Editorial Foreword

Mashriq & Mahjar 3, no. 1 (2015), 1–5 ISSN 2169-4435 Andrew Arsan EDITORIAL FOREWORD This issue of Mashriq & Mahjar brings together five articles concerned, in different ways, with the making and remaking of diasporic community, with the constant compromises and creative reconstructions and appropriations required of migrants eager to make a home for themselves in new locales. Moving between New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Detroit and Dearborn—places so central to the burgeoning field of Eastern Mediterranean migration studies that some might consider them its loci classici—these five contributions compel us to look on these seemingly familiar sites in unfamiliar ways. While some do so by undoing master narratives and pervasive myths to reveal the complex social realities that lie beneath, others attempt to recover lives that have been forgotten, cast out of the historical record by the enormous condescension of posterity, or to reconstruct the discursive strategies and social tactics to which Middle Eastern men and women resorted. But all, despite their different emphases and approaches, prove acutely sensitive to the changing ways in which historical actors sought to embed their own individual lives in broader terrains of belonging and to craft new communities of sentiment and interest. In the first of these articles, Salim Yaqub ably traces the evolution of African-American views on the Arab-Israeli conflict between the Six Days War of 1967 and the late 1970s. Motivated by biblical Zionism and the close ties between Jewish and black civil rights organizations, bodies such as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Convention continued to view Israel as a haven of democracy and a model of self-affirmation through the mid- to late1960s . Only groups like the Black Panther party and the Student National Coordination Committee dissented from the majority opinion, expressing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. However, this situation had begun to change by the mid-1970s, under the pressure of developments both domestic and international. The Andrew Arsan 2 growing willingness of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Arab states to contemplate diplomatic engagement with Israel, Yaqub argues, was important, opening up a space for African-American moderates to voice criticism of particular Israeli policies without having to renege entirely upon their old friend. Significant, too, was the Andrew Young affair of 1979, which saw Young, the United States’ first African-American ambassador to the United Nations forced to resign for his decision to meet a PLO delegate. But equally crucial, Yaqub demonstrates, was the growth of organizations like the National Arab American Association and the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, whose members cannily drew upon the language of civil rights and shared local political concerns to forge a new sense of political community with African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson. (For another perspective on this topic see Pamela Pennock’s Third World Alliances: Arab-American Activists at American Universities, 1967–1973). Paulo Pinto, meanwhile, examines the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which religion, ethnicity, and nationality have become entwined and entangled categories of belonging for Middle Eastern migrants in twentieth-century Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and personal testimony as much as on historical records, Pinto highlights the central role that religious ritual, institutions and associations have played in the efforts of LebaneseSyrian migrants and their descendants to define, and re-define, their relations to one another and their place in Brazilian society. There is no doubt, he argues, that Catholicism continues to serve as a powerful means of incorporation into the Brazilian elite, a sure source of cultural capital for those who have moved up through the ranks of the business world. However, we should not allow the dominant narrative of Christian Lebanese migration and the continuing importance of Catholicism as a cultural attribute to obscure the persistent efforts of other religious communities, whether Christian or Muslim, to define and redefine themselves. Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic, Druze, ‘Alawis, Shi‘a and Sunni—all have resorted to similar tactics, building churches and mosques, establishing cultural associations, schools, charitable foundations, and perpetuating ties with the Eastern Mediterranean. But religion has not always served to underscore ethnic particularity and confessional difference. At times, it has...