Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism by Nadine Naber (review)

Nadine Naber’s Arab America focuses on an Arab American community of young adult activists in the San Francisco Bay Area and explores the complex set of diasporic identities they grapple with. Many have grown up with immigrant parents insisting that they maintain allegiance to a conception of Arab culture set in direct opposition to American culture, which is associated with degeneracy, moral bankruptcy, and sexual deviance. Naber notes that this insistence puts particular pressure on Arab women to adhere to heterosexist norms of family duty and sexual responsibility. At the same time, Arabs are subject to Orientalist and imperialist attitudes in American culture, based on the impression that oppressed women need saving by American heroes, which serves as a justification for American military interventions in Arab lands. The Arab assumptions largely reverse the polarities of the Orientalist ones but still enable imperialist visions of Arab women as oppressed, thereby leaving that larger racist framework intact. What Naber aims to understand, then, is how individual young adults, especially women, navigate various “articulations of Arabness” related to family, religion, gender, and sexuality to maintain a sense of belonging in America without abandoning allegiance to the Arab community.

In researching this topic, Naber strove to utilize an academic methodology that would not replicate Orientalist and imperialist perspectives. So she turned to transnational feminist ethnography, participant observation, and autoethnography to capture “the specific and diverse narratives through which individuals who in one way or another affiliate with the Arab region and its diasporas make claims to, negotiate, live, reject, or transform” concepts of Arabness.¹ She immersed herself in the Bay Area Arab community in the late 1990s, the region where she herself lived; observed a range of cultural discussions, community meetings, and civic gatherings; and interviewed more than one hundred Arab men and women. Naber actually refers to her interview subjects as interlocutors because, she writes, “my interpretations of their stories were shaped as much by the analyses they shared as by my own.”² This makes Arab America a particularly dynamic read as the historical and political contexts she describes come to life through the words of her interlocutors.

The first chapter is steeped in historical material providing the background context for cultural and political changes in the Bay Area that helped foster the conditions Naber observed. The author paints the 1950s and early 1960s as a period of assimilation in the Arab immigrant community in San Francisco, a time of relative calm when Arabs were accepted among whites as a “model minority,” and a pan-Arab community identity prevailed. That shifted in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 1970s oil crisis, and the 1979 Iranian revolution, and by the 1980s the US government and media had succeeded in characterizing Arabs as “the enemy,” with images of rich, greedy sheiks and brutal religious fanatics prevailing. This left Arab Americans feeling immense tension in public, leading some to cloak their heritage and even change their names. The 1990s brought US imperialist interventions, such as the first Gulf War and sanctions against Iraq, which in turn spawned a commitment to political activism among young Arab American adults. A primary takeaway from this chapter is that articulations of Arab American identity cannot be understood without context or assumed to be timeless; they must be comprehended in terms of the specific historical and geographical conditions that help construct and transform them.

Naber’s subsequent chapters accordingly explore in greater detail the diverse identity formations experienced in the late 1990s by Arab Americans in the Bay Area. Chapter 2 showcases the more conservative end of the spectrum of articulations, an identity concept that Naber dubs the politics of cultural authenticity. Immigrant parents see their traditional Arab culture as authentic and fear that their second-generation children will be corrupted by American individualism. Here, young women are constrained by idealized gender norms, much as they are in Orientalist conceptions, meaning that both schemas rely “on the...