Arab American Writing – serie

A collection of poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The poems range from dreamy reflections to bitter longings for the Palestine that was lost when Israel was created in 1948.

The situe, or Arabic grandmother, moves in and out of this collection of stories as they seek to capture the integration of Christian Arab women into American culture. The tales contain elements of magic and stoicism, presenting characters rich in independence and creativity.

New York City's main Arab communities exemplify the continuity and change that has taken place throughout the city's rich history. The Museum of the City of New York, in partnership with the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a group of local Arab and non-Arab scholars, activists and educators, undertook a long overdue exploration of New York's Arab populations. The result is a revealing collection of writings and photographs that document and tell the stories of these communities.

A work that depicts the glamourous Egypt of the pashas and King Farouk, the police state of the colonels who seized power in 1952, the post-Sadat years and the rise of fundamentalism. It is a study of family and culture in transition and crisis, exploring the ambiguities of status and loyalty.

Evelyn Shakir crafts tales that are rich in history and cultural detail, setting her stories in different eras, from the 1960s to the present and carrying us back, on occasion, to the turn of the twentieth century. Each in their own way, Shakir's first- and second-generation women work either to reclaim their Lebanese heritage or to leave it behind. In ""The Story of Young Ali"", a teenage girl resists her beloved father's traditional tales of honor and self sacrifice. The matriarch of ""House Calls,"" on the other hand, is so wedded to the past that she returns from the grave to harangue her Americanized family. In ""Oh, Lebanon,"" a young woman who has fled Lebanon's civil war and refuses to cover her hair with a scarf finds that turning her back on her past leads her in unexpected directions. With agile humor and emotional truth, Shakir offers multiple perspectives on the experience of Lebanese women in the United States. Her stories dismantle stereotypes and remind us that women of Lebanese background have been a part of the American narrative for over a century.

Summoned by his dying mother, Palestinian-born Aziz Shihab returns to the homeland he and his family fled as refugees decades earlier: to a Palestine reclaimed by Israelis and to a country no longer that of his youth in a nation whose estate has been challenged by history. This gripping book chronicles that month-long journey.Part memoir, part travelogue, it reveals the complexities of leaving behind such the past and coming to grips with its abandonment. With his sharp ear for dialogue and with a journalist’s eye, Shihab records and considers, sometimes with fond humour, the Palestinian psyche. Family meetings brim with soothing time-honoured ritual and cultural blindness. Pungent street anecdotes resonate with profound themes like human rights, land dislocation, and poverty. Shihab’s stories of departure and return, loss of land and reconnection provide enriching insights into the depth and intricacy of Palestinian culture and history and its legacy of displacement.

As a blizzard blankets the northeast, burying residents and shutting down airports, the Farrah family eagerly awaits the arrival of Eva, a cousin visiting from Lebanon after a long absence. Over the course of several days, while Eva is stranded in New York City, Chehade’s nuanced story unfolds in the reminiscences and anxieties of each family member.

In this deftly turned story, author Frances Khirallah Noble presents a story that is at once sublimely comic yet surprisingly erudite in the subjects it tackles. Its hero, Kahlil Gibran Hourani, is an ordinary, in fact rather bumbling, middle-aged Syrian American optician. On the eve of his fifty-third birthday Kali finds himself confronting seminal questions. "I face the last third of my life, he reflects, "and I don’t know what to do with myself. Every day I ask how should I be living now? What should I do with the end in sight? Can I come to terms with it?" Enter his dead grandmother, the wisely sardonic Situe. Although she appears in a dream at first and reappears at whim, Situe’s presence will turn Kali’s life upside down. Through a series of misadventures Kali is abducted and wrongly suspected of being a terrorist by apparent rogue government agents. His darkly absurd experiences force Kali to question his own perceptions, inviting the reader to do the same. Part myth, part magical realism, always knowing, the book offers a biting critique on issues of race, constitutional rights, and the realities of Arab American life in a post 9/11 world.

Evelyn Shakir paints tales that are rich in history and background. She sets her stories in different eras, from the 1960s to the present, peopled with Lebanese women of different ages, sometimes writing letters, often reminiscing, looking back as far as the turn of the century. In different ways, these first- and second-generation women struggle with feminist issues overshadowed by the demands of dual cultures. In "Young Ali," a teenager tries to listen to her beloved father’s time-honored tales of men in friendship and marriage. Aggie of "House Calls" is a deceased matriarch who returns to haunt her family with reminders of the customs she fought to uphold while alive. Shakir’s other heroines include a thrice-divorced thirty-year-old woman quibbling with a modern matchmaker, an elderly non-Lebanese woman who spies on Muslim neighbors in the wake of 9/11, and a traditional wife and mother who thinks she has found a route out of old-world womanly duties. Many of the author’s women grapple with reclaiming or abandoning ancestral demands, and finessing age-old male-female relationships. In "Oh, Lebanon," a war-haunted Lebanese-born woman willfully departs from the mores of her upbringing with surprising results. With agile humor and emotional truth, Shakir offers multiple perspectives on Lebanese women trying to change roles in a new landscape without surrendering cultural identity.

Bringing the rich terrain of Arab American histories to bear on conceptualizations of race in the U.S., this groundbreaking volume fills a critical gap in the field of ethnic studies. Unlike most immigrant communities who either have been consistently marked as ""non-white,"" or have made a transition from ""non-white"" to ""white,"" Arab Americans historically have been rendered ""white"" and have increasingly come to be seen as ""non-white."" This book highlights emergent discourses on the distinct ways that race matters to the study of Arab American histories and asks essential questions. What is the relationship between U.S. imperialism in Arab homelands and anti-Arab racism in the lives of Arab Americans? What are the relationships between religion, class, gender, and anti-Arab racism? What is the significance of whiteness studies to Arab American studies? Transcending multiculturalist discourses after September 11 that have simply ""added on"" the category ""Arab American"" to the landscape of U.S. ethnic and racial studies, this volume locates September 11 as a turning point, rather than a beginning, in the history of Arab American engagements with race, multiculturalism, and Americanization.

Within the spectrum of American literary traditions, Arab American literature is relatively new. Writing produced by Americans of Arab origin is mainly a product of the twentieth century and only started to flourish in the past thirty years. While this young but thriving literature varies widely in content and style, it emerges from a common community and within a specific historical, political, and cultural context. In Modern Arab American Fiction, Salaita maps out the landscape of this genre as he details rather than defines the last century of Arab American fiction. Exploring the works of such best-selling authors as Rabih Alameddine, Mohja Kahf, Laila Halaby, Diana Abu-Jaber, Alicia Erian, and Randa Jarrar, Salaita highlights the development of each author’s writing and how each has influenced Arab American fiction. He examines common themes including the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, the representation and practice of Islam in the United States, social issues such as gender and national identity in Arab cultures, and the various identities that come with being Arab American. Combining the accessibility of a primer with in-depth critical analysis, Modern Arab American Fiction is suitable for a broad audience, those unfamiliar with the subject area, as well as scholars of the literature.