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This chapter investigates what is like to be young, Muslim, and male in Brooklyn, New York. Muslim youth in the United States, particularly Arab American men, who have come of age after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, make up a generation with distinct characteristics. Many of today’s young Muslim men see themselves as part of the Islamic revival and substantially more pious than their parents’ generation, which was largely made up of immigrants to the nation. Moreover, they often separate themselves spatially and socially from wider society, achieving a kind of group solidarity with other young Muslim males. From this group sensibility, they then reintegrate collectively into larger society, but often with the express purpose of propagating the faith.

Using beliefs and rumors that emerged during the first days after September 11, this chapter discusses how a culture in crisis uses these tools to make sense out of a disorienting event such as this. Rumor is a truth claim not backed by authoritative information. Whether true or false, it is an expression of a community's collective beliefs. These are especially illustrated in rumors about religious miracles and signs that occurred in the attacks, about groups of Arab Americans who publicly celebrated the event, and about a terrorist who warned his girlfriend about the attack in advance. The chapter analyzes these in terms of the politics of plausibility (the sort of thing Americans are predisposed to believe) and of credibility (the sources that Americans normally trust for reliable information). To flourish in public discourse, a rumor should be both credible and plausible.

Barbara Sellers‐Young details the life and career of Ibrahim Farrah, a Lebanese American who was one of the seminal figures in the performance, teaching, and popularizing of cabaret belly dance in the United States. As a male dancer in a genre widely regarded as performed exclusively by women, Farrah, through his performances and writings, embodied the tensions inherent in the cultural and gender issues surrounding belly dance in both the Arab American community, from which he first learned Oriental dance, and in wider American society after belly dance had become an important leisure activity for more than a million women in the 1980s. Many of those women followed the news and history of the genre in Farrah's groundbreaking journal, Arabesque.

This introductory chapter briefly explores how Arab-American writers and critics respond to negative representations of Arabs in the United States. They articulate a rising need among Arab-Americans for a transformative project of communal and individual self-representation, one that captures the complexity and heterogeneity of their communities. Such efforts, however, have hardly forced Arab-American literary output to conform to a didactic and proclamatory platform. Instead, they render it a valuable creative space for delineating shared and individual concerns regarding Arab-Americans' myriad positions and outlooks in the U.S., their connections to original Arab homelands, and their negotiation of the complexities of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. Drawing from the legal and cultural dimensions of citizenship, the chapter argues that there is very little room for negotiating cultural citizenship outside the discourse and practice of inclusion and assimilation, primarily by virtue of Arab-Americans' religious and political affiliations.

Many rumors concerning the September 11 terrorist attacks claimed that the event was in fact caused by a plot secretly planned by a secret group of evil elites. This chapter proposes a methodology of understanding conspiracy theories as an integrated body of beliefs that make sense of a confusing event by connecting it with deeply ingrained cultural values. Conspiracy has the benefit of seeing order in a disorderly event, and giving people a plausible villain to blame. Initially, many Americans assumed that Arab Americans or Muslims were generally aware of the plot and complicit in it; later, more hardy beliefs held that Israelis or Zionists were actually responsible, or that the Bush administration had cynically orchestrated the attacks to shore up its own credibility at home. Increasingly, these conspiracy beliefs express profound distrust of governments and elite groups of intellectuals.

The chapter explains how Arab American activism became more connected to mainstream progressive political organizing. The Palestine Human Rights Campaign, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and Arab American Institute (AAI) tried to collaborate with liberal religious and political organizations, especially moderate African Americans. The work of the ADC and AAI with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination signalled the inclusion of Arab Americans in mainstream civil rights coalitions.

This chapter describes the formation of the Arab American University Graduates shortly after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and how it became the most influential organization on the Arab American Left. An organization of intellectuals, the AAUG was secular, pan-Arab, and it engaged in advocacy of Palestinian nationalism. It sought alliances with the Third World Left.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of Arab American literary self-representation by moving through a historiography of Arab migration to America and toward an analysis of Ameen Rihani's literary and political writings. Positioned at the headwaters of an indigenous Arab intellectual reawakening (the nahdah) and a migrant Arab political consciousness (the mahjar), Rihani articulates a vision of Arab identity that embraces arabesque self-representation as a form of empowerment. Eventually, the literary strategies of self-representation that Rihani employs translate into the political strategies informing pan-Arabism. Indeed, Rihani's goal is the formation of a pan-Arab identity that self-consciously blends Orient and Occident, modern and traditional, Islamic and Christian, America and Arabia to create mahjar or migrant identity.

Arabs and Jews are inevitably construed as opposing forces engaged in conflict of biblical and global proportions. Renderings of Arabs and Jews often overlook the many close and complicated relationships that they have forged today and historically. In this introductory chapter, the stage is set for the chapters that follow-narratives that confront superficial notions of Arabs and Jews-noting that the chapters in which the stories are told an Arab and a Jewish woman are paired around common themes. This introductory chapter ends by speaking to the context in which the stories were gathered including the documentarian's perspective focused on marginalization.

This chapter revolves around representations of Arab homelands as embodied and performed by immigrant parents or grandparents, with these memories subsequently internalized but also revised by second- and third-generation Arab-Americans—those who came of age or were born in the second half of the twentieth century. These younger Arab-Americans, most of whom have never been to the Arab world, revise inherited understandings of and connections to that “furthest” and “deepest” point of origin, or the “old country.” Instead of replicating the older immigrant generations' nostalgic memories of Arab homelands, however, they destabilize nostalgia by moving depictions of original homelands beyond a celebratory focus on ethnic and cultural traditions to incorporate accounts of the harsh realities of war, dispossession, gender politics, and exile. The writers of this generation draw on transnational frameworks of knowledge production to imagine, exemplify, and enact in their work a revisionary approach to Arab-American citizenship and belonging.

This chapter addresses a range of Arab-American literary and cultural texts that respond to the post-9/11 political and social terrain in the U.S. They capture and challenge homogenized depictions of Arab-Americans, forging in the process what can be identified as revisionaryor counterhegemonic spaces that redefine exclusionary conceptualizations of U.S. citizenship and belonging. In addition to problematizing simplistic types of post-9/11 patriotism that demand a unilateral type of U.S. national identity, the creation of these revisionary spaces responds to racial stereotyping, blanket labeling, and discriminatory profiling by insisting on complex representations of Arab-Americans. The chapter describes how 9/11 and other crises that happened/are happening in the Arab homeland position the formation and development of Arab-American identities within well-cemented racialized structures that hold the political relations between the U.S. and the Arab world at their center—a relationship that is dominated by U.S. political and military hegemony.

Chapter Four situates the emergence of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism within the growing knowledge production of a community of scholars of Arab descent. It illuminates a contrapuntal analytic attentive to the incommensurable connections between U.S. settler conquest, the Holocaust, and the dispossession and dehumanization of Arab communities.

This chapter argues that the best way to understand politics in Arab communities is to focus on everyday life and the ways that political engagement and speech is rooted in and supported by everyday contexts. It explores the complexities involved in naming ‘an’ Arab community, and develops the concept of an Arab community in practice as a way of naming social spaces where Arab-identified individuals come together to enact that identity. Finally, this chapter establishes the interpretive ethnographic methodology and normative commitments that drive the book as a whole.

This chapter portrays second- and third generation Arab-Americans undertaking temporary return journeys to ancestral homelands. The revisionary perspectives resulting from such journeys, a concept referred to as rearrivals, are exemplified in the works of writers Mohja Kahf, Samia Serageldin, Pauline Kaldas, and Muaddi Darraj. The chapter also features nonliterary pieces that focus on the significance of return journeys in the Palestinian context, such as Annemarie Jacir's film Salt of this Sea (2008) and Emily Jacir's visual art. These works are often instigated by a desire to return to the geographical and national roots of diasporic Arab identities, or to what is simply defined as the familiar, even if this familiarity is an inherited construct. Such desires are informed by the urge to gain a deeper self-knowledge and some reprieve from the ambiguities of belonging that plague Arab-Americans in the diaspora.

This chapter delves deeper into the thematic diversity of transnational articulations to investigate how Arab-American rootedness in and production of transnational identities produce specific translocal spaces that alters peoples understanding of U.S. national, diasporic, and ethnic belonging. It analyzes the works of Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Haas Mroue, Rabih Alameddine, Etel Adnan, Edward Said, Laila Halaby, and Randa Jarrar. These writers' antinostalgic stances and critical perspectives, mostly but not solely reflecting a contemporary immigrant perspective, produce complicated constructs of homes and homelands that incorporate the stark effects of lingering war traumas and political tensions on current Arab-American identity formations. Specifically, the works examined highlight the need to ground a transnational framework in the specificity and uniqueness of particular place-based experiences that are primarily shaped within the Arab world and are then transported through immigration or exile into the multifarious U.S. landscape.

This concluding chapter outlines new directions in the field, such as the circulation of Arab American texts and other medium within transnational and translocal circuits. The current expansion of the Arab-American literary and cultural scene includes an increase in the variety of genres being produced as well as in the number of intellectual, virtual, and physical spaces available for showcasing such work. Such efforts further help Americans in understanding how the transnational aspects of Arab-American literature and culture alter various spaces of knowledge about minoritized identities across different spaces and temporalities. The chapter also discusses the impact of the Arab uprising on Arab America. Within the Arab world, specifically in countries that experienced the Arab Spring, the will of the people to demand much-needed revolutionary reforms in government and political leadership have had a major effect on Arab diasporics' connections to their homelands.