Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal

Abstract

Initiated by the late Michael W. Suleiman’s research and scholarly leadership, Arab American Women begins by acknowledging his role in its constitution. Suad Joseph writes in her preface that Suleiman asked her for two favors just days before his death in 2010: to organize a conference on Arab American studies and to complete the edited volume from another conference he had organized on Arab American women at Kansas State University the year before. In 2018 Joseph, joined by Louise Cainkar, completed the editing work Suleiman had begun and solicited new additions reflecting scholarly considerations since the 2009 conference. The challenges of putting together a volume of this scope while incorporating the wide range of scholarship—historical, ethnographic, political, social, and literary analyses, from the nineteenth century to the present day—presented at the 2009 conference cannot be understated. One could approach this task in multiple ways, such as through chronological or thematic organization, and the editors of the volume addressed these issues by focusing on the early history of Arab American women, literary activism, political activism, representations, and war and national security. Joseph and Cainkar took on this task with elegance and responsibility. Their editorial work and opening statements in tribute to Suleiman are commendable for their deep solidarity with and respect for Suleiman’s far-reaching legacy.Given its own section, Suleiman’s work opens the volume and gives an overview of the history of Arab American women from the 1890s through World War II. Based on extensive research into the writings by and about Arab American women in the early Arab American press, Suleiman’s chapter provides a framework for the rest of the volume by broaching key issues that many later chapters address, such as the centrality of the debates around Arab American women peddlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the stereotype of Arab women as oppressed, and a renegotiation of the terms of agency. Suleiman introduces the issue of Arab American women peddlers as one that was vehemently contested because women’s mobile labor seemed improper and threatening to the traditional definition of Arab American masculinity. Jess Bier continues this discussion but suggests that the perception of female peddling as illegitimate probably influenced the available archival material: female peddlers would have been especially likely to avoid preserving their business records. In focusing on the types of material and methodologies available for early Arab American research, Bier uses the examples of peddling, business, and dance to argue that locally specific systems of power shaped the archive of Arab American women’s labor. Charlotte Karem Albrecht’s look at the racialization of Arab American women through dominant ideas of gender and sexuality from 1880 to 1935 references the discussion about women peddlers in the context of Orientalism, whereby the “dishonesty of peddling, the immorality of working women, and the neglect of working children reinforced Orientalist rhetoric of the ‘street Arab’ as well as ideas of cultural barbarism and servility and so pathologized the Syrian community” (162). The discussion of women peddlers in the United States crops up in other chapters of the volume as a significant early debate in the historical and archival material on Arab American women in the first generations of the diaspora.A now well-trodden issue in scholarship on Arab American women is that of agency. Lisa Suhair Majaj’s chapter analyzes the idea of the ethnic home space’s metonymic relationship to the ethnic homeland as a literary trope that risks reifying patriarchy in Mohja Kahf’s Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and Randa Jarrar’s Map of Home. By referencing the commonly wielded antifeminist, nationalist complaint against Arab American feminists who speak out against patriarchy as potentially “airing dirty laundry in public,” Majaj’s chapter refuses the totalizing nature of these claims by suggesting that Arab American women writers begin to redefine stereotypes by depicting home spaces in their full complexity (191). Majaj’s critique of Jarrar’s text, that it risks reinforcing the stereotype of Arabs as oppressive to women because it lacks “a positive, nurturing Muslim homespace,” however, confines its analysis to the binary terms of the antifeminists’ accusation (207). In a similar theoretical realm yet moving from literary analysis to ethnographic research, Bridget Blomfield, in her “Daughters of Fatima: Iraqi Shiʿa Women in the United States,” seeks to understand the role of religious belief in the construction of self-identity among American diasporic Iraqi Shiʿa women but does not move beyond a renegotiation of the Euro-American conception of agency and freedom. Other chapters, such as Mejdulene B. Shomali’s and Nadine Naber’s, implicitly reference the tension among clashing definitions of agency but depart from the original terms of the dispute. In analyzing the recurrence of the Scheherazade trope in Arab American writing, for example, Shomali reveals that certain mechanisms of seeking acceptance and assimilation in the United States reproduce colonial conceptions of acceptable gender and sexuality, consequently predicating the inclusion of certain Arab American bodies on the exclusion of others, namely, queer Arabs. Shomali’s chapter thus analyzes the overdetermination of literature by debates about Arab stereotypes, patriarchy, and racism: Writing sex and sexuality about Arab and Arab American women is the terrain of a “semiotic war”—the women and their bodies become representational proxies that determine who is moral and capable of subjectivity. . . . Morality and subjectivity are then measures of rule and independence. If the United States is the moral determinant, it can continue to disappear Arab men on behalf of Arab women, and, eventually, other minorities. . . . If morality falls to the masculinist and nationalist response of the Arab world to colonization, women are relegated to particular gender roles, which include compulsory heterosexuality. Those whose gendered and sexual practices or preferences fall outside such roles are cast out. (232)The distinct contrasts in the treatment of the debate at the fore of Arab American women’s studies at the time of the 2009 conference point to the difficulties of constructing such a collected volume. Drawn from a wide range of scholarly moments, the work offers a rich overview of the development of Arab American women’s studies, from Joe Kadi’s 1994 Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists on, including the dynamic of Zionist resistance to the programs (as seen in Umayyah Cable’s interview with Elaine Hagopian and chapters by Carol Haddad and Nadine Naber) and the shifts in conceptions of race.While most articles in the volume regard Arab Americans as people of color, Rita Stephan’s chapter treats Lebanese identity as a white ethnicity by claiming that “within the American frame of reference, most Americans are considered immigrants anyway,” immigrants “manifest their Americanization through becoming Americans,” Arabs fall under the American categorization of “non-Hispanic ethnicities,” and her interlocutors “possess different sociopolitical characteristics” (414–15). Joseph’s initial description of the legal basis of considering Levantine Arabs white in the United States, which appears in the first chapter of the volume, provides a different perspective and is thus worth reprinting here: Some Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinians of the early twentieth century were initially denied citizenship on the assumption that they were not “free white” persons. In 1915, an appellate court reversed that decision in the case of a person named George Dow, who was finally granted citizenship on the rationale that Syrians belonged to the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race and therefore were white persons. This case as well as the rights and privileges that accrued to whiteness set a social and political mandate for Arabs from the Levant to consider themselves “white.” The first generations of Arab Americans worked hard to assimilate into white culture and identify as “white,” although Charlotte Karem Albrecht’s chapter in this book reveals that they were nonetheless often treated as nonwhite others. (5)Joseph continues to describe how the charge to consider Arab Americans people of color was led by Arab American feminists in the 1990s and has a long history in academic texts on Arabs and Arab Americans. Given the widely held academic treatment of Arab Americans as people of color as well as the fact that Arabs historically were denied citizenship until permitted to be read as white due to a technicality, Stephan’s assertion of whiteness reads as aberrant. In addition to the inconsistent treatment of race, the volume is overwhelmingly Levantine: most of the chapters look at Syrian and Lebanese diasporic Arabs, while there are few mentions of Arabs from North African or Gulf countries. Our contemporary lens makes it only more clear how much more work on race among Arab Americans is needed.The final chapters of the volume look at national security from a framework of post-9/11 Arab American studies. Evelyn Alsultany, Cainkar, and Therese Saliba turn to the legal and political developments in the United States after 9/11 to investigate the social ramifications of gendered Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, and each analyzes the culmination of such sentiment in the Trump-era “Muslim bans,” with Saliba suggesting that the immigration and detention policies enacted under Bush and Obama paved the way for the “more overtly racist, anti-Muslim, and authoritarian policies of the Trump era” (479). Alsultany argues that the politics of pity directed at the treatment of women in Arab countries was used as justification for and a shield against accusations of racism in the War on Terror. While Alsultany’s chapter restricts the demonization of Arab identities to the masculine, such as in the exclusive circulation of photos of the torture of male Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib rather than including those of women prisoners tortured and raped by American male soldiers, Cainkar suggests that the Islamophobia of the Trump presidency rendered Muslim women cultural threats in addition to Muslim men. These essays provide us with a context to understand Trump’s Muslim ban and the post-9/11 extralegal violence against Muslim and Arab Americans. Though neither chapter comments on Trump’s targeted video harassment of Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, a Muslim Somali American, Alsultany claims that Trump-era demonization of Islam was limited to Muslim men, while Cainkar references only the general vilification of Omar. However, in April 2019 Trump pinned an edited video to the top of his Twitter page that featured out-of-context cuts of Omar’s March 23 speech to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The video repeatedly interspersed Omar saying that “some people did something” with shots of the twin towers burning. Her full comments read, “For far too long, we [Muslim Americans] have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. . . . CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties” (quoted in Rosenberg and Epstein 2019). Alsultany’s, Cainkar’s, and Saliba’s chapters are thus key to understanding the intensity of the repeated video clip montage, the harassment of a Muslim American woman, and the incitement to violence suggested by such a video pinned at the top of the president of the United States’ Twitter page.Despite the inconsistencies produced by the prioritization of theme over temporal development of the scholarship and the absence of non-Levantine work, this ambitious volume, which, in the spirit of Suleiman, generously embraces a wide variety of scholarship (x), is a first in presenting an overview of some of the most significant work on Arab American women from the late nineteenth century to the present and will be a staple in the discipline.