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Essays and poems exploring the diverse range of the Arab American
experience. This collection begins with stories of immigration and
exile by following newcomers' attempts to assimilate into American
society. Editors Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, and Sally
Howell have assembled emerging and established writers who examine
notions of home, belonging, and citizenship from a wide array of
communities, including cultural heritages originating from Lebanon,
Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen. The strong pattern in Arab Detroit
today is to oppose marginalization through avid participation in
almost every form of American identity-making. This engaged stance
is not a by-product of culture, but a new way of thinking about the
US in relation to one's homeland. Hadha Baladuna ("this is our
country") is the first work of creative nonfiction in the field of
Arab American literature that focuses entirely on the Arab diaspora
in Metro Detroit, an area with the highest concentration of Arab
Americans in the US. Narratives move from a young Lebanese man in
the early 1920s peddling his wares along country roads to an
aspiring Iraqi-Lebanese poet who turns to the music of Tupac Shakur
for inspiration. The anthology then pivots to experiences growing
up Arab American in Detroit and Dearborn, capturing the cultural
vibrancy of urban neighborhoods and dramatizing the complexity of
what it means to be Arab, particularly from the vantage point of
biracial writers. Included in these works is a fearless account of
domestic and sexual abuse and a story of a woman who comes to terms
with her queer identity in a community that is not entirely
accepting. The volume also includes photographs from award-winning
artist Rania Matar that present heterogenous images of Arab
American women set against the arresting backdrop of Detroit. The
anthology concludes with explorations of political activism dating
back to the 1960s and Dearborn's shifting demographic landscape.
Hadha Baladuna will shed light on the shifting position of Arab
Americans in an era of escalating tension between the United States
and the Arab region.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Detroit's large
and nationally prominent Arab and Muslim communities have faced
heightened prejudice, government surveillance, and political
scapegoating, yet they have also enjoyed unexpected gains in
economic, political, and cultural influence. Museums, festivals,
and cultural events flourish alongside the construction of new
mosques and churches, and more Arabs are being elected and
appointed to public office. Detroit's Arab population is growing
even as the city's non-Arab sectors, and the state of Michigan as a
whole, have steadily lost population. In Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in
the Terror Decade, a follow-up to their volume Arab Detroit: From
Margin to Mainstream (Wayne State University Press, 2000), editors
Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock present accounts
of how life in post-9/11 Detroit has changed over the last ten
years.
Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse
Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world
Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on
the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and
Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors
to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. The book goes
behind the bulletproof glass in Iraqi Chaldean liquor stores. It
explores the role of women in a Sunni mosque and the place of
nationalist politics in a Coptic church. It follows the careers of
wedding singers, Arabic calligraphers, restaurant owners, and
pastry chefs. It examines the agendas of Shia Muslim activists and
Washington-based lobbyists and looks at the intimate politics of
marriage, family honor, and adolescent rebellion. Memoirs and poems
by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the
book in personal experience, while over fifty photographs provide a
backdrop of vivid, often unexpected, images. In their efforts to
represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the
margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break
new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and
diaspora cultures.
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