Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

I got the question every time I started working with a new group of students, and this day was no exception. "Where you from?" Wilad asked, as I put the children's book I'd been using to teach colors and clothing back in my purse.

I used to answer that question with "Kensington," my Brooklyn neighborhood, or "Philadelphia," my hometown. But that's never the question they're asking. "I'm American," I say.

"You husband 'arabi?"

I thought of my wife, with her Jewish last name, who was at home with our six-month-old son. "No," I say. "My husband's not Arab."

• A big comfy sweater (unless it's summer)
• A men's tank-top (I have these in a variety of colors, and would basically wear nothing but if I didn't ever have to leave the house
• Pajama pants if I can work at home, my schlubbiest jeans if I can't
• Glasses with glasses chain so they don't fall off my face
• A mug which has a positive emotional resonance, usually either this KSU mug or my Star Trek mug

• A printed copy of the dissertation. While I almost always type everything I write, I still do find it easier and faster to edit by hand. (I also prefer grading by hand to grading using track changes, but track changes does make it easier to return papers, especially final papers.)
• A red pen, preferably a rollerball with liquid ink. I could have edited in green or purple, or blue at a pinch, but black would have been impossible--I need the visual distinction from the print of the page. This pen is somewhere between red and magenta, and I rather like it.
• A notebook for writing down major tasks still to do or things to look up. I could have done this on my iPod, which often does this task for me, but since I was working on paper already, the notebook did the work efficiently.
• Some means of organization. I am a terribly organized person; one folder which can contain all of the above supplies and keep them in order so all I have to do each morning is pick it up and leave makes my life so much better.
• Caffeine. I have drunk so much coffee in the last month, you would not believe if.
• Somewhere to work that's not my house. While I can work at home, I prefer not to. Some of it is that I don't have a good office space in the house; while I did, until just this week, technically have a desk in my bedroom, it both got sacrificed on the altar of needing more floor space as my kid gets older, and wasn't really functional. I find I focus better and produce more material more quickly if I'm doing it somewhere else. Eventually, I aspire to either A Job That Comes With An Office, or the income to rent time at the Brooklyn Creative League or somewhere similar.


Of course, the other essential component of these periods of intense workload? Trips to my chiropractor. Oh, the wrist pain, the neck pain, the eyestrain...

So that's my process. What's yours?

...

In conclusion, I'm right? The end?

In writing this paper, I have hoped to describe the way these two groups, Adalah-NY and Al-Awda, engage in political life very differently: their preferred rhetoric, their alliances with other groups, and their relationships to the identities of their members and allies all vary highly, and in ways that make sense given the different segments of Arab’s New York and progressive/radical communities that house them. If, at the very least, I have contributed to an effort to disaggregate the understanding of what Palestine activism is in the contemporary United States, I consider that I have produced useful intellectual work.

At the same time, I’d like to suggest some of the larger ramifications of this work for thinking about social movements. Too often, radical movements with low probability of achieving their goals are viewed only as foils for more moderate movements, the ones who are likely to win concessions, in part because of tensions between radical movements and the nervous centers of power. I want to suggest that there are important reasons for not treating groups like Al-Awda and Adalah-NY as afterthoughts. Empirically, the way that the margins battle over the meaning of their work ends up moving down into more centrist groups: the way the language of boycott, even if substantially divorced from the original context of the BDS call, has moved into mainstream Palestine activism, is a sure sign of this. If we want to see where mainstream movements are going, we must look to their margins. Normatively—and I believe we are as required to normatively justify our work as we are to methodologically justify it—we cannot ignore voices on the margins, because they represent political actors making arguments that demand a full hearing. Without being able to hear the argument within any set of claims made, and being able to address the fundamental question of justice that beats at the heart of it, political society will be unable to aim for full incorporation of all members.