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Acknowledgments
- University of Michigan Press
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Acknowledgments Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora is a collaborative project that was probably in the making long before we actually began conceptualizing it in 2003. Growing up in the wake of our families’ displacement from Iraq, and having lived in multiple geographies as part of complex familial mixing, we see this project as an attempt to connect what otherwise would be perceived as disparate and disjointed worlds. We have attempted to gather under one “roof” essays on seemingly unrelated cultural geographies that correspond to the various disaporic worlds we have been familiar with, or aware of, but which have hardly travelled together in scholarly publications. Middle Eastern disapora in the United States is often compared to Europe, while the linked analogies to the rest of the Americas are overlooked. The Arab/Latino interface examined in this book was inspired by similar convergences in our own lives. Our respective familial itineraries, along with Iraq and the United States, in the case of Evelyn Alsultany, have included Cuba and Colombia, while in Ella Shohat’s case have included Israel/Palestine and Brazil. It was therefore only a matter of time before we sought to translate our personal trajectories to a book that proposes to view the Americas as a continuum, in terms of both Middle Eastern diasporas and cross-border cultural flows. Finally, the penchant to regard the presence of Arabs, Muslims, or Middle Easterners in the West as a menacing infiltration, on the one hand, or as exotic unattainable people, on the other, was also at the heart of our desire to highlight a long historical cultural syncretism between East and West as well as between North and South. We hope that the volume will contribute to reshaping the discursive premises about the world/s we inhabit. This journey, however, would not have been possible without the enthusiastic participation and groundbreaking work of the authors who have enriched the itineraries of scholarly inquiry while also making the volume’s x / Acknowledgments proposed conceptual framework a textual reality. Taken together, the essays, we believe, offer a multiperspectival understanding of the interconnected cultural geographies. We are immensely grateful to the contributors for their excellent work and remarkable patience throughout this long and winding road. We would also like to acknowledge the superb work of those with whom we were in dialogue concerning the project along the way: Hishaam Aidi, Seyed Alavi, Shiva Balaghi, Doris Bittar, Chaza Charafeddine, Nouri Gana, Deborah Justice, Alex Lubin, Dina Ramadan, and Steven Salaita. We thank our editor at the University of Michigan Press, LeAnn Fields, for her belief in this project from the outset. Despite some raised eyebrows about the relevance of Latin America to the discussion, and despite some doubts about the coherency of such proposed analytical framework, LeAnn supported the scope of the volume throughout the process. At University of Michigan Press, we also thank Marcia LaBrenz, Alexa Ducsay, and the anonymous readers. Over this long period, the project has also benefited from the diligent work of a number of research assistants: Emma Alpert, Camila Bechelany, Benjamin Minh Ha, Leili Kashani, Jennifer Kelly, Diala Khalife, Andrew McBride, Sandra Ruiz, Adam Pascarella, Monika Raj, Michael Sackllah, Mejdulene Shomali, Karim Tartoussieh, Lani Teves, and Eliot Truesdell. We are immensely grateful for their indispensable help. We are fortunate to be surrounded by supportive friends and colleagues who generously helped the project in various ways. We are deeply grateful to Minoo Moallem for her invaluable comments concerning the volume as well as to Mireille Abelin, Mona El-Ghobashy, and Christine BurmeisterGuivernau for their feedback and support. We would also like to acknowledge the dialogues which we have had over the years with: Rabab Abdulhadi , Thomas Abowd, Deborah Al-Najjar, Anan Ameri, Paul Amar, Sinan Antoon, Kathryn Babayan, Elif Bali, Magdalena Barrera, Moustafa Baymoumi , Yael Ben-Zvi, Michael Bobbitt, Isaura Botelho, Lori Brooks, Dorothy Duff-Brown, Emily Brown, Carlos Augusto Calil, Amy Carroll, Christianne Cejas, Erskine Childers, Luiz Antonio Coelho, Vivia Costalas, Ebony Coletu, Deirdre de la Cruz, Philip Deloria, Nacisse Demeksa, Greg Dowd, Leonor Garcia, Lourdes Garcia, José Gatti, Reem Gibriel, Indepal Grewal, Catherine Groves, Esther Hamburger, Suheir Hammad, Sandra Hanna, Salah Hassan, Rima Hassouneh, Mervat Hatem, Anya Hurwitz, Shaista Husain, Shazia Iftkhar, Amira Jarmakani, Caren Kaplan, John Tofik Karam, Connie Katon, Osman Khan, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Kate Lyra, Sunaina Maira, Ivone Margulies, Randy Martin, Florencia Masri, Joseph Massad, Khaled Mattawa, Anthony Mora, Nadine Naber, Maria del Mar Logrono-Narbona, Marisol Negrón...