Between the Middle East and the Americas

The Cultural Politics of Diaspora

Subjects: American Studies, Latin American Studies, Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies
Paperback : 9780472069446, 348 pages, 18 B&W illustrations, 6 x 9, February 2013
Hardcover : 9780472099443, 348 pages, 18 B&W illustrations, 6 x 9, February 2013
Ebook : 9780472028771, 352 pages, 3 B&W and 15 color illustrations, February 2013
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Perceptions of the Middle East in conflicting discourses from North America, South America, and Europe

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Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora traces the production and circulation of discourses about "the Middle East" across various cultural sites, against the historical backdrop of cross-Atlantic Mahjar flows. The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. The essays cover such themes as Arab hip-hop's transnational imaginary; gender/sexuality and the Muslim digital diaspora; patriotic drama and the media's War on Terror; the global negotiation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy; the Latin American paradoxes of Turcophobia/Turcophilia; the ambiguities of the bellydancing fad; French and American commodification of Rumi spirituality; the reception of Iranian memoirs as cultural domestication; and the politics of translation of Turkish novels into English. Taken together, the essays analyze the hegemonic discourses that position "the Middle East" as a consumable exoticized object, while also developing complex understandings of self-representation in literature, cinema/TV, music, performance, visual culture, and digital spaces. Charting the shifting significations of differing and overlapping forms of Orientalism, the volume addresses Middle Eastern diasporic practices from a transnational perspective that brings postcolonial cultural studies methods to bear on Arab American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Latin American studies. Between the Middle East and the Americas disentangles the conventional separation of regions, moving beyond the binarist notion of "here" and "there" to imaginatively reveal the thorough interconnectedness of cultural geographies.

 

Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany is Associate Professor in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor, Departments of Art and Public Policy, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University.

Honorable Mention: Arab American National Museum (AANM) 2014 Arab American Book Award, Non-fiction category

- AANM Arab American Book Award