ideas about race had shifted in the United States, due in large part to the civil rights movement. Race became an increasingly contested term. Yet even though the biological idea of race was generally refuted, structural racism persisted (Gaines 1996; Omi and Winant 1994). Around this time, the U.S. government increasingly began relying upon the U.S. Census and racial categories for statistical information (Lopez 1996; Samhan 1999). Within this schema, a new civi...