"this sweet/sweet music": Jazz, Sam Cooke, and Reading Arab American Literary Identities

Abstract

Black. Not Never quite fitting in. Always on the edge--Joanna Kadi, Food for Our Grandmothers (xvi) Arabs in the United States fit uneasily into a racial schema that identifies individuals and groups as either or The many studies on American ethnicity and racial formation show that historically Americans were first considered white, then quite white, then later legally became white. This study explores the vexed notion of American whiteness or in-betweenness, beginning with the question: How do three literary texts by Americans engage with blackness? Here, I propose that reversing the terms of how race is read in relation to Americans can lead to a better understanding of how American authors claim and identify with blackness in their texts to expose and negotiate US racial hierarchies. This is important, I suggest, not only because they reformulate the positioning of Americans within US racial hierarchies, but also as a contribution to rethinking these hierarchies, and the privileges and inequalities linked to them. This article argues that Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz, Etel Adnan's Beirut Hell Express, and Suheir Hammad's daddy's song use a strategy of identity building as Arabs/Arab Americans which affiliates and aligns the authors with African Americans. I argue that they do this by employing specific symbols in their texts that represent black America. Specifically, I demonstrate how all three texts invoke African American music as a metonym for black America and propose that this is a location for potential solidarity in the construction of American identities. Arabian Jazz and Beirut Hell Express understand jazz as black and invoke this symbolically; daddy's song draws upon the African American musical icon Sam Cooke in a similar way. Before moving on to the detailed analyses of these three texts, I will first provide a background to the history and context of American racialization, relying on the insights of critical race theory and recent studies of America specifically related to race. Next, I briefly outline some of the ways in which various groups--white, non-white, and not-quite-white--have staked their identity claims in relation to African Americans, and specifically to African American music. This background to the complexities of the relationships between Americans and African Americans in the United States provides a lens through which to read the invocations of black music in Beirut Hell Express, Arabian Jazz, and daddy's song. American Racialization in the United States The artistic and creative connections drawn in these literary texts between Americans and African Americans must be understood in the context of the complex relationships between these groups; central to this relationship is the racialization of Americans within the United States. (1) Being marked as different, alien, and generally understood as non-white or outside the mainstream in the United States has prompted many Americans to seek out and build links to other groups of color, including African Americans. Such shared oppression has also led to shared action around many of the issues important to racialized groups in the United States. Long before September 11, 2001, issues on which Americans expressed common ground with African Americans and other people of color have included: racial profiling; detention and murder for political organizing or even for the suspicion of political organizing; and the lynching of Americans in the US South. (2) Political organizing is one of the primary locations for these solidarities (Saliba 309-11; Samhan Politics 11-28), but it is not merely in political terms that such solidarities have been articulated. As this article and others show, like other racialized groups in the US, Americans have expressed their identification with African American arts, literature, and creative production more generally (Majaj, Arab American Ethnicity 323). …