Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States since 9/11

Epilogue: On Discipline and Inclusion

EPILOGUE ON DISCIPLINE AND INCLUSION ANDREW SHRYOCK IT IS GOOD that this volume appears at a temporal remove from the events of September 11, 2001. The United States’ reaction to the 9/11 attacks has included the invasion and military occupation of two (formerly) sovereign nation-states, a domestic security crackdown, new laws to justify the crackdown , and a reorganization of the federal agencies that execute and manage the global war on terror. Over the last six years, these developments have moved from the realm of the extraordinary to the realm of the commonplace. Though ominous, they now pervade our everyday lives, as if to verify Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that “the state of exception in which we live is the rule.” The essays in this book show how Arab and Muslim Americans are situated within this interplay of rule and exception, and the patterns revealed herein are not always the ones scholars (or community activists or media analysts or government officials) would have predicted in the early days of the post-9/11 era. Not only is there stark variation in how the backlash has been experienced in different Arab and Muslim populations across the United States, there is also a clear trend, in almost all the communities studied here, toward more assertive, tactically adaptive expressions of American identity. These self-conscious acts of Americanization are rarely as new, in form or content, as they appear to be; still, they provide ideal locations in which to rethink current understandings of citizenship. It is important to take this concept apart, if only because it animates so many intellectual and political agendas at once. As a rhetorical device, citizenship is used to facilitate (and block) the incorporation of immigrants, to expand (and contract) the limits of national belonging. As such, talk of citizenship has powerful, often contradictory effects. In discussing these essays, I focus on aspects of citizenship discourse that foster disciplinary inclusion. This idea is more complex, and much harder to assess, than disciplinary exclusion, the process realized in hate crimes, deportations, arrests, detentions, interrogations, profiling, and collective stigma. Without drawing attention away from these obvious forms of discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, the contributors to this volume have made deeper insights possible by pointing out unexpected ways in which inclusion, as policy and desire, is reshaping Arab and Muslim American communities in the post-9/11 era. CITIZENSHIP, IN THEORY AND PRACTICE The word citizenship surfaces repeatedly in this volume, but two essays make it central to their arguments in ways that are emblematic of larger trends. Sunaina Maira (chapter 2) examines modes of citizenship available to South Asian youth at a public high school in Wellford, a pseudonymous New England town. In making her case for three specific citizenship styles—flexible, polycultural, and dissenting—Maira puts forward a nuanced account of contemporary citizenship theory, building on the insight, now widespread in the literature, that legal citizenship does not ensure a sense of national belonging. This misfit between membership as an artifact of law and membership as a structure of feeling is the problem that citizenship theory is typically meant to address. Maira’s high school students are clearly dealing with this issue in the heightened form it assumes for Muslims in the United States today. Indeed, local variations on this dilemma shape every essay in the volume. Maira’s analysis of citizenship in theory, as theory, greatly enriched my reading of the other papers, even though, in her own study, the reach of her insights is limited by the peculiarities of her field site. The American high school is an incubator of citizens, and is designed to create them, but legal minors are not yet fully engaged in public life. Maira is fully aware of this fact, which should not be construed as a failing. Most of the essays in this volume deal with youth, specifically with students, a trend consistent with several themes I will discuss here. Maira’s analysis tells us a great deal about how teachers and school administrators (who, in Wellford, are generally liberal and progressive) help immigrant children script alternative forms of American belonging, and how the students respond. The power of Maira’s presentation is amplified when it is read alongside Howell and Jamal’s account (chapter 3) of the 9/11 backlash in Arab Detroit. This essay treats citizenship in practice, as practice, with the same analytical sharpness Maira brings to matters of theory...