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 Century publishes 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 ARAB AMERICAN LITERARY FICTIONS, CULTURES, AND POLITICS © Steven Salaita, 2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7620-8 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 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53687-0 ISBN 978-0-230-60337-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230603370 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2007 10987654321 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 This page intentionally left blank 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 I question 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,1 but 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).