Adaptive Agency and Arab American Womanhood, 1893-1967 Koegeler-Abdi, Martina Publication date: 2018 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Koegeler-Abdi, M. (2018). Adaptive Agency and Arab American Womanhood, 1893-1967. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 28. sep.. 2021 UNIVERSITY OF COPENH AGEN THE FACULTY OF HUMAN ITIES Adaptive Agency and Arab American Womanhood 1893 - 1967 PhD Thesis Martina Koegeler-Abdi Supervisor: Martyn Bone Date of Submission: 06. July 2018 Name of department: Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies Faculty: Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen Author: Martina Koegeler-Abdi Title: Adaptive Agency and Arab American Womanhood, 1893–1967 Primary supervisor: Martyn Bone, University of Copenhagen Secondary supervisor: Silvia Schultermandl, University of Graz Date of submission: 06. July 2018 Number of words: 94,887 Abstract My dissertation develops a new perspective on Arab American cultural histories during the early to mid-20th century in the US. I focus mostly on Syrian and Lebanese American women in the Northeast and their strategies of self-representation. Archival traces of these women’s public visibility are scarce and distributed across a wide range of media: photography, reader comments, correspondence, club minutes or unpublished memoirs. Through adaptive agency women select and incorporate widely legible elements of hegemonic, racialized tropes of womanhood in their cultural, narrative or embodied forms of self-representation. These adaptive choices can be traced across different kinds of archival material and thus reveal how Arab American women positioned themselves in the US cultural sphere. The four case studies analyze how adaptive agency shaped and changed visions of Arab American womanhood over time, looking at a juxtaposition of belly dancers’ embodiments of harem fantasies to early 1900 Syrian American family photography, the archive of The Syrian World newspaper in the 1920s, the legacies of club women in the Syrian Ladies Aid Society in Boston in the interwar years and the unpublished memoir of the Lebanese American beauty queen Rosemary Hakim in 1955. My research shows that Arab American women used adaptive agency, often via repertoires of respectability, to mitigate their racial ambivalence in the US context. In doing so, they engaged in trans/national and local conversations about race, gender and belonging. This dissertation seeks to highlight the role of gender and women’s agency in early Arab American community formation, and that Arab American women’s self- representations did not only address orientalist frames, but also racial legacies of slavery, immigration exclusions and ethno-nationalisms. i Resumé Min afhandling præsenterer et nyt perspektiv på den arabisk-amerikanske kulturhistorie. Analysen fokuserer primært på syriske og libanesiske kvinders selvrepræsentation i begyndelsen af og frem til midten af det 20. århundrede i det nordøstlige USA. Der findes kun få spor efter disse kvinder i det offentlige rum, og dokumentationen er spredt på tværs af en bred vifte af medier: fotografi, læserkommentarer, brevvekslinger, foreningsreferater og ikke-offentliggjorte erindringer. Gennem adaptive agency udvælger og inkorporerer kvinderne elementer af hegemoniske, race- og kønnede troper i deres kulturelle, narrative og fysiske former for selvrepræsentation. Disse tilpasningsvalg kan spores på tværs af forskellige typer af arkivmaterialer og afslører, hvordan arabisk-amerikanske kvinder positionerede sig selv i den amerikanske kultursfære. De fire casestudier analyserer, hvordan deres adaptive agency med tiden formede og ændrede forestillinger om arabisk-amerikansk kvindelighed. Afhandlingen starter med en sammenstilling af mavedans som udtryk for haremsfantasier og syrisk-amerikanske familiefotografier i begyndelsen af 1900-tallet, og analyserer herefter avisen The Syrian World fra 1920'erne, arven efter kvinderne i Syrian Ladies Aid Society i Boston i mellemkrigsårene og den libanesisk- amerikanske skønhedsdronning Rosemary Hakims upublicerede erindringer fra 1955. Min forskning viser, at arabisk-amerikanske kvinder anvendte adaptive agency, ofte gennem respektabilitetsrepertoirer, til at afbøde deres racemæssige ambivalens i en amerikansk kontekst. Hermed indgik de i en trans/national og lokal dialog om race, køn og tilhørsforhold. Afhandlingen søger at fremhæve kvinders indvirken på den tidlige arabisk-amerikanske samfundsdannelse, og at arabisk-amerikanske kvinders selvrepræsentationer ikke kun rettede sig mod orientalistiske rammer, men også mod den racemæssige arv fra slaveri, udstødelse af indvandrere og etnonationalisme. ii Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 The Scope of this Dissertation 5 Early Arab Immigration and the Assimilation Narrative 15 Arab Americans and US Legal Racial Classifications 19 Racial Ideologies and Orientalisms in US Cultural Politics 27 Methodology and Theoretical Foundations 37 Why Adaptive Agency? 38 Agency, Affect and Politics 41 Adaptive Modalities and the Archive 49 Location in the Field 55 Chapter 1. The Harem Woman and the Family Portrait 63 Arab American Women’s Embodied Self-Representation after the Chicago World Fair Ashea Wabe and the US American Harem Scenario 66 Burlesque, Minstrelsy and Belly Dancing 71 A Harem Scenario in the Making 76 ‘Just a little slave?’ Little Egypt on the Auction Block 84 The Syrian American Family Portrait 94 Midway Types 97 Repertoires of Respectability 105 Chapter 2. Immigrant Mothers or New Women? 124 Race, Religion and Modernity in 1920s Syrian American Womanhood Beyond Cultural Pluralism: Modern Womanhood and the ‘Syrian Race’ 129 iii “A hint of Mary Antin”? The Reception of Anna Ascends (1920) in the National Press 141 and in The Syrian World (1927-8) The Muslimwoman and the Marriage Debates––Women’s Voices in The Syrian World 160 Chapter 3. The Clubwomen 181 The Syrian Ladies Aid Society in Boston: Adaptive Agency in Community Formation and Diaspora Politics Syrian Ladies and US Women’s Clubs 184 The Evelyn Shakir Collection Revisited 202 Performing Literacy ––The SLAS as a Cultural Institution 217 The Ladies’ Trans/National Politics in the Interwar Years 229 Chapter 4. The Beauty Queen 236 From Beirut with Love: Miss Lebanon-America, US Orientalism and Cold War Diplomacy 1950s Beauty Culture and the Miss Lebanon-America pageant 239 Hakim’s Self-Writing 249 Arabian Antipodes and The Sheik 260 Beauty Politics: From US Cold War Cultural Diplomacy to the 274 UN Arab States Delegation Conclusion 287 Works Cited 297 iv Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my colleagues, friends and family. I want to sincerely thank everyone who has helped me throughout this journey and I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Martyn Bone and my co-supervisor Silvia Schultermandl. Thank you for your thoughtful guidance throughout the entire PhD process and your dedication to supporting my research and professional development! You have generously shared your expertise, international networks and given me also room to find my own way in the project. I cannot thank you enough for all your constructive comments, encouragement and mentorship. I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen for the PhD fellowship that allowed me to carry out my research in the best possible way. And many thanks to everyone at the EnGeRom department for offering a wonderful academic home, with special thanks to the former and current PhD coordinators Inge Brigitte Siegumfeldt and Pia Schwarz Lausten and my colleague Christa Holm Vogelious. I have also greatly benefitted from exchanges with my fellow PhD students, and I would like to especially thank Joseph Ballan and Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder for our ethnic studies reading group and Maria Jørgensen and Astrid Rasch for our writing exchanges. And thank you also to Jesper Præst Nielsen for co-organizing an inspiring early career workshop. I further greatly appreciated Clara Juncker’s comments and advice at my pre-defense as well as Walter Hölbling’s and Joshua Sabih’s support of my research in the transition to and beginnings of my PhD. My PhD experience would not have been the same without my research stay at Brown University in the fall of 2015. I sincerely thank Matt Guterl for supporting my stay and for offering advice and comments on my project during and beyond my semester at Brown. I would like to v further thank the faculty and graduate students at the American Studies department, in particular Felicia Bevel and Ida Yalzadeh, for making me feel at home right away. I am particularly grateful for all the assistance given by librarians and archivists throughout my research in locating archival sources digitally or physically. I want to especially thank Kirsten Terry and the Arab American National Museum. Kirsten was so kind to scan and send a copy of the Rosemary Hakim memoir in the fall of 2014 before it was digitally available. A year later the AANM’s Evelyn Abdalah Menconi Travel Grant enabled me to spend 10 days in their physical archives, which laid the foundations for my entire project. I would further like to thank Elyssa Bisoski for her help in obtaining image use permissions. I also want to acknowledge the formative experience during my MA studies at the Cultural Analysis and Theory department at SUNY Stony Brook prior to