Celebrating Arab American Heritage Month

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Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children -- four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra's oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda's insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can't help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family -- knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is a story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. It is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.--

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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. --Book Jacket.

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Arab American women have played an essential role in shaping their homes, their communities, and their country for centuries. Their contributions, often marginalized academically and culturally, are receiving long- overdue attention with the emerging interdisciplinary field of Arab American women's studies. The collected essays in this volume capture the history and significance of Arab American women, addressing issues of migration, transformation, and reformation as these women invented occupations, politics, philosophies, scholarship, literature, arts, and, ultimately, themselves. Arab American women brought culture and absorbed culture; they brought relationships and created relationships; they brought skills and talents and developed skills and talents. They resisted inequities, refused compliance, and challenged representation. They engaged in politics, civil society, the arts, education, the market, and business. And they told their own stories. These histories, these genealogies, these narrations that are so much a part of the American experiment are chronicled in this volume, providing an indispensable resource for scholars and activists. -- Publisher's description

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Arab Americans in Film explores the representation of Arab Americans in Hollywood and Egyptian films that results in a unique and striking revelation of identity, belonging, and cultural citizenship--

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Women's transgressive behaviors and perspectives are challenging societal norms in the Arab world, giving rise to anxiety and public debate. Simultaneously, however, other Arab women are unwillingly finding themselves labeled bad as authority figures attempt to redirect scrutiny from serious social ills such as patriarchy and economic exploitation, or as they impose new restrictions on women's behavior in response to uncertainty and change in society. Bad Girls of the Arab World elucidates how both intentional and unintentional transgressions make manifest the social and cultural constructs that define proper and improper behavior, as well as the social and political policing of gender, racial, and class divisions. The works collected here address the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. They include short pieces in which the women themselves reflect on their experiences with transgression; academic articles about performance, representation, activism, history, and social conditions; an artistic intervention; and afterwords by the acclaimed novelists Laila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy. The book demonstrates that women's transgression is both an agent and a symptom of change, a site of both resistance and repression. Showing how transnational forces such as media discourses, mobility and confinement, globalization, and neoliberalism, as well as the legacy of colonialism, shape women's badness, Bad Girls of the Arab World offers a rich portrait of women's varied experiences at the boundaries of propriety in the twenty-first century.--Back cover.

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One way integrative approaches to health care improve on traditional medical models is by recognizing the impact of cultural factors on health. While this evolution benefits clients of all ethnicities, it holds added significance to treating individuals of Arab descent, who face a wide range of new challenges and stressors in post-9/11 America. Biopsychosocial Perspectives on Arab Americans introduces an interdisciplinary lens by bringing together vital research on culture, psychosocial development, and key aspects of health and disease to address a wide range of salient concerns. Its scholarship mirrors the diversity of the Arab American population, exploring ethnic concepts in socio-historical and political contexts before reviewing findings on major health issues, including diabetes, cancer, substance abuse, mental illness, and maternal/child health. And by including policy and program strategies for disease prevention, health promotion, and environmental health, the book offers practitioners--and their clients--opportunities for proactive care.

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The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state.Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

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While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I've heard it said that the second generation never asks the first about its story, but nearly all the essays in this book include long, intimate portrayals of Muslim family life, often going back generations. These young Muslims are constantly negotiating the differences between families for whom faith and culture were matters of honor and North America's youth culture, with its emphasis on questioning, exploring, and inventing one's own destiny.-from the Introduction by Eboo PatelIn Growing Up Muslim, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia. The fact of 9/11 and subsequent surveillance and suspicion of Islamic Americans (particularly those hailing from the Middle East and the Asian Subcontinent) have had a profound effect on these students, their families, and their communities of origin.

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The story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. Just over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk: How does it feel to be a problem? Now, Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same about America's new problem--Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the United States. He moves beyond stereotypes and clichés to reveal their often unseen struggles, from being subjected to government surveillance to the indignities of workplace discrimination. Through it all, these young men and women persevere through triumphs and setbacks as they help weave the tapestry of a new society that is, at its heart, purely American. -- Publisher Description.

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As a writer starting out in the early 1990s, Khaled Mattawa begins Meet the Poet-Stranger, the essay that opens this collection, I wanted the company of fellow immigrants who worked in the language of their adopted homelands, chiseling away at their exile and making a home for themselves in poetry. Throughout his career, Mattawa's thoughtful and politically astute considerations of what it means to create as a poet-stranger, particularly for those of Middle Eastern heritage, have been steeped in his personal experience as a Libyan-American writer. The essays included in this volume cover Mattawa's approach toward translating contemporary and classical Arabic poetry, the personal and international politics of poetry, and the difficulty of representing one's own family history in one's own writing. The concluding piece, Poems and Days (A Reader's Memoir), presents his deep engagement with the work of other poets during his formative years as a writer--

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I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka's story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream--Publisher's description.

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In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants returning to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire--for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other--takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.

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Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this viscerally elegant and intimately edgy memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America. Randa Jarrar is a fearless voice of dissent who has been called politically incorrect. As an American raised for a time in Egypt, and finding herself captivated by the story of a celebrated Egyptian belly dancer's journey across the United States in the 1940s, she sets off from her home in California to her parents' in Connecticut. Coloring this road trip are journeys abroad and recollections of a life lived with daring. Reclaiming her autonomy after a life of survival--domestic assault as a child, and later, as a wife; threats and doxxing after her viral tweet about Barbara Bush--Jarrar offers a bold look at domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexuality through the lens of the punished-yet-triumphant body. On the way, she schools a rest-stop racist, destroys Confederate flags in the desert, and visits the Chicago neighborhood where her immigrant parents first lived. Hailed as one of the finest writers of her generation (Laila Lalami), Jarrar delivers a euphoric and critical, funny and profound memoir that will speak to anyone who has felt erased, asserting: I am here. I am joyful--provided by publisher.

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Redefines dominant perceptions of Arab Americans via an aesthetic analysis of Arab American novels, such as Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz and Crescent, Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, and Mohja Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, thereby launching transcultural possibilities by initiating visibility through poetics-Provided by publisher--

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While conventional wisdom points to the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 as the gateway for the founding of the first Arab American national political organization, such advocacy in fact began with the Syrian nationalist movement, which emerged from immigration trends at the turn of the last century. Bringing this long-neglected history to life, The Making of Arab Americans overturns the notion of an Arab population that was too diverse to share common goals. Tracing the forgotten histories of the Free Syria Society, the New Syria Party, the Arab National League, and the Institute of Arab American Affairs, the book restores a timely aspect of our understanding of an area (then called Syria) that comprises modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Hani Bawardi examines the numerous Arab American political advocacy organizations that thrived before World War I, showing how they influenced Syrian and Arab nationalism. He further offers an in-depth analysis exploring how World War II helped introduce a new Arab American identity as priorities shifted and the quest for assimilation intensified. In addition, the book enriches our understanding of the years leading to the Cold War by tracing both the Arab National League’s transition to the Institute of Arab American Affairs and new campaigns to enhance mutual understanding between the United States and the Middle East. Illustrated with a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and manuscripts, The Making of Arab Americans provides crucial insight for contemporary dialogues.

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Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Nora develops an intimacy with Jeremy, an Iraq war veteran. Along with the widow Maryam; Efrain, an immigrant witness to the accident; Coleman, the police investigator, and Driss--the dead man himself-- Nora explores secrets and hypocrisies in a society riven by race, class, and religion. -- adapted from jacket