Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

209 Pages·2006·0.59 MB·English

by  Steven Salaita

Arab American Literary
Fictions,Cultures,and Politics
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
American Literature Readings in the 21st Centurypublishes works by contemporary
critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in the United States.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body
from Willa Cather to Truman Capote
By Thomas Fahy
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
By Steven Salaita
Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison
By Kelly Lynch Reames
Arab American Literary
Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
Steven Salaita
ARABAMERICANLITERARYFICTIONS,CULTURES,ANDPOLITICS
© Steven Salaita,2007.
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by
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ISBN-13:978–1–4039–7620–8
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Searching Diversities: Observations
of an Arab Ex-Student 1
1 Problems of Inclusion: Arab American
Studies and Ambiguous States of Being 17
2 The Internationalization of the Nation:
The Uses of the Lebanese Civil War in
Arab American Fiction 51
3 Honesty Lost: The Strange Circumstances of
Love, Death, and Norma Khouri 87
4 Escaping Inadequate Spaces:
Anti-Arab Racism and Liberating Fictions 109
Conclusion Multicultural and Monocultural
Disjunctions 143
Notes 155
Bibliography 181
Index 193
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Preface
I start with a confession:
I have always been suspicious of the monograph. This isn’t to say
that I have problems with it as a genre, for it is an excellent means
for scholars to present complex and specialized information to other
scholars, who will then transmit that information to students and
society at large (the author of the monograph, of course, himself or
herself usually does these things, as well). I also like the system in
which scholars can find the means to communicate research findings
free of crude market fluctuations and demographic trends (although
these considerations increasingly are affecting academic publishing).
Scholarly monographs have played an important role in making at
least rudimentary sense of a chaotic world.
My suspicion about them arises mainly from stylistic considerations.
Since I have no experience in the social and biological sciences, let me
limit my complaint to my own field, English Studies. Few things are
as exciting to me as peeling off the plastic film of a newly arrived book
dealing with subject matter in which I hold an interest. As sad as that
excitement must sound to nonacademics, I imagine it is true of many,
if not most, of my colleagues across the disciplines. I love reclining
with a freshly packed argeela(hookah) and a new book, skimming its
back-cover endorsements and acknowledgments, then turning to the
first page, a blue pen at the ready to mark enlightening passages, or
to write marginal script alongside those with which I disagree. This
experience is particularly rewarding if the author has stated points
with succinct candor and uncanny clarity. The best books I read
inevitably end up draped in blue ink and capitol “Q”s throughout
their margins, signaling that I need to quote what I found to be an
illuminating formulation. The worst ones are filled with question
marks that seem almost desperate in their oversized and sometimes
repetitive construction.
The books I take to, I realized after many years of reading, are
those that combine the classic techniques of essay writing with the aus-
terity of the monograph. They manage to be erudite but accessible,
viii PREFACE
nuanced but sensible, friendly but unflinchingly rigorous. Although
Iquestion whether I am always successful, this is the type of scholarship
I like to produce (all of us, after all, develop personal styles through
the age-old medium of plagiarism). I am growing experienced as a
scholar, and therefore do not retain much of the idealistic naiveté of
English graduate students and junior scholars, who often believe that
something in print written by a “big name” must be worthwhile even
if it elicited disappointment upon completion or was not even com-
pleted, in which case self-blame supersedes honest reaction. I don’t
hold any romanticized notions of “dumbing down” scholarship for
the sake of total accessibility,1but neither do I think a doctorate and a
reputation are license to obscure good argumentation within clichéd
jargon and pompous neologisms. I will try to avoid such tendencies in
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics and combine
the open-ended reflectivity of essay writing with the research-motivated
agenda of scholarship. The result will be, I hope, a book that undermines
overconfident analysis and raises useful questions, and a book that
students and professors will both find worth reading.
It is a good time to write about Arab Americans. I offer this sen-
tence on the one hand as a literal observation: it is, after yet another
brutal winter, a beautiful spring day in Wisconsin, and I can hear the
long-absent sound of robins and cardinals chirping amid the click-
clack of the plastic keyboard. It is, in fact, a good time to do lots of
activities, but I have found nothing as sobering and captivating as
transforming a white computer screen into a jumble of black text that,
when edited, assumes some cohesiveness as an idea or proposition—
or, when I am lucky, a challenge. And it is a good time to write about
anything; the best topic in my mind happens to be the ethnic com-
munity in which I grew up and to which I am happily dedicated.
On the other hand, I offer the sentence as a tenuous methodolog-
ical proposition. It houses an observation that requires some histori-
cal and sociopolitical analysis. The observation is temporally
ambiguous and thus worthy of clarification, one that can be filled with
thousands of material examples working within particular ethnic
traditions and attempting to seek truth and generate meaning. It is an
observation, in short, that might coerce somebody into a book-length
deliberation. As a result of my continuous mental perambulations
through the conceptual terrain of Arab American culture and society
these past few months, I have finally fallen victim to the strange
human tendency to complexify simplicities and then seek simple
answers to intellectual complexities. I have coerced myself into a
book-length deliberation.
PREFACE ix
Why is it a good time to write about Arab Americans? This book
will comprise the long answer; let me commence in unraveling the
long answer by providing the short one. Arab Americans, for the first
time in our history in the United States, are being analyzed widely and
systematically as a discrete ethnic community integral to the coalescence
of an imagined American cultural polity. I emphasize the adverbs
widely and systematically because it is important to recognize that
Arab Americans (and others) have been analyzing ourselves as a
discrete ethnic community for over a century. Only recently, though,
has the analysis become widespread and systematic, a change in sensi-
bility that will be assessed at length in this book. It is the right
moment, then, to organize the variegated analyses of Arab Americans
within one broad study, however incomplete that study will end up
being.
It is also a good time to write about Arab Americans because Arab
Americans, for reasons closely related to the emergence of widespread
and systematic analysis, are generating a fair amount of interest in
both popular and academic circles in the United States. The downside
of this generally positive interest is the stereotyped or otherwise
reductionist discussion of Arab Americans arising from certain schol-
ars and media commentators (the latter certainly hold more guilt on
this front).2 One of the purposes of this book is to complicate such
overconfident—at times dishonest—approaches by highlighting the
communal diversities any effective analyst of Arab America must
invariably confront. I consider it imperative, in any event, to produce
arguments that do not reduce Arab Americans to political metonymy.
Sporadic academic discussion of devising an Arab American Studies
is another reason it is a good time to write about Arab Americans.
Throughout this book, I will synthesize the positive and negative
dimensions of this possibility and explore some philosophical and
curricular questions associated with ethnic area studies. Though I am
a supporter of such a thing called Arab American Studies (in whatever
form it might actually develop), I am also an unceasing advocate of
interethnic studies, a sensibility owing, I imagine, partly to my formal
training in Native American Studies and partly to my own cultural
multiplicity (American, Jordanian Bedouin, Palestinian, Hispanic,
Arab American, Appalachian—given the emphasis many Americans
now place on the categorization of identity, I could probably extend
this list considerably, as could most writers, a fact that plays more than
a peripheral role in debates over the probity of ethnic area studies).
Iwill argue that a desire to construct an Arab American Studies and a
focus on integrating Arab Americans into political and intellectual