Evelyn Alsultany

Nadine Christine Naber

Rabab Abdulhadi

In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist commitments and ambiguities and to highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street. Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the place of Arab Jews in Arab and Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the countries in which they live wage wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab arid Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded perspectives at the center of gender, Middle East, American, and ethnic studies. Rabab Abdulhadi is associate professor of ethnic studies/race and resistance studies and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at San Francisco State University. She is a coauthor of Mobilizing Democracy. Her articles have appeared in Gender and Society, Radical History Review, Peace Review, Journal of Women's History, Ms. Magazine, the Guardian, and Palestine Focus, as well as Arab-language newspapers and magazines. Evelyn Alsultany is assistant professor in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, and The Arab Diaspora. She is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media Post 9/11. Nadine Naber is assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies, Journal of Ethnic Studies, and Journal of Cultural Dynamics. She is a coeditor of Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 and author of Articulating Arabness.

Gender, Violence, & Belonging

Arab & Arab American Feminisms

After 9/11, there was an increase in both the incidence of hate crimes and government policies that targeted Arabs and Muslims and the proliferation of sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. Arabs and Muslims in the Media examines this paradox and investigates the increase of sympathetic images of “the enemy” during the War on Terror. Evelyn Alsultany explains that a new standard in racial and cultural representations emerged out of the multicultural movement of the 1990s that involves balancing a negative representation with a positive one, what she refers to as “simplified complex representations.” This has meant that if the storyline of a TV drama or film represents an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the storyline also includes a “positive” representation of an Arab, Muslim, Arab American, or Muslim American to offset the potential stereotype. Analyzing how TV dramas such as West Wing, The Practice, 24, Threat Matrix, The Agency, Navy NCIS, and Sleeper Cell, news-reporting, and non-profit advertising have represented Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans during the War on Terror, this book demonstrates how more diverse representations do not in themselves solve the problem of racial stereotyping and how even seemingly positive images can produce meanings that can justify exclusion and inequality.

Race and Representation after 9/11

The Arabs and Muslims in the Media

"Examines how different institutions--Hollywood, universities, corporations, and law enforcement--have sought to be inclusive of Muslims in an era of rampant Islamophobia"--

The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion

Broken

Race and Representation After 9/11

Arabs and Muslims in the Media

After 9/11, there was an increase in both the incidence of hate crimes and government policies that targeted Arabs and Muslims and the proliferation of sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. Arabs and Muslims in the Media examines this paradox and investigates the increase of sympathetic images of “the enemy” during the War on Terror. Evelyn Alsultany explains that a new standard in racial and cultural representations emerged out of the multicultural movement of the 1990s that involves balancing a negative representation with a positive one, what she refers to as “simplified complex representations.” This has meant that if the storyline of a TV drama or film represents an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the storyline also includes a “positive” representation of an Arab, Muslim, Arab American, or Muslim American to offset the potential stereotype. Analyzing how TV dramas such as The Practice, 24, Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and Sleeper Cell, news-reporting, and non-profit advertising have represented Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans during the War on Terror, this book demonstrates how more diverse representations do not in themselves solve the problem of racial stereotyping and how even seemingly positive images can produce meanings that can justify exclusion and inequality.

Ella Shohat

Perceptions of the Middle East in conflicting discourses from North America, South America, and Europe

The Cultural Politics of Diaspora

Between the Middle East and the Americas

Nadine Naber

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi

In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and between each other. Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.

Evelyn Alsultany

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