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78 6 Decolonizing Culture Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms Nadine Naber In this essay, Nadine Naber interrogates the ways that Arab diasporas remake “Arab culture” in the United States and the significance of this process to the issues of sexism and homophobia. Her analysis focuses on middle-class Arab immigrant discourses and the Arab American social movements to which she has belonged. Naber proposes a feminist approach that locates diasporic notions of “culture” within the historical legacies of European colonialism and Orientalism and the contemporary experiences of displacement, immigration, racism, and assimilation. Here, she argues that “culture” is “political.” This approach considers how issues that are seemingly “internal” to our communities (such as sexism and homophobia) emerge with and through a range of “external” forces. From this standpoint, Naber calls for alternatives to social movement frameworks that subordinate gender or sexuality or both to a private-culturalcommunal domain and mark gender and sexuality as secondary to the more pressing issues of our times—such as war and racism. Working beyond the notions of distinct and separate internal-private and external-public domains, she finds a sense of liberation from the fear of “washing our dirty laundry in public” that has haunted many Arab and Arab American feminist projects in the United States. I was born in San Francisco, three years after my parents arrived from Al Salt, Jordan. Over the next twenty years, my parents moved a dozen times across the This essay is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Articulating Arabness: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Diaspora. I am grateful to Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, Lara Deeb, and Andrea Smith for their invaluable feedback on this essay. My deepest appreciation goes to all of the people who participated in my research. There are not enough words to thank them for their contribution. Decolonizing Culture | 79 Bay Area, creating for me a childhood and a sense of community that was both rigidly structured and ever changing. Throughout my childhood, “culture” was a tool, an abstract, ephemeral notion of what we do and what we believe, of who belongs and who does not. Culture was the way that my parents exercised their control over me and my siblings. The same fight, I knew from my aggrieved conversations with friends and relatives, was playing out in the homes of countless other Arab families. The typical generational wars—about whether we teenagers could stay out late at night, or whether we could spend the night at our friends’ slumber parties—was amplified into a grand cultural struggle. The banalities of adolescent rebellion became a battle between two stereotypes, between rigid versions of “Arab” and “American” values. To discipline us, our parents’ generation invoked the royal “we,” as in: “No, you can’t go to the school dance because we don’t do that.” Here, “we” meant “Arabs.” I hated these words. I hated these declarations of what “we” did and didn’t do. Yet, they worked. Sort of. Sometimes, I actually listened. Or, more often as time went on, I simply tried to hide these parts of my life from my parents. Because even worse than disobeying my parents was the threat—always tangible in my house and in our community centers—that I might be disobeying my people— a term that signified anyone from the Naber family, to everyone in Jordan, to all Arab Christians, to al Arab. Transgressing my parents’ rules was not merely adolescent rebellion, but was a form of cultural loss, of cultural betrayal. And even worse, each moment of transgression meant the loss of Arab culture to al Amerikan, that awesome and awful world that encompassed everything from the American people to the American government to the American way of life (at least as my parents seemed to imagine it). Our Arab community, like so many immigrant networks, was wildly diverse, comprising Muslim and Christian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian families. Yet we all seemed to have a remarkably similar idea of what “American” and “Arab” meant. We seemed to share a tacit knowledge that al Amerika was the trash culture, degenerate, morally bankrupt, and sexually depraved. In contrast, al Arab (Arabs) were morally respectable—we valued marriage, family, and close relationships. It was not only our parents who put this pressure on us.1 What we learned at school and from the U.S. media reinforced this dichotomy. As with all products of human belief, there were caveats, and shades of gray, and matters of...

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