Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora ed. by Evelyn Alsultany, Ella Shohat (review)

Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 1 (2014), 189–194 ISSN 2169-4435 EVELYN ALSULTANY & ELLA SHOHAT, eds., Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013). 348 pages. $85.00 cloth, $40.00 paper. ISBN 9780472069446. REVIEWED BY JUAN POBLETE, University of California at Santa Cruz, email: jpoblete@ucsc.edu This ambitious and pioneering collection of essays sets out to map diasporic territories not easily recognized by Area Studies-based approaches. While the latter often stress a durable history of borders and a series of historically defining and stable national traits, the former speak of processes of movement and displacement, of instability and migration. Recognizable territories and the cultural formations developed within them are thus contrasted with the sociocultural and affective processes impacting those who live in and at the borders of different national communities. In effectively showing the importance of these de- and re-territorializing dynamics, however, the volume also amply demonstrates why the proper understanding of the cultural politics of Middle Eastern immigrant populations in the Americas is not as much an issue of fully displacing nation and areacentered paradigms as it is one of introducing cross-border processes into the specificity of national and regional geographies. The first of the volume’s three sections includes two chapters— “The Cultural Politics of ‘the Middle East’ in the Americas: An Introduction” by Shohat and Alsultany and “The Sephardic-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism” by Shohat— providing a common thread to the reader of the following thirteen essays. Shohat’s “The Sephardic-Moorish Atlantic” originating in a piece written to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism has two central points to make: that the genealogy of Orientalism proposed by Said needs to be expanded to encompass a previous historical period of a broader phenomenon (Eurocentrism) in order to show that “the formation of Orientalism as a discourse 190 Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 1 (2013) preceded and anticipated Orientalism as a field of study” (45). This previous period is marked by what Shohat calls the “two 1492s.” If the first one, highlighted by Walter Mignolo, is a critique of Said proving that the colonial Eurocentric discourse underpinning his book’s Orientalism from the eighteenth century onward actually originated with the Spanish and Portuguese Conquest of America; Shohat’s second 1492 is meant to correct Mignolo’s Occidentalism by showing that underneath the colonial Occidentalism of the conquerors lay the “proto-Orientalism” of the Spanish Reconquista and “the forcing-out of Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors from Spain” (51). In this view “Anti-Semitism or Judeo-phobia, along with anti-infidelism or Islamophobia, provided a conceptual framework projected outward against the indigenous people of Africa and the Americas” thus historically connecting for centuries “the various ‘questions’: the Jewish, Muslim, ‘Indian’, Black, and the African question” (52). Shohat’s second main point is that we must, as a result of this intertwined history, rethink the possible links between Middle Eastern Studies—as a self-contained epistemological endeavor studying people in that far “there”—and American, Ethnic, and Latin American Studies. “[B]oth area studies and ethnic studies marginalize Middle Eastern Americans by positioning them as ‘foreigners’ to be studied merely ‘over there,’ denying their entry into a scholarly framework of race and ethnicity in the Americas” (56). Middle Eastern Studies is equally altered as it now must concern itself with diasporic Middle Eastern communities in Europe and the Americas. Shohat concludes proposing an “inter-area studies” approach researching the “co-implicatedness of regions, for example, of America in the Middle East and the Middle East in America” (56). The volume’s Introduction—“The Cultural Politics of ‘the Middle East’ in the Americas: An Introduction”—by Shohat and Alsultany clearly outlines the space of intervention for the book: if until now comparisons on Arab/Muslims in Canada and the US are mostly made in relation to Europe (and thus to the context of what Shohat has called one of the Global Souths), Shohat and Alsultany’s collection is meant to bring forward the relevance of “the rest of the Americas” for such comparative effort (thus including the other Global South, not...