Review: Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism

$UDE$PHULFD*HQGHU&XOWXUDO3ROLWLFVDQG$FWLYLVP E\1DGLQH1DEHUUHYLHZ &KULVWLQH%HFNHU

Cinema Journal, Volume 54, Number 4, Summer 2015, pp. 161-164 (Review)

3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI7H[DV3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/cj.2015.0056

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cj/summary/v054/54.4.becker.html

Accessed 2 Nov 2015 04:42 GMT

BOOK REVIEWS: Issues in Contemporary Television Studies Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism by Nadine Naber. New York University Press. 2012. $79 hardcover; $25 paper. 320 pages.

reviewed by chrisTine Becker

© 2015 by the University of Texas Press

N

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 justifi 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. In researching this topic, Naber strove to utilize an academic methodology that would not replicate Orientalist and imperialist perspectives. So she turned to transnational feminist ethnography, participant observation, and autoethnography to capture “the specifi c and diverse narratives through which individuals who in one way or another affi liate with the Arab region and its diasporas make claims to, negotiate,

www.cmstudies.org

54

|

No. 4

|

Summer 2015

161

Cinema Journal 54

|

No. 4

|

Summer 2015

live, reject, or transform” concepts of Arabness.1 She immersed herself in the Bay Area Arab community in the late 1990s, the region where she herself lived; observed a range of cultural discussions, community meetings, and civic gatherings; and interviewed more than one hundred Arab men and women. Naber actually refers to her interview subjects as interlocutors because, she writes, “my interpretations of their stories were shaped as much by the analyses they shared as by my own.”2 This makes Arab America a particularly dynamic read as the historical and political contexts she describes come to life through the words of her interlocutors. The first chapter is steeped in historical material providing the background context for cultural and political changes in the Bay Area that helped foster the conditions Naber observed. The author paints the 1950s and early 1960s as a period of assimilation in the Arab immigrant community in San Francisco, a time of relative calm when Arabs were accepted among whites as a “model minority,” and a pan-Arab community identity prevailed. That shifted in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 1970s oil crisis, and the 1979 Iranian revolution, and by the 1980s the US government and media had succeeded in characterizing Arabs as “the enemy,” with images of rich, greedy sheiks and brutal religious fanatics prevailing. This left Arab Americans feeling immense tension in public, leading some to cloak their heritage and even change their names. The 1990s brought US imperialist interventions, such as the first Gulf War and sanctions against Iraq, which in turn spawned a commitment to political activism among young Arab American adults. A primary takeaway from this chapter is that articulations of Arab American identity cannot be understood without context or assumed to be timeless; they must be comprehended in terms of the specific historical and geographical conditions that help construct and transform them. Naber’s subsequent chapters accordingly explore in greater detail the diverse identity formations experienced in the late 1990s by Arab Americans in the Bay Area. Chapter 2 showcases the more conservative end of the spectrum of articulations, an identity concept that Naber dubs the politics of cultural authenticity. Immigrant parents see their traditional Arab culture as authentic and fear that their secondgeneration children will be corrupted by American individualism. Here, young women are constrained by idealized gender norms, much as they are in Orientalist conceptions, meaning that both schemas rely “on the symbolic presence of the idealized Arab woman to facilitate the belief that an essential, homogenous true Arab culture can be protected, maintained, and preserved in America.”3 Naber’s discussions with women facing these pressures illustrate that no such homogenous culture exists, but some do find empowerment in the notion of an Arab identity distinct from an American one. The next chapter looks at young adults who prioritize a Muslim identity over an Arab one. According to Naber, this emerged partly from a growing feminism among young Arabs who felt patriarchy ruled more strongly in their parents’ Arab culture than in the Islamic religion and saw in Islam a broader range of ideologies, as well as greater 1 Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 17. 2 Ibid., 21. 3 Ibid., 82.

162

Cinema Journal 54

|

No. 4

|

Summer 2015

gender and racial equality. Naber also looks at how the rise of this “Muslim First, Arab Second” mentality led youth toward activism when they were met with Islamophobia and saw deepening imperialism, especially via satellite television coverage of violence in Arab lands. Muslim college students in particular strove to provide counternarratives to US Islamophobic discourses. Naber writes, “Here, affiliating with a Muslim identity is just as much of a critique of capitalism, imperialism, militarism, racism, and war as it is a matter of ethics, morality, and religiosity.”4 The final two chapters look at even more contested identities in Arab youth communities, in particular within the Leftist Arab Movement (LAM). These activists also rejected the politics of cultural authenticity and instead adopted a politics of diasporic anti-imperialism. But as Naber compellingly explores through extensive quotes from six female interlocutors, there were also complex tensions within the LAM. These women wanted to take command of traditional gendered narratives of Arabness and thus “generated a commitment to replacing representations of ‘oppressed’ Arab women with representations of ‘powerful’ Arab women.”5 However, changes in local migration patterns and the movement’s makeup led to men taking on more leadership roles, leaving the women feeling increasingly marginalized by hetero-patriarchy. They even felt compelled to remain silent about this alienation, fearing that their charges of sexism would only reinforce negative images of Arabs and fuel more imperialist motivations. An interlocutor named Dahlia explains: “If I were to come out publicly and say this person is sexist . . . I can hear it now—even from other progressive activists. . . . ‘Even progressive Arab women are oppressed by progressive Arab men!’ That would just legitimate further violence, colonization, and oppression against us.”6 The final chapter correspondingly showcases ways in which some women in the LAM tried to express a diasporic feminist anti-imperialism “that transcends the bifurcation of Arabness into an intra-communal and an external-political domain” and thus “expanded the possibilities for articulating anti-imperialist activism in feminist and queer terms.”7 There were two primary avenues for this, the first being grassroots work, which meant leaving the public speeches to men while women organized interpersonal gatherings that let Arab Americans share their own stories with each other. The second was artwork, which carried Arab counternarratives to broader crowds and expressed intersectional concerns. By sharing personal chronicles amid the contextual cultural and geographic history, Naber declares that she “aimed to create an alternative model of Arab American identity, one that does not rely on the bifurcated and ultimately false options of the ‘effeminate cultural self ’ and the ‘masculinist political’ self.”8 In this regard, one of the most evident lessons of the book is that reductive binaries and monolithic assumptions about Arab American culture can detrimentally affect everyday lives, whether they emerge from within Arab communities or are imposed externally. This idea resonated 4 Ibid., 146. 5 Ibid., 183. 6 Ibid., 194. 7 Ibid., 204. 8 Ibid., 249.

163

Cinema Journal 54

|

No. 4

|

Summer 2015

strongly with me in the wake of a conversation I recently had with my father. We were discussing recent events in the Middle East, and he expressed Islamophobic sentiments, insisting that Muslims bring nothing positive into global culture. I contested this, and he responded with surprise that I, an avowed feminist, would defend anything Islamic, “given how Muslims treat women.” Although I should have challenged this troubling assumption on a number of accounts, especially the presumption of a monolithic Muslim culture, I was instead stunned into silence and retreated from the conversation. I now wish I could have handed him a copy of this book. Naber also successfully makes the case in Arab America that feminist ethnography is a vital tool for explicating identity formations while still tying them to broader cultural and political contexts. With respect to this, I wish the book had more to say about queer Arab American activism. Most of the chapters save discussions of queer subjectivities for near the end, lending an unfortunate impression that they are an afterthought. Conversely, I’m intrigued to know how conservative Arab American youth view the more liberal forms of activism that Naber explores. Of course, Naber acknowledges that she immersed herself in an activist community that she was already a part of. While this raises questions of objectivity, the intimate access she obtained across a number of years was invaluable for the depth of perspectives she shares. However, with San Francisco being a liberal region, one wonders how other Arab American communities would compare, such as Dearborn, Michigan. But this is more of a plea for another book rather than something problematic about this one. Indeed, more accounts like this should be written. Most fundamentally, Arab America humanizes complex people whose personal stories we rarely read, especially when, like my father and even myself, we rely only on the American media to inform us. ✽

164