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Introduction WE BEGAN THIS book by suggesting that Arab American identity is something made in public spaces. Although scholars repeatedly try to explain this identity by examining what is Arab about it, we think more is accomplished by focusing on the American contexts that create it. What is American about Arab identity in Detroit? First, it is portrayed as a kind of ethnic identity. Arab Detroit is not thought to be representative of American society at large, even though, as Schopmeyer's essay on community demography in part 1 shows, Arab Detroit is indistinguishable from the larger population in many ways. Second, Arab identity in Detroit is framed in relation to American culture. Whatever this book is about, it is not about the Arab experience in Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, or Canada. Yet most Arab American readers will not perceive our narrow focus as a slight to Arab immigrant communities in other countries. This is because most Arab Americans are interested in a history that connects them, and by extension Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, or Iraq, to the United States. Finally, Arab American identity is a product of the English language, the medium in which it flourishes. Arabs who speak only Arabic, and the thousands of Arabs in the New World and Europe who speak only Spanish or French, belong to Arab communities of a different kind altogether. These points come together in the case of Janet, an Iraqi Chaldean born and raised in Detroit. Janet speaks only English, and she is a proud member of the Arab American community. Janet has several cousins whose parents migrated to Mexico in the same year Janet's father came to Detroit. Except for a handful of Chaldean greetings, these cousins speak only Spanish. Janet does not consider them to be Chaldean, much less Arab: "They think they are Chaldean, but really they are just Mexicans. They dress like Mexicans. They walk like Mexicans. They eat Mexican food. They even have Spanish 483 Ethnic Futures names. I wouldn't call them Chaldean at all." Janet seems entirely unaware that her Mexican cousins see her as an American who "just thinks" she is Chaldean/Arab. Janet speaks English, dresses and eats like anAmerican, presumably walks like one, and evenhas an English name. That Janet and her Mexican cousins are all convinced that they are good Chaldean/Arabs shows the extent to which their ethnic identity is shaped by the larger society—Mexico in one case, the United States in the other—and not by models of identity prevalent in the homeland, Iraq. More ironic, still, is the fact that Janet and her cousins, when pressed to define and represent their Chaldean/Arab identity to others, would do so in virtually identical ways. They would prepare certain foods, highlight distinctive kinds of music and dance, display certainhandicrafts, and perhaps trace the family histories and kinship ties thatbrought them to the New World and that simultaneously root them in their ancestral village, Telkaif. These symbols and traditions encapsulate ethnic identity not because they carry the "essence" of Chaldeanness, or Koreanness, or Italianness, but rather because they can all be displayed, bought and sold, and reproduced in new languages (when ancestral ones are forgotten) and public formats (when the private life of the community is no longer rich enough to sustain the imagination of its members). In fact, this new brand of ethnic identity has its greatest appeal among people whose links to the "old country" are intellectual, nostalgic, disgruntled, vexed, or merely ideological. For Arabs born and raised in Detroit, these imaginative links are often cultivated as a way of escaping the close quarters of immigrant family life, where "the homeland" is someone else's memory, and Amreeka, a morally suspect zone, is consistently off limits. The essays in this section deal with the sometimes subtle, sometimes radical transformations that occur as "Arab immigrant cultures" become "ethnic American cultures." These transformations take place in the medium of public life, on the open market, and (most important of all) in the English language. Sally Howell's essay on ethnic arts-programming in Detroit shows how Arab American expressive culture is framed by categories that originated outside the Arab community, is legitimized by mainstream academics and scholars, and is supported financially by government and private endowments whose funding agendas are set in cooperation with community-based agencies (like ACCESS) that represent politically significant interest groups. Anne Rasmussen, analyzing the private sector, explores the growing market in Arab musical sounds...

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