Book Description

While the American nation has not yet come to terms with Arab and Muslim hyphenated identities, Middle Eastern peoples, cultures, and ideas have become a vibrant presence in the Unites States, and indeed throughout the Americas. Even on the most mundane level, Middle Eastern cuisine-- shawarma, falafel, hummus, shish kebab, couscous, pita bread- is by now staple food sold in supermarkets and consumed by Americans of diverse origins, just as home supplies-- Turkish kilims or Moroccan lampshades are common decor. In many cities, trendy Middle Eastern-style cafes have mushroomed, offering their customers the pleasures of nargila smoking, belly-dancing, and Arabic singers, while chic boutiques operate to the soundtrack of Rai and Arabic pop. Arab rhythms have also been incorporated into popular music throughout the Americas, creating new musical hybrids whether through dialogues or sheer appropriation. Rapper, Jay-Z, appropriated Hossam Ramsy's "Khusara Khusara" into "Big Pimpin'". Sting collaborated with Cheb Mami on "Desert Rose". Cuban musician Omar Sosa shaped a musical polyphony of genres where Moroccan rhythms dialogue with salsa, samba, jazz, pop, rock, and bolero. Shakira- the Lebanese-Colombian "cross-over" pop sensation- opens and closes her concerts with Arabic music, while other Latina-Arabs, such as Paula Abdul and Salma Hayek, are part of mainstream popular culture. Meanwhile, the popular Brazilian telenovela, O Clone (The Clone), that recounts the saga of a Moroccan immigrant family in Brazil, has been dubbed into Spanish and watched by millions of Latinos and Spanish-speakers in the U.S. and Latin America. Def Poetry Jam has recently been live on Broadway and televised on HBO featuring Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad. CNN, Good Morning America, and NPR have covered the stand-up comedy of Ray Hanania and Nasry Malek and Iranian-American artist Sherene Neshat was recently featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Meanwhile, through the "War on Terror," the Middle East is fully encoded within the terrorizing spectacle of a horror movie narrative and Arab- and Muslim-American communities are facing heightened surveillance, deportation and detention.

The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas proposes to study this dynamic presence of the Middle East within the North and South American landscape, highlighting its ambivalent and contradictory position. We hope to explore this paradoxical situation in which the "Middle East" is at the heart of the current state of national anxiety, while at the same time, the "East" are interwoven into the American cultural fabric. The degree to which Middle Eastern culture is imbricated in the Americas, the volume hopes to suggest, is not always obvious or explicit, and requires a historicized study of the politics of culture. The Americas in this volume are viewed as a contact zone of transculturation, a contradictory site in which "the Middle East" is produced and performed against the backdrop of colonial and imperial history as well as of contemporary corporate transnationalism.

The key questions include: What are the implications of the hegemonic discourse about "the Middle East" for the diasporic articulation of belonging? In what ways the geography of identity is imagined and enacted through diverse cultural practices? What are the relationships between those practices and the larger issues of the politics of immigration, U.S. foreign policy, and economic interests in the Middle East/North Africa? What are the social and historical conditions that produce the simultaneous commodification and demonization of Middle Eastern culture in the Americas?

This interdisciplinary project will explore the various dimensions of the cultural politics of representation with regards to North Africa/West Asia and its diaspora, beginning from the premise that representation itself is a site of contestation, with profound historical and theoretical implications for the field of Middle East Studies and American, Caribbean and Latin American Studies. Drawing on various disciplines, we seek to examine issues of representation in their various ramifications, all within a postcolonial perspective. Possible themes include a comparative analysis of narratives of Arab displacement to diverse geographies; the politics of translation and reception of intellectual and artistic work; legal discourses about immigrants and their place in the American national imaginary; representations of Latinos of Arab origins in popular culture; Middle Eastern and Muslim-American stand-up comedy and performance; comparative studies of the racialization of Arabs between North and South America; converging minorities, such as the case of Latino Muslims; and how tourism to the Middle East shapes U.S. popular imagination. The volume as a whole aims to further illuminate the complex relationship between American, Ethnic, Postcolonial and the diverse Area Studies as they impact a complex articulation of the "Middle East" both "inside" and "outside" the Americas.