Book Review: Salaita, The Uncultured Wars
Feb. 13th, 2010 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehThe Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays
by Steven Salaita
I read this slim volume of essays about a year ago, for the simple reason that it was on the shelf in the Arab-American studies section of NYU's Bobst Library (E184, right at the end of that aisle on the fifth floor...what, like you don't have certain sections of the library memorized?), and I hadn't read it yet. I'd enjoyed a previous book of Salaita's, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, and was interested to see where he was going. My first impressions of the book were overwhelmingly positive; I believe I actually read the entirety of "Open-Mindedness on Independence Day," a scathing critique of a Thomas Friedman column, to the first person I saw after I read it. I wrote a review of it at the Livejournal community 50books_poc (for people aiming to read more books by people of color) to encourage others to pick it up. In particular, I loved the book's prioritization of questions of discourse and meaning, his exhortation in the final essay to please listen to Arabs when they speak, rather than rendering them impossible to speak with. This is exactly the line of argument I'm developing in my dissertation, under the rubric of "discursive misrecognition." (You can read more about the way I'm formulating this concept vis-a-vis critical theories of recognition in this paper.) When I began designing the syllabus for the course I am teaching this semester, called The Middle East in Diaspora, I ordered it for the students without a second thought.
Then I reread it.
I still like the book. In fact, I might like it more on a second reading, because Salaita's sense of humor and the power of his argument both hold up very well. But I realized as I was flipping through that I wouldn't be able to assign much of it to my students; in the end, they're reading three essays, fewer than forty pages (too few to justify the cost, sadly).
The reason for this, is, I think, very telling about the nature of this object we call "Arab-American studies." Salaita is a Palestinian, an Arab, born in the US (I believe, or if not raised here from childhood), writing a book about the way Americans view Arabs. But, in this book, he is only rarely writing a book about Arab-Americans. The Arabs that the Americans in his book are viewing (and refusing to engage with on substantive questions of politics) are foreign--insurgents in Iraq, terrorists at Guantanamo, Palestinian Christians. His concise and powerful statements about who the American left cannot acknowledge or dialogue with makes no distinction between American Arabs and Arabs in the rest of the world, both of whom are mired in the same failure of speech. But because he doesn't differentiate, he doesn't speak that much to a conversation focused solely on Arab-Americans.
I think this is common across Arab-American studies; it simply isn't walled off from Arab studies generally. I've presented on my research (and seen many other papers on Arab-Americans) at MESA, and no one's looked at me funny; I identify myself as a comparativist within the field of political science, and the label of Americanist was the thing that most worried me about starting this dissertation, because it's simply not what I do. The fabulous issue of the (now defunct?) MIT Electronic Journal of Middle Eastern Studies on gender and feminism after 9/11 was explicitly both Arab and Arab-American, and many of the authors didn't explicitly identify themselves with one or the other identity label.
But what it meant was, as I'm trying to teach a course comparing three different communities with origins in the Middle East currently living in Europe or the US--Arabs in the US, North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany--it was hard to make Salaita's essays work within the framework. In the end, I assigned three of his pieces; the short "Open-mindedness on Independence Day" for our week on alternatives to "racism" to conceptualize the experiences of Arab-Americans, and the stunning "I Was Called Up to Commit Genocide" (about the deployment of Palestinian Christians by Christian Zionists) and the very moving "Immigrants are Not Homogenous," on his boyhood memories of the Gulf War, for our week on divisions within diaspora communities.
Nevertheless, I love this book, and I hope I'll be able to figure out how to assign it to other students in the future, because I want to expose more people to his work. I'd encourage anyone interested in Arab/American relations to pick it up. In the mean time, I'm fascinated by the concept of his The Holy Land in Transit, so plan on picking it up when I have a little time. (HARDY HAR HAR.)
by Steven Salaita
I read this slim volume of essays about a year ago, for the simple reason that it was on the shelf in the Arab-American studies section of NYU's Bobst Library (E184, right at the end of that aisle on the fifth floor...what, like you don't have certain sections of the library memorized?), and I hadn't read it yet. I'd enjoyed a previous book of Salaita's, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, and was interested to see where he was going. My first impressions of the book were overwhelmingly positive; I believe I actually read the entirety of "Open-Mindedness on Independence Day," a scathing critique of a Thomas Friedman column, to the first person I saw after I read it. I wrote a review of it at the Livejournal community 50books_poc (for people aiming to read more books by people of color) to encourage others to pick it up. In particular, I loved the book's prioritization of questions of discourse and meaning, his exhortation in the final essay to please listen to Arabs when they speak, rather than rendering them impossible to speak with. This is exactly the line of argument I'm developing in my dissertation, under the rubric of "discursive misrecognition." (You can read more about the way I'm formulating this concept vis-a-vis critical theories of recognition in this paper.) When I began designing the syllabus for the course I am teaching this semester, called The Middle East in Diaspora, I ordered it for the students without a second thought.
Then I reread it.
I still like the book. In fact, I might like it more on a second reading, because Salaita's sense of humor and the power of his argument both hold up very well. But I realized as I was flipping through that I wouldn't be able to assign much of it to my students; in the end, they're reading three essays, fewer than forty pages (too few to justify the cost, sadly).
The reason for this, is, I think, very telling about the nature of this object we call "Arab-American studies." Salaita is a Palestinian, an Arab, born in the US (I believe, or if not raised here from childhood), writing a book about the way Americans view Arabs. But, in this book, he is only rarely writing a book about Arab-Americans. The Arabs that the Americans in his book are viewing (and refusing to engage with on substantive questions of politics) are foreign--insurgents in Iraq, terrorists at Guantanamo, Palestinian Christians. His concise and powerful statements about who the American left cannot acknowledge or dialogue with makes no distinction between American Arabs and Arabs in the rest of the world, both of whom are mired in the same failure of speech. But because he doesn't differentiate, he doesn't speak that much to a conversation focused solely on Arab-Americans.
I think this is common across Arab-American studies; it simply isn't walled off from Arab studies generally. I've presented on my research (and seen many other papers on Arab-Americans) at MESA, and no one's looked at me funny; I identify myself as a comparativist within the field of political science, and the label of Americanist was the thing that most worried me about starting this dissertation, because it's simply not what I do. The fabulous issue of the (now defunct?) MIT Electronic Journal of Middle Eastern Studies on gender and feminism after 9/11 was explicitly both Arab and Arab-American, and many of the authors didn't explicitly identify themselves with one or the other identity label.
But what it meant was, as I'm trying to teach a course comparing three different communities with origins in the Middle East currently living in Europe or the US--Arabs in the US, North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany--it was hard to make Salaita's essays work within the framework. In the end, I assigned three of his pieces; the short "Open-mindedness on Independence Day" for our week on alternatives to "racism" to conceptualize the experiences of Arab-Americans, and the stunning "I Was Called Up to Commit Genocide" (about the deployment of Palestinian Christians by Christian Zionists) and the very moving "Immigrants are Not Homogenous," on his boyhood memories of the Gulf War, for our week on divisions within diaspora communities.
Nevertheless, I love this book, and I hope I'll be able to figure out how to assign it to other students in the future, because I want to expose more people to his work. I'd encourage anyone interested in Arab/American relations to pick it up. In the mean time, I'm fascinated by the concept of his The Holy Land in Transit, so plan on picking it up when I have a little time. (HARDY HAR HAR.)