Arab New York illuminates the political possibilities and complexities of constructing a collective Arab American identity. Emily Regan Wills dives into the lives of people involved in organizations in New York to gain leverage on questions about identity formation, transnationalism, and everyday politics. She taught English classes, manned festival booths, and coordinated and participated in protest and educational events with social service and political organizations targeting Arabs in New York. She supplemented her participant observation, conducted from 2008 to 2010, with ethnographic analysis of online material for the time period around and after the Arab Spring movements of 2011. Her critical self-reflection on potential limitations and problems associated with her methods, such as differential access to groups and the impact of her own positionality as a white, female, gay scholar, are admirable and a model for students of politics. She takes these limitations and turns them into fruitful avenues of inquiry by working through a variety of critical theoretical material such as intersectional theory, Foucault, and the meaning of ethnography. Through this work, the book aims to show “how everyday spaces and practices are deeply political in their own practice, not merely as shaping ground for future participation—and that our understanding of politics, particularly Arab American communities, is inescapably too thin if we ignore this” (p. 174).
Our current understanding of Arab American communities is indeed thin in many ways. Scholars of immigration and ethnic or race politics often leave out the Arab American experience. This scholarly blind spot contributes to and is a result of the broader sensibility in America, identified by Wills, that Arab Americans are deemed outside of the bounds of legitimate political actors; there is a “misrecognition” of their presence and speech in the broader political discourse. One strategy by Arab actors then is to quiet or transform political claims in public in order to attempt to navigate such misrecognition. Therefore, according to Wills, much of the construction and contestation of the political identity of Arab Americans needs to be observed in the negotiation of daily life in “free spaces” such as community organizations, rather than in the public or the more standard places scholars generally look for “politics.” This book fills in an important niche in the growing scholarship on Arab Americans with Will's political ethnography.
Through participation in Arab American spaces in New York, Wills uncovers how collective identity, “arabiya” or arabness, is constructed through food, cultural celebrations, and discursive devices, such as references to a singular “homeland” or a singular “Islam.” While denaturalizing the category of Arab American, complicating it by context and identifying multiple cross-cutting identities, Wills argues that such a collective identity is extremely valuable as a basis for political engagement. Throughout the book, she considers nuances of the formulation and the use of an Arab identity. She notes how the audience and the location in which these tools are deployed (in a classroom, in New York, or in America) affects the specific articulation of arabness. She considers the ways gender, sexuality, religion, and class work with, against, and through the construction of arabiya and suggests, drawing on Kimberley Crenshaw's work, that “Arab” is best understood as an intersectional coalition (p. 154). Wills also shows a variety of practices navigating identity and difference in political work for Arab organizations. One protest group worked to solidify and reinforce an assumed shared pro-Palestinian, Muslim identity through repeated political practice even as it may have moved them further away from the mainstream. Another used the idea of solidarity across identities as a basis for political action that was designed to grow bridging social capital and draw in outsiders.
This is one example of the rich insights that fill the pages of Arab New York on community building, transnationalism, social movements, and incorporation. As a scholar of immigration more broadly, I found myself asking throughout about connections and comparisons between Arabs Americans today and other immigrant groups that have faced different forms of misrecognition. How do the problems of gender and navigating across difference identified by Wills political compare with what Cristina Beltrán (Reference Beltrán2010) finds in her work on Latino/as in The Trouble with Unity? Has the experience of Latinos in earlier moments affected the political choices of those working on an unified Arab identity now? Another example, when Wills notes that children involved in Arab American Association are “much less interested in drawing sharp boundaries between ‘arabi and American” and they had space to move fluidly between the two, I wondered how this compares with what Portes and Rumbaut (Reference Portes and Rumbaut2001) explain about second generation immigrants more broadly in Legacies? Is this generational response altered by Islamophobia which reads Arab American bodies as anti-democratic and a threat?
Wills does not dig extensively into these comparisons, possibly because she does not want to lose site of the unique position and discrimination faced by Arab Americans in this particular political moment. While it would be interesting to hear the author's take on the connections with earlier scholarship on Latinos or Asian Americans or Jewish immigrants, this study provides fodder for others to begin that careful, contextualized comparative and connective work between Arab Americans and other immigrant groups. To those ends this book would be of interest to upper division students and scholars looking at the Arab American experience but also at immigration, social movements, identity, and transnationalism more broadly. Additionally, the book will also be of interest to those mapping out the contours of our evolving party coalitions. Concluding on a positive note, Wills suggests more space has opened up in American political discourse for Arab American actors. Evidence of this is the inclusion of Arab identity as one of the fault lines of American party politics. For those concerned with questions about immigrants and identity in American politics moving forward, this well-theorized exploration of Arabs in America during the Obama years is an important contribution.
