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ajnabiehDiwan, the annual Arab American arts conference, was held in New York this year, which means I had the chance to attend. It was a very exciting conference, driven by artists who want to be politically engaged and reflect critically on what their work means, in a climate of deep and troubling anti Arab bias, as well as the constantly shifting political situation in the Arab world. I both heard very interesting presentations, and got to encounter some new-to-me artists that I'd love to recommend. This post is going to be for writing up presentations; I'll do a separate series of artists to watch for posts.
Friday, I attended all but the poetry reading, and found it to be very exciting. There was a good sized crowd, especially for a Friday; lots of artists, a few academics & teachers, some students, and a bunch of other folks. The conference was co-sponsored by the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, which led to one very funny effect: the majority of the speakers had strong accents (to my ear), either because their first language was Arabic...or because they were from Michigan. Oh, linguistic variation in Arab America...
The first panel I attended focused on responses to September 11th, ten years later. In addition to two amazing artists, there was a very interesting paper by Andrea Shalal-Esa, looking at how Arab American writers talk about terrorism in their work. She spoke about the impossibility of not referencing terrorism, and the drive to want to talk about something, anything else. One of the things I noticed as she spoke was that the majority of the writers she mentioned were women. Diana Abu Jaber, Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj: the leading lights of contemporary Arab American writing are all female. (The men she mentioned were Greg Orfalea and Ray Hanania, neither of whom, I think, have the profile of the others.) Now, all these women are both excellent writers and totally badass feminist icons, as far as I'm concerned. But this gender imbalance makes me wonder. To what extent does the predominance of universalist, human/peace centered approaches in Arab American literary conversations about terrorism occur because these are traditionally feminine positions? How do the economics of publishing reward Arab women's writing beyond men's? Is this a retrenchment of American notions of the feminized humanities upon the Arab notion of the strong, masculine poet? Any conversation of this type, I fear, would inevitably turn to crap almost immediately; nevertheless, I wonder.
I also saw a fabulous panel about arts and education. The highlight of it, for me, was seeing three high school students, all Arab American, present about incorporating Arab American and Middle Eastern studies into the K-12 curriculum. They did an excellent job documenting the gaps in knowledge they were left with, and the differences between private and public schools and the opportunities they present. They also made a good case for ways to incorporate Arab history and culture into the curriculum. I sincerely hope they write up their results and send them to their school board!
Also on the panel was novelist and professor Randa Jarrar, talking about teaching Arab American women's literature in the college classroom. She gave a great presentation of book covers, talking about the ways ethnicity is signified, and books are ghettoized, based on the ethnicity of characters and writers. She stressed the importance of authors getting clauses in their contracts about being able to approve their covers, and showed the difference between a cover she rejected for her book and the redraft she accepted. An important lesson for any of us working as writers!
The last presentation was by the folks behind Big Bad Boo Productions; they make children's cartoons featuring Middle Eastern and other minority characters. They showed cute little clips from their two major products, Mixed Nutz, about a group of friends and their adventures, and 1001 Nights, a kid-friendly retelling of some of the classic tales. They also run Oznoz, which offers educational materials and kids' media in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and a few South Asian languages. A cool resource, and one I might take advantage of for myself and my kid.
In the afternoon, I attended the "unconference" session, which was originally going to be open to any topic, but which ended up focusing on the Arab revolutions. The conversation was fairly intense, especially as it included both Libyans who strongly supported the NATO intervention, because they honestly believe the alternative is genocide, and those whose response ranged from skepticism to downright rejection of the US's motives and involvement. I found myself coming to hold a complicated position the more I listened and thought, which included a totally cynical view of the US's motives, the belief that the intervention was legitimately saving lives, and a strong conviction that there needs to be clear and consistent pressure on the NATO coalition to get in, protect the revolutionaries, and then, not to put too fine a point on it, GTFO. If any form of liberal interventionism can work in practice, it needs to truly involve preserving the independence of those protected, and not turn into just another neocolonial tactic.
I also had a little moment in the session, which I wasn't able to speak to, but which still bothers me, and so I'll put it out there. There were a small number of non-Arab folks there, including two white men in particular. Both of them spoke in ways that were dismissive of the words of the Arabs in the room, who were almost all women. One of them, in particular, went on a long rant about geopolitics in the Arab world that seemed directed at telling the Libyan woman there that she was wrong in her belief that the intervention would work--when her comments were highly emotionally charged and about concrete individuals whose lives she feared for.
This whole discourse made me livid. As always, I wanted to post a giant sign reading NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR WHITE PEOPLE TO TALK above my hard. And, in fact, I declined to speak, even though I wanted to, because I really thought that there needed to be fewer white voices in the room. In retrospect, I'm not sure I made the right choice. Not that my comment would have been a direct refutation of the others, and the Arab moderators seemed to be able to move the conversation on productively without being hurt. But I'm just not sure when silence is the better part of solidarity, and when speech is. I'm also quite aware of the gender dynamics of that room: the white ladies stayed quiet and listened to the voices of others, and the white dudes spoke up in more or less egocentric ways. The while thing was frustrating, though the conversation was, I think, generally productive.
On Saturday, I arrived just in time to catch the end of a music performance, and then saw an amazing panel of visual artists, which reduced me to tears at a couple of points. (Again, watch for the artists' posts.) The closing keynote was delivered by Joseph Massad of Columbia University.
I have to admit, I was not super-impressed with Massad's lecture, perhaps just because, until the last ten minutes, it was all things I had heard before. That is to say, he spoke about the colonial relationships between the development of Middle Eastern studies as a field and about the ways that Arabs are constricted by the Orientalist assumptions of Western culture. This may be a potent sign that I've been doing Middle Eastern studies too long, or that I'm a white girl doing it, but if I never had to hear that lecture again, I'd be happy. Don't get me wrong, I anticipate giving it a lot, but I am, at this point, fairly sure I understand it, and can apply the points it makes in my research and my analysis of situations. I suppose that, if I'm going to hear someone of Massad's stature, I'd like something a little more novel from him--even if it's about those same points. Could he have talked about specific examples, relevant to the experience of Arab-American artists? That would have enlivened things. My impulse for Moar Data was definitely showing. At the end, he did speak quite well about the ways that the revolutions throughout the region offer the potential for changed understandings of the region, which I thought was quite engaging; the whole thing ended with the audience desperately seeking his analysis, country-by-country, of what was going down, which was gong great until we got kicked out for the building closing!
The conference sessions will be available via the Arab American National Museum iTunes site (link will try to open in iTunes) in a few months; you can also see their other programming there now. The program is here, with lots more info. Look for the artist profiles over the next week-or-two-or-three...
Friday, I attended all but the poetry reading, and found it to be very exciting. There was a good sized crowd, especially for a Friday; lots of artists, a few academics & teachers, some students, and a bunch of other folks. The conference was co-sponsored by the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, which led to one very funny effect: the majority of the speakers had strong accents (to my ear), either because their first language was Arabic...or because they were from Michigan. Oh, linguistic variation in Arab America...
The first panel I attended focused on responses to September 11th, ten years later. In addition to two amazing artists, there was a very interesting paper by Andrea Shalal-Esa, looking at how Arab American writers talk about terrorism in their work. She spoke about the impossibility of not referencing terrorism, and the drive to want to talk about something, anything else. One of the things I noticed as she spoke was that the majority of the writers she mentioned were women. Diana Abu Jaber, Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj: the leading lights of contemporary Arab American writing are all female. (The men she mentioned were Greg Orfalea and Ray Hanania, neither of whom, I think, have the profile of the others.) Now, all these women are both excellent writers and totally badass feminist icons, as far as I'm concerned. But this gender imbalance makes me wonder. To what extent does the predominance of universalist, human/peace centered approaches in Arab American literary conversations about terrorism occur because these are traditionally feminine positions? How do the economics of publishing reward Arab women's writing beyond men's? Is this a retrenchment of American notions of the feminized humanities upon the Arab notion of the strong, masculine poet? Any conversation of this type, I fear, would inevitably turn to crap almost immediately; nevertheless, I wonder.
I also saw a fabulous panel about arts and education. The highlight of it, for me, was seeing three high school students, all Arab American, present about incorporating Arab American and Middle Eastern studies into the K-12 curriculum. They did an excellent job documenting the gaps in knowledge they were left with, and the differences between private and public schools and the opportunities they present. They also made a good case for ways to incorporate Arab history and culture into the curriculum. I sincerely hope they write up their results and send them to their school board!
Also on the panel was novelist and professor Randa Jarrar, talking about teaching Arab American women's literature in the college classroom. She gave a great presentation of book covers, talking about the ways ethnicity is signified, and books are ghettoized, based on the ethnicity of characters and writers. She stressed the importance of authors getting clauses in their contracts about being able to approve their covers, and showed the difference between a cover she rejected for her book and the redraft she accepted. An important lesson for any of us working as writers!
The last presentation was by the folks behind Big Bad Boo Productions; they make children's cartoons featuring Middle Eastern and other minority characters. They showed cute little clips from their two major products, Mixed Nutz, about a group of friends and their adventures, and 1001 Nights, a kid-friendly retelling of some of the classic tales. They also run Oznoz, which offers educational materials and kids' media in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and a few South Asian languages. A cool resource, and one I might take advantage of for myself and my kid.
In the afternoon, I attended the "unconference" session, which was originally going to be open to any topic, but which ended up focusing on the Arab revolutions. The conversation was fairly intense, especially as it included both Libyans who strongly supported the NATO intervention, because they honestly believe the alternative is genocide, and those whose response ranged from skepticism to downright rejection of the US's motives and involvement. I found myself coming to hold a complicated position the more I listened and thought, which included a totally cynical view of the US's motives, the belief that the intervention was legitimately saving lives, and a strong conviction that there needs to be clear and consistent pressure on the NATO coalition to get in, protect the revolutionaries, and then, not to put too fine a point on it, GTFO. If any form of liberal interventionism can work in practice, it needs to truly involve preserving the independence of those protected, and not turn into just another neocolonial tactic.
I also had a little moment in the session, which I wasn't able to speak to, but which still bothers me, and so I'll put it out there. There were a small number of non-Arab folks there, including two white men in particular. Both of them spoke in ways that were dismissive of the words of the Arabs in the room, who were almost all women. One of them, in particular, went on a long rant about geopolitics in the Arab world that seemed directed at telling the Libyan woman there that she was wrong in her belief that the intervention would work--when her comments were highly emotionally charged and about concrete individuals whose lives she feared for.
This whole discourse made me livid. As always, I wanted to post a giant sign reading NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR WHITE PEOPLE TO TALK above my hard. And, in fact, I declined to speak, even though I wanted to, because I really thought that there needed to be fewer white voices in the room. In retrospect, I'm not sure I made the right choice. Not that my comment would have been a direct refutation of the others, and the Arab moderators seemed to be able to move the conversation on productively without being hurt. But I'm just not sure when silence is the better part of solidarity, and when speech is. I'm also quite aware of the gender dynamics of that room: the white ladies stayed quiet and listened to the voices of others, and the white dudes spoke up in more or less egocentric ways. The while thing was frustrating, though the conversation was, I think, generally productive.
On Saturday, I arrived just in time to catch the end of a music performance, and then saw an amazing panel of visual artists, which reduced me to tears at a couple of points. (Again, watch for the artists' posts.) The closing keynote was delivered by Joseph Massad of Columbia University.
I have to admit, I was not super-impressed with Massad's lecture, perhaps just because, until the last ten minutes, it was all things I had heard before. That is to say, he spoke about the colonial relationships between the development of Middle Eastern studies as a field and about the ways that Arabs are constricted by the Orientalist assumptions of Western culture. This may be a potent sign that I've been doing Middle Eastern studies too long, or that I'm a white girl doing it, but if I never had to hear that lecture again, I'd be happy. Don't get me wrong, I anticipate giving it a lot, but I am, at this point, fairly sure I understand it, and can apply the points it makes in my research and my analysis of situations. I suppose that, if I'm going to hear someone of Massad's stature, I'd like something a little more novel from him--even if it's about those same points. Could he have talked about specific examples, relevant to the experience of Arab-American artists? That would have enlivened things. My impulse for Moar Data was definitely showing. At the end, he did speak quite well about the ways that the revolutions throughout the region offer the potential for changed understandings of the region, which I thought was quite engaging; the whole thing ended with the audience desperately seeking his analysis, country-by-country, of what was going down, which was gong great until we got kicked out for the building closing!
The conference sessions will be available via the Arab American National Museum iTunes site (link will try to open in iTunes) in a few months; you can also see their other programming there now. The program is here, with lots more info. Look for the artist profiles over the next week-or-two-or-three...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-28 10:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-28 10:37 pm (UTC)