Nadine Naber's Arab America is an intensely personal and reflexive ethnography. The author's own life story of growing up in a Jordanian American family in the San Francisco Bay Area circumscribes the text, and she articulates her own investment in the Arab feminist activism that forms the book's foundation. Naber argues that Arab Americans have often been confined by the terms of Orientalist versus anti-Orientalist discourse, leaving little room for honest discussions of internal community dynamics or alternative expressions of Arabness. In order to move beyond problematic “us” versus “them” and “here” versus “there” dichotomies, Naber theorizes a “diasporic feminist anti-imperialism,” and employs a methodological approach grounded in multisited feminist ethnography. This methodology successfully opens up room for a diasporic feminist critique, complicating narratives of gender and race that have long surrounded Arab culture in the West.

Using source material from fieldwork she carried out in the San Francisco Bay Area from January 1998 to August 2001, Naber provides a cogent analysis of the complex web of correlations between gender, sexuality, religion, race, and generation in Arab American life. She does this by describing the viewpoints of numerous groups, including first-generation Arab Americans, Iraqi female refugees, immigrant male activists, second-generation female activists, and queer Arabs, providing the reader with a sense of the multiple perspectives at play. The chapters are grouped thematically with the first, “From Model Minority to Problem Minority,” serving as a history of Arab immigration to the United States in which Naber argues that increasing U.S. military intervention abroad beginning in the 1960s and 1970s transformed Arab Americans into a “diaspora of empire.” Naber strategically situates her ethnography in the late-1990s to show that 11 September 2001 was not necessarily a pivotal moment for anti-Arab racism or U.S. military action in the Middle East, but rather represented an extension of cultural and political dynamics that had already been formed. Thus, her book is “grounded in the wide range of studies about the relationship between U.S. empire and Arab diasporas that Arab American studies scholars had been developing long before September 11, 2001” (p. 61).

While Arab America does contribute to a body of literature on U.S. empire and Arab diasporas, it is unique from this literature as an ethnographic investigation of a pre-9/11 period that was published over ten years after 9/11. The book both disproves that 9/11 must be central to any study of the Arab American community and contextualizes the foreign and domestic elements that guided reactions to the infamous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Naber conducted nearly 100 interviews for her research, and she draws on this material throughout the book. The first three chapters discuss the status of Arab Americans as a U.S. minority in terms of diasporic identity, cultural authenticity, and religion. Naber narrows her focus to the lives and work of six of her interlocutors for the final two chapters about the cultural politics of the Leftist Arab Movement (LAM). Concentrating on six women activists provides the reader with a fuller picture of the range of backgrounds and goals in the Arab American activist community. In addition to profiling these six women, Naber carefully explains the motivations of the mostly immigrant male members of LAM, who generally had more direct experiences with U.S. involvement in the Arab world than second generation Americans.

In her consideration of the ways in which cultural and political relationships between the United States and the Middle East have impacted diasporic communities, Naber makes clear the fruitfulness of methodologies that pinpoint the effects of transnational encounters. One example emerges from a LAM event entitled “Artists for Iraq” at which an Iraqi refugee who was invited as a speaker criticized Saddam Husayn. Elham, the refugee, described the terrible conditions she experienced living under Saddam's regime, which led to a discussion among LAM members about what it meant to criticize Arab leaders when their efforts had been aimed at critiquing U.S. imperialism. The complex set of interactions between Iraqi refugees and activists working on their behalf illustrates the usefulness of transnational methodologies. Naber's study leaves room for additional research on “diasporas of empire” in the past or present and invites the question of whether parallels can be drawn between the Arab American community and other communities in diaspora that are implicated in imperialist action.

The book approaches the terrain of autoethnography as Naber discloses her own involvement with LAM and Arab feminist activism in the Bay Area, but she never relinquishes her analysis at the expense of her own narrative. By including her own background as a second-generation Arab American and member of the community she is describing, Naber makes her own story into an ethnographic case study and demonstrates her personal investment in her work. In fact, she could have included even more of her own experiences as a woman in the LAM activist community during the late 1990s, though this would have defied expectations for an academic text and raised methodological questions. As a feminist ethnography, Arab America contributes to numerous fields, including Arab American studies, ethnic studies, women's studies, queer studies, anthropology, and postcolonial theory. Although Naber's likely audience is scholars of Arab American studies, the book would be useful to those located or interested in any of the above fields.

Nadine Naber has written a brave, multifaceted, and engaging book about Arab American inter-group dynamics that have largely gone undiscussed for fear of airing “dirty laundry” that exposes problems with sexism in the community, thereby reaffirming Orientalist tropes of female helplessness and male hypermasculinity. Ultimately, Arab America demonstrates the need for more scholarly work analyzing points of contact between the Middle East and the United States that have long been underexamined.