Peddling an Arab American History: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Early Syrian American Communities A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Charlotte Marie Albrecht IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jigna Desai, Adviser August 2013 © Charlotte Marie Albrecht 2013 Acknowledgements The work of this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of many. First, my adviser, Jigna Desai, has been a constant source of encouragement, guidance, and productive critique throughout this process. Were it not for her, I would have never discovered the jewel of Oklahoma! Reg Kunzel, Erika Lee, Shaden Tageldin, and Sarah Gualtieri rounded out a fantastic interdisciplinary committee that helped me to see all that was possible for my work from many different perspectives. The Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota was an abundant and flexible intellectual home. Gratitude to Eden Torres, Richa Nagar, Zenzele Isoke, Idalia Robles de Leon, Angela Brandt, Amy Kaminsky, Jacqueline Zita, Susan Craddock, and Naomi Scheman. Special thanks to Haven Hawley, Daniel Necas, Sara Wakefield, Saengmany Ratsabout, and everyone at the Immigration History Research Center. Thanks is due as well to other faculty who have supported me along the way: Joe Kadi, Amira Jarmakani, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Rabab Abdulhadi, Lisa Albrecht, Trica Keaton, and David Chang. To my double-duty friends, thank you for knowing when to talk about “our work” and when to leave it: especially Katie Bashore, Elakshi Kumar, Jasmine Tang, Juliana Hu Pegues, Emily Smith Beitiks, Kelly Condit-Shrestha, Myrl Beam, and Simi Kang. To Jessica Giusti, thank you for the pep talks, the trash talks, and that big heart of yours. To Umayyah Cable and Mejdulene Shomali, thank you for making a community with me, to our home-away-from-home at conferences, and to the future that we’re building together. To Lana Barkawi, Flo Razowsky, Nahid Khan, Kathy Haddad, Rabi’h Nahas, Willie Nour, Khaldoun Samman, Susan Raffo, Bao Phi, Reema Bazzy, Katie Spencer, Becky Smith, Jessica Rosenberg, Ethan Laubach, and Jna Shelomith, as well as many others, thank you for fueling my creative life and making the Twin Cities home. To Thea Lee, Charissa Uemura, Charissa Blue, Sharon Goens, Marie Michael, and Sun Yung Shin, I am forever changed by the work we’ve done together. Thank you for giving me a deeper understanding of what liberation can be. Finally, to all of my family, especially my parents, Kenneth and Constance Albrecht, thank you for your love and unyielding vision that I could do this. To Katie, thank you for sticking with me, for grounding me, and for reminding me of all there is to celebrate. i Table of Contents List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………iii Explanation of Terms…………………………………….............................................iv Introduction………………………………………………………………..…...............1 1. Narrating Arab American History: The Peddling Thesis...…………….…….............42 2. Peddlers, “Persians,” and Roving Sexual Threats: Syrian Male Peddlers in Popular Culture………………………………………………………...…………….......…….81 3. “From Peddling it is Only a Step to Begging”: Syrian Immigrants and Social Welfare…………………………………………….………………………..……….123 4. Erotics and Intimacies: Imaging and Imagining Pleasure in Early Arab America….169 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...207 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………214 ii List of Figures 1. Karem family tree excerpt………………………………………………………74 2. Karem family tree excerpt, re-envisioned……………………………………….76 3. Photo of Syrian family in diaspora, ca. 1920…………………………………...194 4. Photo of Syrian American business-owners, ca. 1913………………………….195 5. Photo of Daher and Khalil, ca. 1920……………………………………………197 6. Photo of George and Dell, 1925……………………………………………..…198 7. Photo of Nazha and Bud, 1925…………………………………………………202 iii Explanation of Terms Ethnic, cultural and racial terms—their definitions, uses, and slippages of meaning—play significant roles in the history of race for migrants from West Asia and North Africa. It is thus important to enumerate my use of certain terms. Naming in racial and ethnic identity is a complicated practice that is fraught with contradictions and exclusions. With the understanding that there is no “perfect” way to label ourselves or each other, that there exists no way to satisfy the many contentions of essentialism or exclusion that naming entails, I will explain here my choices for the labels I do employ. Some feminist and queer critiques have generated an alternative geographically based descriptor—Southwest Asian and North African or SWANA. According to Nadine Naber, this term disrupts the imperialist narrative of “Middle Eastern” while also pushing against “patriarchal and homophobic nationalisms” and including in its rubric non-Arabs from the region who share a similar history.1 While I think each of these critiques is valid, because this project intentionally addresses “Arab American studies” as an emerging discipline and the specific history of Arabs in the United States, I will mainly use the terms “Arab” and “Arab American” in this dissertation to refer to people whose origins (either birth or ancestral) are in West (or Southwest) Asia and North Africa but who reside (even temporarily) in the United States. I find it critical to reclaim “Arab” politically in the United States, in order to resist the systematic and singular associations 1. Nadine Naber, “Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations,” in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, eds. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 9. iv of “Arab” with “terrorist” and the many obfuscations those associations entail. Of course, the use of the term “Arab” would have a different significance if I was writing and working from a different locale. When speaking more generally about people who have ancestral roots in the “Middle East,” including those who do not identify as or are not ethnically considered Arab, I refer to the people of “West Asia and North Africa.” Finally, I use the term “Syrian” to denote people coming from the region of Greater Syria under the Ottoman Empire (the present-day regions of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine), which constituted the first significant wave of Arab migration to and through the United States before World War II. “Syrian” is also the term that these migrants used to refer to themselves during the time period in question. Thus I use these terms tentatively, and with the knowledge that they are always contingent upon context and strategy. v Introduction Down the street he comes, a man apart, knowing no friend; his queer dress, his hooked nose, his broken speech and queer mannerisms set him aside from the rest—the peddler of rugs. On his arm, a gaudy display of rugs and scarfs [sic], gleaming like jewels in the sunlight. Sparkling tinsel and glistening silk, yet alas, they bear no blessing of a known manufacturer, a thing made only to sell through the picturing of the faults of others. Bearing a guarantee of a foreigner who you will perhaps never see again. Nor are the political rugs exemplified by the candidacy of Dr. M. Shadid of any better quality. These rugs too glisten in the light of hard times; they are smooth, but what lies under the surface?—Will they, like the peddler’s rug, fade, will they become a thing forsaken, dirty, unfit to have around? After the first washing, what will we have?...No American parentage glorifies this person, and no American philosophy blesses his doctrine. We need no off-color Jews as congressmen, nor do we need off-color capital-baiting lines of thought in our national make-up. —“The Peddler of Rugs”2 In 1927, Dr. Michael Shadid, a resident of Elk City, Oklahoma, found himself the victim of social isolation in Elk City and backlash in the Syrian American community, due to the presence of the Ku Klux Klan and Shadid’s public comments about racism in the United States. Shadid was born in 1882 in Marj’ayoun, a town in what is known today as southern Lebanon. At the time of Shadid’s birth, it was part of Syria, a large, Ottoman-ruled province in West Asia.3 Shadid came to the United States in 1898, worked as a traveling peddler for a short time, and eventually settled in Oklahoma, after living in Texas and getting his medical license in St. Louis. As an Arab, an immigrant, and a proponent of cooperative medicine living during the Ku Klux Klan’s virulent resurgence 2. “The Peddler of Rugs,” The Vici Beacon, 1927, Elk City, Oklahoma. 3. Ottoman-held Syria, also called Greater Syria or bilad al-sham in Arabic, covered the geographies of present-day Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Occupied Palestine, and parts of Jordan. 1 in Oklahoma, Shadid attracted attention. In February, Shadid wrote to The Syrian World, an English-language periodical for the Syrian American community, and told the editors of his experience with the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma. Dr. Shadid wrote that, despite his success as a physician, he was socially ostracized by Klan members because of his race. Shadid then made two provocative claims: first, Syrians were not welcome in the United States because of their race; and second, Syrians should return to Syria, where they were needed to contribute to and advance the economy. The response to Shadid’s letter from the Syrian American community was prolific. Readers and the editors of The Syrian World responded to rebut the assertion that they were racially ostracized, often arguing that Shadid’s experience were specific to Elk City and not characteristic of the United States as a whole. Shadid also responded to these rebuttals to affirm that he had experienced the same discrimination in several other U.S. locales in which he had lived before moving to Oklahoma. Readers especially rejected the notion that Syrians should return to Syria (despite the fact that many Syrians did return rather than live out the remainder of their lives in diaspora).