Arab American Awakening

Worldly Theorizing

The lines of inquiry and critique opened up by Said’s expansive oeuvre, and especially by Orientalism, mark nothing less than an epistemic shift in the U.S. academy. As a collective knowledge project, the field of ethnic studies (as well as many others) cannot but labor in a complex relation to Said’s work. Orientalism has complemented the field’s sustained critique of the institutionalization of an objectifying knowledge of racial “otherness” produced in the service of Euro-American empire. The field’s insurgent commitments to justice likewise find an enduring inspiration in Said’s abiding humanism. Said’s own praxis models an activist scholarship with a wide-ranging public intellectual face, one wagering against the quietude of a scholarly withdrawal from the field of representation, one grounded in a deeply humanist liberation for those deemed less than human not simply or solely by the Herrenvolk nationalisms of white supremacy but also by elite knowledge producers themselves. When Said revisited the aims and impact of Orientalism in the mid-1980s, he recognized the book’s deep (if implicit) affinity with an epistemic shift in university knowledge production. The book addressed

similar issues raised by the experiences of feminism or women’s studies, black or ethnic studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their point of departure the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical reality.11

Said thus situates Orientalism in the historic breach in U.S. universities through which interventions into its world-ordering Eurocentrism were being mobilized. The area studies models to make the difference of the Cold War periphery knowable to U.S. state interest had by this moment stabilized in a particular imperial hegemony. Ethnic studies in this sense was thus what Immanuel Wallerstein calls one of the “unintended consequences” of area studies. Ethnic studies articulated claims on the university to produce and circulate forms of knowledge by and for peoples in the United States for whom area studies frameworks signified racialized notions of development, modernization, and benevolent intervention, to say nothing of their instrumentalization to justify U.S. imperial violence across the third world.12

Yet the specific uptake of Orientalism into U.S. ethnic studies has of necessity required the argument to travel.13 Its sustained critique of Euro-American imperial culture devastates the purported apolitical claims of scholarly neutrality, yet its assiduous anti-essentialism critically departs from the identitarian nationalisms shaping early formations of the U.S. third world Left. Some saw Orientalism’s uptake as exacerbating, as opposed to resolving or contesting, knotty theoretical concerns sedimented in those academic disciplinary domains heretofore predicated on normative exclusions. While a genealogy of Eurocentrism’s dominating mode resonated with the early insurgent aims of a third world college, for some, its singular mapping of domination through the canon of Euro-American humanist critique left little room to conceptualize the agency, let alone the theorizing, of colonized peoples, or for that matter, the internal contradictions of orientalism itself.14 The spatiotemporal coordinates of the text’s theorization of race, centered as they are on a largely Southwest Asian cartography, do not map easily onto the analytical currents of social movement that bring ethnic studies into the U.S. university. Nor, as an array of scholars of postcolonial feminism argues, does the book provide a situated account of orientalism’s articulation to either gender or sexuality.15

As a consequence, there are uneasy silences in the book’s explanatory framework. Absent are Eurocentrism’s origins in the differential racialization of Muslims and Jews during the Reconquista, and the imprint of such race making and gender making on the conquest of the Americas.16 The book does not address the epochal role of transatlantic slavery and its abolition—or the traditions of insurrection animating freedom struggles beyond the ambit of the property relation—that shaped British, French, and U.S. knowledge regimes.17 For a book that centers the Napoleonic project of colonial domination in Egypt as profoundly encyclopedic, its silence around the Haitian Revolution is stark. And shifting the analytical gaze from British, French, and (to a lesser extent) U.S. imperial interests in the “Near East” to its interests in the “Far East” would require a more complex engagement with the race-making processes of transpacific labor migration and the pervasive violence of twentieth-century U.S. warfare from the Philippines to Southeast Asia to Korea and Japan.18 Indeed, while the book closes by taking up orientalism’s “latest phase” in the United States, this section’s focus rarely moves beyond a critical investigation of the emergence and function of Middle East Area studies frameworks after World War II. Earlier manifestations of orientalism in the United States, or outside the production of elite knowledges, are beyond the scope of the text.19 Under the heading “Criticism,” the ethnic studies historian Ronald Takaki jotted down on his own copy that the book “left out Africans”; its “monolithic” and “one dimensional” representations of orientalist objects of knowledge could not account for the “complicated contradictions” of a figure like Shakespeare’s Caliban; and the field of representation was “top down, not from below,” even while the analysis emphasized race—it is based on “white sources”—and “overlooked class.”20

While Said subsequently pursued some of these vectors of relationality—most methodically in Culture and Imperialism (Orientalism’s self-described sequel)—what is of interest here is how a genealogy of Orientalism warrants reading its emergence in the shifting complexity of race and knowledge in the nascent post–civil rights, postoccupation, and post-structuralist moment. For Said, the life-shattering event of June 1967 occurred in a messy context indeed. It initiated a critical investigation of the institutional apparatus whose effects were imprinted in the “smoldering extracts” of anti-Arab racism littering the popular media.21 But it also invited a critical interrogation of the powers of meaning making, a project that Said would underscore required simultaneous investigation. The intervention of French post-structuralism punctured the thin sheen of empiricist conceptions of a natural or authentic agential subject grounding so much social scientific scholarship in area studies. Said engaged this linguistic turn with depth, curiosity, and a critical dose of wariness. It demanded recognizing the formative role of ambiguity in meaning making—wherein the lack, absence, or exclusion in the cut of meaning left the trace of a radical indeterminacy. Michel Foucault’s archaeological perspective invited a critical mode that tracked modernity’s discursive productivity, its will to classify, order, distribute, specify. The Althusserian critique positioned the subject’s formation in relation to the state’s arsenal of repression and ideology, and ideology’s own reified reality production in the form of popular mythologies. It is not inconsequential that Said was among the first scholars involved in the elaboration and circulation of these concepts in the U.S. academy in the early 1970s, publishing two important early articles on Foucault22 and reviewing for the New York Times English-language translations of early essays by Roland Barthes.23

Said took the simultaneous transformations in U.S. theorizing, intensified Palestinian suffering, and a broad field of anti-Arab racism as an invitation to “rethink what I was doing, and try to make more connections in my life between things that had been either suppressed, or denied, or hidden.”24 Such reevaluation animated a second trajectory in Said’s writing. In an essay titled “Beginnings,” published in 1968 and anchoring his first major postdissertation project Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Said meditates on the variegated processes, meanings, and effects of the act of beginning. He conceptualizes origins as an a priori fiction, albeit a necessary one, and one that is intended and willed into the world. Beginnings project a specific intention to produce meaning, even as the result of what is begun is indeterminate and unclear from the outset. “Words,” Said writes, “stand at the beginning, are the beginning, of a series of substitutions.”25 From there, Said advances an elaboration of Foucault’s concepts of “adjacency, complementarity, and correlation” to comprehend how discourse both condenses and traverses a wide range of meanings, covering a vast field of linguistic territory even as it delimits modes and methods of representation (209). These are “anti-dynastic” concepts, Said argues, distributed horizontally and discontinuously, edging one against the next. “Instead of a source we have the intentional beginning, instead of a story a construction” (66).

Post-structuralism taken up in this way enabled Said (and many others in the U.S. academy) to interrogate how knowledge claims garner their truth-value, the symbolic architecture that gives them meaning, and the force relations that enunciate them. Such insights were ethically warranted and politically necessary, and Orientalism bears this profound theoretical imprint. Importantly, though, theory also had to retain a purchase on the social, material, and communal worlds that conditioned its production. Said’s work registers a wariness of the near monasticism of theory’s uptake in the United States. Its rarified vocabulary and permanent deferral of an engagement with a general audience left the field of politics open to all manner of crude reductionism and petty nationalism.

In this sense, Said’s work clarifies the convergence of forces against which the question of Palestine was persistently broached. On the one hand, Palestinians, rendered otherwise absent from frameworks of history, agency, and subjectivity via dominant Zionist and Holocaust narratives, had begun claiming a national, historical, and representational reality. Palestinians were demanding admittance “into one’s consciousness as a human quality,” as Said presciently puts it in “The Arab Portrayed” (5). Yet U.S. literary theory’s attempt to emancipate itself from questions of subjectivity and agency had approached social reality in a “mystical mode” that had inadvertently ceded the domain of the political to state interests.26 The result was a form of criticism whose rarified argumentation maintained specialized silos and scholarly commitments to noninterference. It created a talismanic quality to its modes of address, which functioned in tandem with state agents to narrow both the scope and the audience for representation. Unmoored from the messy, fleshly materiality of race and power, such theory was symptomatic of what Said called in 1982 the “Age of Reagan,”27 whose devastating effect exposed Palestine to another form of epistemological transfer, this time theorized out of existence.28 Much of Said’s work recasts this problem by reclaiming an oppositional stance for the intellectual, one whose worldly and secular compass challenged not only those whose knowledge production served the interests of imperial domination but also those whose hermetic modes of critique verged on militant orthodoxy.29

Among the domains where Said opposed theory’s monasticism was in the constructivist turn in race theory. Against reductive accounts of a delegitimized biologistic notion of race, or the ontological essentialisms that yoked one’s actions to one’s supposed unchanging being, a range of scholars in the 1980s theorized race’s “reality” as a reflection of socially produced meanings inscribed in signifiers of racial difference.30 Post-structuralism’s antifoundationalist insights did much to return the question of race to the social field of power, discourse, and ideology; its impact on critical investigations of race was—and remains—wide-ranging. The 1985 double issue of the journal Critical Inquiry on “‘race,’ writing, and difference” was symptomatic of this line of argument, and Said’s contribution to this issue was especially incisive. Wary that the material violence of race would be obfuscated by an ahistorical textualism, or that the abstraction of difference would bracket the violence of imperial power, Said situated his analysis of difference in the context of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When engaged from this perspective, “difference” operated on multiple registers with profound human effects. Difference named an opposition to both homogenization and “rigidly enforced and policed separation.”31 It also highlighted the Palestinian argument addressed to Israel and the Arab states, that “no one has an inherent right to use difference as an instrument to relegate the rights of others to an inferior or lesser status” (41). Said leveraged difference to analyze the specious narrative of Israeli exceptionalism and political Zionism’s fantasy of total separation. The conditions of such a critique, Said suggested, emerged precisely from “an awareness of the supervening actuality of ‘mixing,’ of crossing over, of stepping beyond boundaries” (43). In this way, Said sought to wrest difference from the riptide of textualism, routing it instead toward a worldly nondominating vision. “The logic of the present,” he writes emphatically, “is a logic either of unacceptable stagnation or annihilation—that, at least, seems certain to me. Different logics are necessary” (57).

Contrapuntal Variations

One of Said’s decisive elaborations of difference as signifying nondominating relationality is found in his critical concept of contrapuntalism. Contrapuntalism is a methodological approach and a reading practice elaborated most fully in Culture and Imperialism. In this self-described “sequel” to Orientalism, Said tracked how modern Western culture’s most canonized works of literature reflect the imprint of imperial modalities, sometimes obscured, as in Albert Camus, or fully in view as in Joseph Conrad. Lodged within them is an imaginative geography of dominance structured by hierarchical conceptions of space, place, subjectivity, and economic mobility. These novels reveal just how crucial imperialism has been to what it means to be modern; indeed, Said claims, “without empire, I would go so far as saying, there is no European novel as we know it.”32 The second half of Culture and Imperialism analyzes narratives of resistance produced in the broad sweep of the decolonizing world. The writings of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Léopold Senghor, Claude McKay, Chinua Achebe, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, George Antonious, and more recently the postcolonial critics Partha Chatterjee and Ranajit Guha offered what Said terms “adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures” (69). In making this argument, Said made legible an archive spanning both the West’s most treasured artifacts—those that had made the West recognizable to itself and had legitimated an imperial common sense—and those that had routinely challenged the West’s claims to dominance through new forms, new modes of consciousness, and new ways of seeing.

Said borrowed the term contrapuntalism from the vocabulary of Western classical music to theorize a reading practice adequate to the complexity of this world-belting archive. A contrapuntal methodology enabled Said to make legible what he calls “intertwined and overlapping histories” (16) to do the crucial work to “think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing together” (32). In interviews and numerous written works, Said cited Glenn Gould’s influence on this methodological formulation. Indeed, Said’s first essay devoted to music criticism, published in 1983, centers on what Said calls Gould’s “contrapuntal vision.”33 Gould’s performance of Bach’s fugues provided a framework to think about the complex interlocking of discrepant formal and thematic elements. “In the same way,” Said (himself an accomplished pianist) continues, “we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism” (51).

Importantly, the term has at least two other valences in Said’s work. The first elucidates an ethical comportment to approaching the question of historico-political subject formation. In Said’s first essay specifically taking on the question of Palestine, “The Palestinian Experience,” written in 1968–69, contrapuntalism bears significant analytical weight. There Said narrated what an ethical commitment to difference must look like in the context of Palestine struggles. The essay describes how from Said’s own experience, Israelis and Americans seem to share a baseline adherence to the idea that maintaining Israel’s status quo is required to ensure what he calls “the Jewish rhythm of life” (35; emphasis in original). In trying to understand what such an evocative musical metaphor means in practice, Said suggests one of two possible interpretations: the first is that the phrase “stands for a fear that the Holocaust could be repeated, which makes of Israel . . . what the English would call a funk-hole for every still-dispersed Jew” (35). Figuring the Jewish state in this way conceives of the globe as a permanent battlefield and Israel the necessary shelter for a perennially vulnerable Jewish diaspora. This position was widely embraced in the years immediately after the 1967 war. The other interpretation suggests that preserving the Jewish rhythm of life is a way to evade the “no less real truth that the Jewish rhythm has supplanted a more inclusive one, the Palestinian, which has and would allow Christian, Moslem, and Jew to live in counterpoint with each other” (35; emphasis added). Here counterpoint signifies, if all too briefly, a nondominating and noncoercive connection across difference, a commitment to a Palestinian ethos of inclusive heterogeneity with deep historical and regional roots.

Importantly, this ethical relation required substantive inquiry into both the ways that political subjects coconstitute one another, and how connective histories are formulated and narrated. In a position that he elaborated in the context of the October 1973 War, and to which I return at the end of the chapter, Said claimed strenuously that the Jew and the Arab were figures of inextricable historical and political entanglement. Delivered as a keynote address to the 1973 Association of Arab American University Graduates convention, alongside Rev. Daniel Berrigan and the Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak, Said’s “Arab and Jew” made the evocative claim that for the Jew and the Arab, “each is the other.” Such an entanglement was the result of a situation in which “Palestinian Arabs and Diaspora Jews were victims of power and historical circumstances that made violence or the total absence of any meaningful engagement the only two alternatives.”34 To fully register such a position meant laboring forthrightly in the long shadow of the Holocaust. While such a position was only glimpsed in the 1973 speech, in a 1997 essay, “Bases for Coexistence,” Said underscored this imperative reflection on historical entanglement as an ethical obligation. Any lasting commitment to coexistence required Arabs and Jews to contend with the Holocaust in all its complex gravity and excess of meaning. “We must think our histories together,” Said implored, “however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future.”35 Such “thinking together” required a relational approach, Said averred, built on an ethical commitment to forge connection against the paucity either of shallow comparison or of hasty equation. In Israel and Palestine, he argues, “mass extermination and mass dispossession are connected” (208). The critical task is to make legible those connections, to live with them beyond the confines of state narratives or those of disavowal or forgetting. One must be “true to the differences between Jew and Palestinian, but true also to the common history of different struggle and unequal survival that links them” (208). This variation on a critical contrapuntal theme invited a relational engagement with the Holocaust, one that, at least in the immediate context of the post-1967 moment, many American Jews and American Arabs were hesitant to take up.36

The final variation on contrapuntalism appears in Said’s evocative writings on exile. Notably, Said named the breach of 1967 as a catalyst for himself to “think and write contrapuntally.”37 In “Between Worlds,” an essay written as he completed his book-length memoir, Said intimates that his own post-1967 shift in historical and political consciousness—his engagement with exile—is embodied in his own individual identity produced in that space “between worlds,” one that required that he “use the disparate halves of my experience, as an Arab and as an American, to work with and also against each other” (562). This more personal conception of counterpoint emerged in the context of a broader collaborative struggle to bring the effects of racism and imperialism in Palestine into view in the United States. That is to say, Said was not working in isolation. Rather, he was surrounded by and in conversation with a community (albeit one at times small, embattled, and crosshatched by dissensus) of Arab and Arab American scholars, many of whom were claiming a critical relation to their surroundings.

Given these three valences for the term, Orientalism’s emergence in a social and intellectual history of a nascent Arab American studies should be read contrapuntally, locating the text within the “overlapping experiences and intertwined histories” of U.S. imperial culture. Doing so reveals much about Orientalism’s place in a broader field of struggle over race, representation, and knowledge production. The task that Said and many of his AAUG interlocutors took on after 1967, he said, was “to make the case for Palestinian presence, to say that there was a Palestinian people and that, like all others, it had a history, a society, and, most important, a right to self-determination.”38 The AAUG’s commitment to organized political activity, humanistic scholarship, and the public enactment of Palestinian presence complemented Said’s own practice and is thus quite clearly part of Orientalism’s emergence, even as such commitments are often hidden in the text itself. Nor can one separate these commitments from the other aspects of Said’s variegated culture work, including his critical engagement with post-structuralist conceptions of language and the human, and his robust theorization of exile as an intellectual and a historical position. Each aspect of Said’s thought is intertwined in his response to the 1967 war, a response that departed from, as well as critiqued, what Timothy Brennan calls Said’s “willing and untroubled assimilation” in the United States.39 “It is,” notes Ranajit Guha, “as if the dissonance of life call[ed] for a new dialogue between life and literature in the light of the experience of exile.”40

Of course, Arabs have had a long and tenuous relationship with U.S. imperial culture’s race-making processes.41 While such processes are reflected in the weighty catalog of biased journalism and demeaning popular cultural stereotypes, the signal insight from “The Arab Portrayed” and elaborated in Orientalism is that testifying to this abysmal litany requires a broad investigation of the historical production and sedimentation of race in its various structural and institutional settings.

The (Connecting) Link Between

Framing the dissonance between Arab and American as “between worlds” has another genealogy that Said never substantively engaged, yet its presence indelibly marks the contingent relation to national incorporability that Brennan and Guha reference. This genealogy is registered in the Arabic term hamzat al-wasl, a grammatical concept found in descriptions of the cultural and political activity of Amin al-Rihani, one of the most prominent Arab critics of Zionism in the United States prior to World War II. Like Said, Rihani was a prodigious and ardently secular writer and activist. He routinely spoke about Palestine’s perilous future, on college campuses, before Congress, and at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Rihani also held private meetings with figures of political prominence, including Teddy Roosevelt in 1917, Secretary of State Henry Stimson in 1929, and President Herbert Hoover in 1931.42 These activities alongside his literary and historical works were part of Rihani’s larger commitment to be, in the words of the Arabic literary historian George Saydah, “the hamzat al-wasl between East and West.” The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic defines this concept as a grammatical term denoting both a conjunction and the spoken “glottal stop” used to make the conjunction heard. Unlike the hamzat al-qat, which signifies a word meant to stand on its own, uncoupled from the words surrounding it, hamzat al-wasl signals the fusion of an end, a gap, and a continuation. It is the silence following the end of an articulation that performs the connective work of linking it to another articulation. In the context of a specific utterance, the hamzat al-wasl becomes, according to Hans Wehr, the “(connecting) link between.”43 The ambivalence raised through the use of parenthesis and ellipses is suggestive: What would it mean to have a linkage that did not connect, or did something other than connect? What kinds of grammatical, political, and historical formations would this link be found in between?

Arab incorporability into frameworks of U.S. national belonging has long been understood as tenuous and probationary, precariously located within the contradictions of a normative if also flexible structure of whiteness. It is figured suggestively by the anthropologist Suad Joseph in her notion of the “Arab-”: “not quite free, not quite white, not quite male, not quite persons in the civil body of the nation.”44 U.S. orientalism has long framed Arab American subjects as both deviant and desirous, inscrutable yet infinitely knowable. Recent scholarship has clarified how the historically contingent relationship between race and U.S. imperial culture provides a crucial lens for analyzing Arab and Arab American life. While such scholarship has grown as a consequence of the early twenty-first-century “war on terror,” the formative scholarship of this sort, focusing specifically on anti-Arab racism, took the first Gulf War as its point of departure.45 The racialized discourses of Ronald Reagan’s first war against international terrorism in the early 1980s set the stage for George H. W. Bush’s first Gulf War and Bill Clinton’s devastating sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s, which scholars like Nabeel Abraham saw as inextricably linked to the proliferation of anti-Arab hate crimes, government surveillance, employment discrimination, negative media representations, demeaning political discourses, and the pervasive stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood cinema.

Given the prevalence of phenotype as a hegemonic signifier of racial difference, combined with a U.S. federal census regime that had, since 1978, classified peoples of Middle Eastern and North African descent as white, scholars interested in making visible the seemingly systemic aspects of anti-Arab discrimination have innovated key analytics. Some scholars crafted the term political racism as a way to frame the demonization and discrimination of Arab Americans predicated either on their express or presumed opposition to U.S. foreign policy.46 Others have developed the framework of “cultural racism” to analyze how differences that travel under the sign of “culture”—religious practice, language, presuppositions around morality and kinship structures—become the avenues for calibrating social hierarchy.47 Nadine Naber has recently theorized how the imperial racism to which Arabs in the United States and in the Middle East have been exposed has linked cultural racisms to “nation-based racism,” where the commitments to a national liberation struggle that run counter to U.S. hegemony are used to justify intensified exposure to a coercive state structure that calibrates security as a preemptive measure.48

For many of the scholars of Arab descent that came to forge the AAUG, the promise of liberal inclusion was unfulfilled. A sense of belonging connected them to Arab homelands often in the crosshairs of ascendant U.S. imperial interests. Civil rights reforms created potential avenues to seek federal discrimination protections, though such cases were often “invisible” because Arabs were not considered a legally “protected class.” Likewise, while the narrative of Black civil rights struggles offered powerful inspiration and sometimes openings to cross-racial solidarities and support, the impact of the June war of necessity internationalized and complicated the civil rights framework. Additionally, with the passage of the 1965 Hart–Celler immigration reform act, the juridical domains of civil rights and immigration reform globalized liberal logics of “formal equality.” The Hart–Celler Act legislated a new set of what the historian Mae Ngai calls “inclusionary” quotas that were evenly distributed across the globe. Nonetheless, this liberalization underscored the “exclusionary” racialized framework for conceiving of the globe’s population. Hart–Celler kept with the racial logic that had shaped U.S. immigration policy for much of the century insofar as it maintained the primacy of the nation’s “ethno-racial mapping” by retaining a numerical ceiling for immigration from specific countries, rehashing in the language of liberal reform the racialization of national identity. The Act, writes Ngai, “furthered the trend begun in the 1920s that placed questions of territoriality, border control, and abstract categories of status at the center of immigration law.”49 In this way, the increase in Arab immigration dovetailed with the intensification of border security, policing, and racial profiling, and these all functioned as crucial tools in managing the national population.

Expanded Arab and Muslim immigration was framed by a dominant U.S. national narrative that figured Muslim religious practice as exceeding the underlying Christian tenets of the nation, and Arab ethnic identity as signifying imperial enmity.50 In the late 1960s and 1970s the popularized racialization of Arab nationalism transmuted into the overdetermined discourse of “Muslim terror” alongside U.S. interventionist foreign policy articulated to the Israeli state. This period was marked by a highly charged concatenation of intranational and international race-making practices, setting the stage for the intensification of anti-Arab racisms in the 1990s and the 2000s. In this period, the figures of the Arab immigrant, the Islamic fundamentalist, the “terrorist,” the Palestinian, and the “non-Western” were routinely fused. Edward Said, in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, wrote convincingly of the instrumentalist cultural racism produced by the mass media, academic scholarship, and policy circles, that generated so-called expert knowledge about Islam. The purportedly premodern, or even antimodern Islamic world, with its “irrationality” and “inscrutability,” its propensity for “fundamentalism” and “terrorism,” posed a danger to U.S. national security and thus required observation, regulation, and intervention.51 For Said, the modes of mass media coverage of dramatic geopolitical events like the June 1967 War, the October 1973 War, the 1973–75 oil crisis, the revolution in Iran, and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–80 all helped solidify this racialized conception of “Arab-Islamic culture.”

Punctuating the U.S. media landscape were high-profile acts of violence in solidarity with Palestine, from Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 to Leila Khaled and “Skyjack Sunday” in 1970, Black September and the “Munich Massacre” in 1972, and Entebbe in 1976. The expression of Palestinian national aspirations through dramatic public performances of violence became so much a priori evidence of Islam’s—and Palestinians’—essential propensity to violence, readily conscripted into imperial racism’s articulation of cultural and nation-based racisms. This analytical collapse was further sedimented in the suturing of U.S. neoconservatism—whose early iterations focused on the unbridgeable fissures between Black people and Jews in the domestic sphere—to Israeli discourses on terrorism. This ideological fusion was registered most clearly in Terrorism: How the West Can Win (1986), a collection of essays edited by the Israeli “terrorism expert” and future leader of the Likud Party Benjamin Netanyahu, with contributions from neoconservative stalwarts like Norman Podhoretz, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan alongside Israeli military icons Moshe Arens, Yitzhak Rabin, and Netanyahu himself. Said, in a review of the collection, adroitly termed this the discursive production of the “essential terrorist.” “Do we really believe,” asks Said, “that Arabs and Moslems have terrorism in their genes?”52

In the Crosshairs of Area Studies

The AAUG also emerged in close counterpoint to American academic scholarship that claimed disinterestedness in the political landscape even as it was organized under the rubric of U.S. national strategic necessity. Reckoning with this counterpoint clarifies how the articulation of knowledges that the AAUG would come to produce are, in Wallerstein’s terms, part of area studies’ “unintended consequences.” Its founding occurred proximate to the Twenty-Seventh Conference of the International Congress of Orientalists (ICO), a convention held in mid-August 1967, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Registration for the ICO conference totaled nearly 2,500, and the meeting was the first for the ICO in the United States; indeed, with the exception of earlier meetings in New Delhi and Algiers, the Ann Arbor event was the first that the ICO convened outside Europe.53 As is clear from the comments delivered during the conference’s inaugural session, scholars were tasked with forcefully delinking the political from the intellectual, power from knowledge, and the prescriptive from the analytical. ICO officers declared quite simply that “the International Congress of Orientalists is not a political forum” (24), that “an international scholarly organization can fulfill its purpose only by adhering steadfastly to scholarship and remaining free of politics” (33). The president of the Congress, W. Norman Brown, explicitly requested that political issues be avoided at the sessions: “The Organizing Committee considers that the tradition of the Congress not to take a stand on non-scholarly subjects has been a wise one and is one which the present Congress should continue to observe” (33–34). The presumptive bracketing of the “scholarly” from the worldliness of geopolitics, at a meeting held only months after the June war, to say nothing of the major riots that had roiled Detroit only weeks earlier, expressed precisely the investments of an imperial episteme in the fetishization of abstract neutrality.

Yet, as the ICO president would also elaborate, the particular contours of U.S. scholarship on “the Orient” was deeply imbricated in Cold War politics, making scholars in the United States uniquely positioned to conduct pertinent research on the Middle East. The proliferation of area studies programs was bolstered by legislation passed in 1958 by the U.S. Congress. Originally enacted as an emergency measure, the National Defense Education Act, or NDEA, was crafted as a response to Soviet successes in the space race.54 The express purpose of NDEA was to “give assistance in various forms to individuals, and to States and their subdivisions, in order to ensure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.” The specter of Sputnik I and II, both launched in 1957, was used as a rationale to overhaul the funding of education in the United States under the aegis of national security. The NDEA sought to produce experts in strategically useful forms of knowledge not only in the subjects of mathe-matics and science—subjects deemed crucial to competing in the space race—but also in the humanities. Title VI of the NDEA, “Language Development,” focused on funding university-based language and area centers to support the study of modern foreign languages, as well as the “history, economics, geography, and so on [sic]” of foreign regions of interest. The rapid proliferation of Title VI centers, and their analogs funded by private foundations, was predicated on an imaginative geography drawn through the framework of national security, where the globe could be carved into distinct units that, using the abstract principles of statistical analysis and political economy, could be studied by the U.S. state.

Since the ICO was meeting for the first time in the United States, Brown traced an institutional history of the development of “‘language and area’ programs.” Brown celebrated these programs as a national strategic response to the enormous social and political upheavals in the wake of World War II. These programs, Brown recounted, were funded “with the cooperation at first of private agencies, later of the federal government through the Office of Education” (32). He noted that there was varying opinion early on among the programs’ developers about the “need to combine the modern and ‘practical,’ the technical and the utilitarian, with the traditional and humanistic, the classical and cultural, the philosophic and aesthetic.” A consensus developed that “such a combination was the best approach to the study of foreign areas.” Such a form of study of the “Orient” was “peculiarly cultivated in the United States,” a form Brown figured as “a coin with both sides well modeled and burnished, neither of which can exist without the other” (32). In this way, Brown signaled area studies’ profoundly political and strategic development and deployment of knowledge. Yet the institutional and material context, and their corresponding national and geopolitical interests informing such knowledge production, were presumed to not interfere in the production of “objective” knowledge.

AAUG: A Nascent Arab American Studies

The above story of the emergence of U.S. area studies is a well-traveled one. Its basic contours bear emphasizing precisely because they clarify how the nascent formation of Arab American studies was shaped in response to the epistemic imperatives of national security, ones expressed all the more emphatically amid the “world-shattering” moment following the 1967 war. For many Arab Americans, the widespread national sentiment surrounding the war, that Americans were victors by proxy, was devastating and deeply alienating. Scholars of Arab descent saw in this “thunderbolt” the need to develop analyses that ran counter to area studies frameworks, a necessity that was underscored further during the post-1973 oil crisis and the U.S. economic downturn.

During the ICO meeting, the Syrian sociologist Rashid Bashshur invited several academics of Arab origin to his home for an informal meeting to discuss the possibility of developing a scholarly organization that could effectively respond to the postwar expression of anti-Arab racism. Bashshur’s invitees were particularly concerned with what kinds of knowledge could be produced in this context. An outline for the AAUG was drawn up that evening. The AAUG was to “operate as an educational and cultural association [whose] activities would and should have significant political implications and consequences.”55 They sketched out five goals for the organization: to contribute intellectual and professional skills for the transformation of the Arab world; to develop an alternative, “scientific and accurate,” scholarly literature about Arabs in the United States and the Arab world; to build a national organization devoted to making Arabs in the United States less vulnerable to racist police and surveillance practices; to model a viable Pan-Arab nationalism; and to serve as a vehicle for the overall improvement in the relationship between the United States and the Arab world.56 A charter document was drawn up to support these goals, and signatories included Bashshur, the engineering professor Adnan Aswad, the Arab studies scholar Hassan Haddad, the attorney Abdeen Jabara, the historian and political scientist Hisham Sharabi, and the political scientist Michael Suleiman. The AAUG was officially established at a meeting arranged by Bashshur and Jabara in Chicago at the end of the 1967, in the shadow of the first annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). Among the AAUG’s early and influential members was Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, who was a driving force behind the organization in the years to come and who recruited notable scholars of Arab descent, including Edward Said, to participate in the organization.

The AAUG’s archive of published works—its dozens of books, pamphlets, newsletters, advertisements, and so forth—reveals a nascent version of Arab American studies that labored in the shadow of area studies’ epistemes and rapidly transforming post-1967 processes of racialization. One strand of knowledge production investigated how U.S. imperial statecraft and Israeli military occupation in the Middle East had significant tangible repercussions in the United States. In doing so, part of the AAUG’s knowledge production informed what would be recognized today as a transnational analysis of race and empire. Investigations of what would come to be called anti-Arab racism in the United States were, in the formative years of the AAUG, concerned with U.S. foreign policy in the region, a sense of nonbelonging brought on by the proliferation of negative media and educational representation, employment discrimination, and state surveillance and harassment of Arab Americans based on their political views.

One of the AAUG’s guiding principles was that the American public was on the whole composed of what Abdeen Jabara termed “basically fair minded people,” but that a mix of anti-Arab misrepresentation, false information, and demeaning stereotypes shaped their consent to harmful U.S. policies. The AAUG could serve as a “professional association to counter the stereotypes and misinformation.” At the same time, the AAUG could also provide what Jabara called the “true facts about what had happened to the Palestinians.” The organization often publicly centered a strain of Palestinian nationalism committed to the revolutionary transformation of Jewish-Arab relations in historic Palestine. While some in the organization, like M. Cherif Bassiouni, saw this practice as a “non-starter,”57 the organization was capacious enough to maintain and grow despite such political differences. The association could deepen the research and provide a platform from which to circulate knowledge about Palestinians and the broader Arab world, to make publicly audible a “voice that had heretofore been silent.”58 As Baha Abu-Laban, a longtime member, put it in recent reflections, the early organizers were “sensitized to the need to challenge racism as a result of the struggles of African Americans for civil rights.”59 At the same time, the possible coalitional linkages opened up by an antiracist commitment were not always viewed as strengthening the organization. As Bashshur put it in his 2007 reflections, “I thought that seeking support from other disenfranchised groups and communities would dilute our efforts, detract from our primary objectives and reduce the potential for success. Worse yet, it would dismiss the legitimacy of our perspective in mainstream American public opinion.”60 Just as analysis of the origins and aims of anti-Arab stereotypes was not preordained in the organization, neither were strategies as to how to collectively combat them. Intra-organizational differences surrounded questions of scholarly neutrality, the privileging of the Palestine question, and the strategic need to build coalitions with other aggrieved communities.

Such differences did not preclude the AAUG from becoming a prolific vehicle for producing and circulating knowledge. It routinely published a newsletter and brief “information papers,” most often regarding Palestine and Palestinians—including one authored by Jabara on the Zionism as racism debates at the United Nations. It also published a wide range of monographs, often drawing from scholars’ presentations delivered at the AAUG’s annual conventions. In the mid-1970s it produced two documentary films suitable for private screenings. The first, Palestine Is the Issue, produced by Allen and Jeanne Camp, bore witness to a colonial narrative that, in the words of the organization, “recounts the demographic transformation of Palestine in one generation from a settled and productive Arab country to the settler state of Zionist Israel.” The second film, Palestinians: Holding On, focused on Palestinians living inside 1948 Israel.

In 1979 the organization founded the academic journal Arab Studies Quarterly. Said and Abu-Lughod were ASQ’s first general editors, and collaboratively they penned the brief statement of purpose published in the journal’s inaugural issue. Meant to “fill the gap” by asking about “what is not present” in contemporary studies of Arabs and the Arab world, the journal challenged the dominant area studies mode of scholarship that was “always reproducing the actual dissymmetry between the underdeveloped Oriental world and the incomparably powerful Occidental world that represented the Arabs in certain definite ways and not in others.”61 ASQ functioned explicitly as a vehicle for a different kind of knowledge project. “All [ASQ] argues,” Abu-Lughod and Said continue, “is that the Arabs can be studied . . . as a cultural, historical, social, and material experience, which is not by definition reducible to a function of ‘the Middle East,’ the conflict with Zionism, or the Great Powers.”62

Throughout the early 1970s the AAUG leadership published letters and op-eds in national newspapers arguing that the case of Palestine warranted an analysis of how Israeli racism and colonialism contributed to “a general climate of anti-Arab racialism” in the United States.63 The AAUG also placed periodic print advertisements in the New York Times. The first of these ads, run in November 1969, responded to President Richard Nixon’s avowed hope to be a “peacemaker” by demanding that he declare support for a single secular democratic state for the “five million Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Palestinians.”64 (This position drew the ire of some for equating Jews with a religious denomination.) Another advertisement ran a few months later, under the banner headline “Silenced Majority in the Middle East,” and offered assistance to U.S. journalists invited to report on Israel. It suggested potential lines of investigative reporting, including the incarceration of Palestinian freedom fighters, collective punishment, “captivity” in Gaza, the transfer of Palestinian lands and bulldozing of Palestinian homes, and the condition of Arab Jews and other ethnic minorities inside Israel.65

Along with sustaining an active publishing stream focusing on Israel and Palestine, and foregrounding alternative state and society research on questions of Arab state development, infrastructure, and education, the AAUG researched Arabic-speaking communities in the United States. Scholarship on these communities sometimes reproduced a normative model of ethnic assimilation, which was framed as a humanizing project to reclaim a sense of belonging to a multiethnic American polity. Sometimes this work took up a critique of the racially structured hierarchies crosshatching Arab American life and history. Such work aimed to clarify for both scholarly communities and broader American publics the heterogeneous lifeworlds of Arab America.66 In a programmatic survey of scholarship in what was called, in 1974, Arab American studies, Barbara Aswad diagnosed the state of the field this way:

In comparison with other ethnic groups in the U.S., the Arab-American community has received little study. In part this is due, no doubt, to its relatively small size, which is estimated to be about one and one half to two millions. Recently however, there has been an ethnic revival in the urban areas of the U.S. It became obvious in the late ’60s and early ’70s that many members of ethnic groups had not “melted,” had not lost their pride and cultural values, and that some had been forced to be ashamed of their foreign origin in public, and lived in a form of dual existence. The politics of ethnicity, always a part of the American class and political structure, also became more publically discussed in the 1960s. In large part this was due to the success of the Black expressions of identity and unity, but in the case of the Middle Eastern Arab communities, it was also in response to the conflicts in the Mid-East, and to the U.S. policies in relation to those conflicts. The heavy governmental support of the expanding settler state of Israel, and the inability to find expression of the Arab side through the mass media caused a growing alienation from U.S. policies and a new feeling of cultural and political awareness.67

Aswad cast a nascent Arab American studies as a richly relational project. Her overview clarifies how a broader context of ethnic revival and critiques of assimilation, inspired by the Black freedom struggle, generated interest in articulating Arab American identity claims. At the same time, such articulations were explicitly counterpoised with the U.S. state’s investment in Israeli settler colonialism and the exclusion of Arab perspectives from popular media outlets.

The AAUG’s first national convention, organized by Abu-Lughod and held in December 1968 in Washington, D.C., focused on the question of Arab American identity and history in consonant relational tones. The publication of seven papers delivered at the conference was suggestively titled “Studies in Assimilation.” The special relationship between U.S. imperial culture and the Arab world, which pivoted around Zionism and Israel, required rethinking assimilation, enculturation, and national citizenship. In the wake of the June war, it became clear for some scholars that a U.S. liberal democratic conception of national identity and national belonging was no longer an adequate framework for understanding probationary forms of ethno-racial inclusion. The AAUG’s inaugural president, Fauzi Najjar, asserted as much in his opening address:

Never before have Americans of Arab background experienced the sense of alienation and bewilderment that they did in the summer of 1967. Most of us who lived through those tragic moments had for a while completely lost our bearings in what seemed to be an endless nightmare. The crisis was not simply a military victory—swift and stunning as it may have been—rather, it was the consequence of a sudden awareness that a serious breakdown had indeed occurred in the political, ideological and moral outlook of this nation—a nation we have adopted and loved.68

Assimilation’s promise of national belonging had been definitively breached, with the probationary privileges of whiteness sundered. Abu-Lughod highlighted the transnational dimension of this post-1967 shift in his prefatory remarks to the “Studies in Assimilation” collection: “Although equally concerned with their commitment to their new environment, [a younger generation of Arab-Americans] have not perceived a contradiction between their [commitment to building a home in America] and expression of a serious concern for the original homeland.”69 In the collection’s opening essay, the religious historian Abdo Elkholy took up this transnational dimension to dwell on the incomplete process of Arab Americans “find[ing] themselves fully accepted in the stream of the American social structure” while having lost a sense of the “traditional values of the original culture.”70 Elkholy argued that the visceral reaction to the “occupation of Palestine by international Zionism” was a catalyst to return to an understanding of Arab roots. He concluded by positioning AAUG scholars not as part of the liberal process of assimilation into the American norm but as constituting the possible avant-garde of an anti-imperialist struggle against Zionism (11). “The Arab elites in the United States,” writes Elkholy, “can counter the fallacious claim of the Israeli democracy. They can substantiate its racial discrimination in education, religious freedom, and civil rights” (16).

At the second conference in 1969—focusing on the conditions and possibilities of Palestinian revolution—Abu-Lughod, then the AAUG’s president, underscored the antiracist and anti-imperialist stakes of a critique of assimilation:

It is much easier to melt in this great melting pot, easier to get co-opted with pay, and implicitly, though not very consciously, to collaborate with our opponents in inflicting the maximum punishment on our communities. . . . Those of us who are here tonight . . . have signified our intention to traverse the more difficult path, to combat Israel’s racism in all its manifestations and on all fronts. (n.p.)

Such a break with assimilation was all the more intensified because of the U.S.–Israel relationship. “The estrangement between Arab and American communities seems to be unending,” intoned Abu-Lughod, “the more so because the fate of Israel’s empire and that of imperial interests of the United States seems to be assuming greater coalescence” (n.p.). This specifically named U.S. context was the site of “the more difficult path,” for Israel’s racism had “manifested” in U.S. social, political, and epistemological structures.

By 1970 the number of conference attendees had grown to five hundred, and the number of presenters had grown to fifty, with prominent speeches by the likes of Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maxime Rodinson, and Said. By this point, the organization’s political emphases were articulated through an anticolonial Pan-Arab nationalism that centered support for the Palestinian Revolutionary Movement. These positions were articulated in the language of national liberation adopted by the AAUG at several of the early conferences and were published in the conference proceedings. They analytically linked Zionism with imperialism, colonialism, racism, exclusion, and expansionism; they committed to combating these oppressive regimes “in whatever form it expresses itself and to wage a relentless war against reactionary, corrupt, and oppressive domestic systems.”71 The “combined forces” of Zionism and imperialism, sometimes expressed in these documents as simply “imperialism-Zionism,” denied Palestinians the right to self-determination.72

Given these dire conditions, the AAUG endorsed “the current necessary recourse of the Palestinian People to a war of national liberation of their historic homeland and their aspiration to liberate all sections of the Palestinian community from all manifestations of racial and national prejudice and other forms of human oppression.”73 This position engaged not only questions of territory and borders but also the very epistemic assumptions that made occupation possible. Its tenor and structure drew on notable UN human rights documents like the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which internationalized antiracist struggles. Such “relentless war” was likewise staged in a broader internationalist framework of solidarity and coalition. Another conference resolution states, “Just as the Palestinian Revolution has publicly supported the just cause of the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Black Community in the U.S., the Association registers its gratitude for the continuing support of these communities to the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian People.”74 The 1973 AAUG conference took up this internationalist geography as a scholarly framework, investigating “settler regimes in Africa and the Arab World” and explicating the ideological and material linkages between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the occupation of Palestinian territories. The anticolonial political horizon was evocatively captured in the conference proceedings’ subtitle: “the illusion of endurance.”75

By the mid-1970s, it had become clear to members of the AAUG that Arabs in the United States were being represented in the knowledge projects such as the large-scale, state-run surveillance program known as “Operation Boulder,” a practice that scholars in AAUG made central in their research and public education. The Nixon administration used the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics as an opportunity to intensify the practices of policing, surveillance, and intimidation of specifically Arab and Muslim populations within the United States that the government had first begun in the wake of the June war. Such tactics had been calibrated and refined through operations like COINTELPRO, the FBI’s “secret war against Black Power activists,”76 and while the latter was purportedly shut down in 1971, many of its residual tactics shaped Operation Boulder. The operation was coordinated across several government agencies, including the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Customs, the Internal Revenue Service, and the State Department. President Nixon directed the operation to investigate “any alien who is ethnically Arab, who was born in an Arab country, and whose parents were born in an Arab country regardless of their present nationality or residence.”77 The ostensible reason was to secure the United States from the perceived threat of “Arab terrorism.” The externally determined ethnic ascription of “Arabness” was itself grounds for regulation and surveillance. As one commentator at the time noted, there were noteworthy precedents to this practice of widespread racial profiling conducted under the auspices of “security,” most notably the internment camps that imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese and Japanese American citizens in the early 1940s.78

A primary target of Operation Boulder was the AAUG, especially its cofounder—and by 1972, its president—the attorney and civil rights activist Abdeen Jabara. Jabara’s FBI file was first opened in 1966 when he signed on as legal counsel for the Organization of Arab Students. When in 1968 he joined the defense team for Robert F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Palestinian American Sirhan Sirhan, Jabara gained a much higher profile.79 Even after Jabara was determined by the FBI not to pose a risk to national security, his support for Palestinians in court and his public critique of Zionism and U.S. foreign policy were used as justifications for the maintenance of a broad network of surveillance, from wiretapping to undercover informants.

A few weeks after Operation Boulder was disclosed, the AAUG ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The headline read: “Is the Nixon Administration Playing Politics with Civil Liberties?” The advertisement went on to say that “Arab-Americans, long assimilated into the mainstream of American culture, are stunned by their Government’s arbitrary challenge to their status of equality with other U.S. citizens.” The state’s withdrawal of its probationary privileges disrupted any smooth narrative of ethnic Arab incorporation. The ad continued, “Anti-Arab racism in the U.S. has been on the increase. Is it now being accorded official sanction?”80 Sociologists active in AAUG, including M. Cherif Bassiouni and Elaine Hagopian, immediately conducted extensive research on the program; Bassiouni’s findings were circulated in an AAUG monograph, while Hagopian’s were printed in the Journal of Palestine Studies.81 Over three years, Operation Boulder produced dossiers on over 150,000 people, including photographs, fingerprints, and documentation of political beliefs, emphasizing any political activity “of an anti-Zionist character.”82 Agents used visa violations to justify numerous deportations and unwarranted arrests, and intelligence generated by the program was shared with Israeli intelligence services.83 It was shut down in 1975 because, according to one State Department official, “it cost a lot of sweat and overtime. It was a tremendous extra workload and a source of heartburn.”84 It nevertheless sanctioned the already popularized recalcitrant figure of the Arab as alien and terrorist, in but not of the nation.

In the wake of Operation Boulder’s disclosure and the intensification of anti-Arab stereotyping in the news media, the 1974 AAUG conference returned to an investigation of the conditions of Arab life in the United States. Rather than analyze relative patterns of ethnic assimilation, or senses of belonging and nonbelonging, the 1974 conference featured research on the dominant structures and representations that racialized Arabs. “Arab” shifted from ethnic adjectival supplement to the United States (Arab American) to a proper noun in relation to the United States: “Arabs in America.” Baha Abu-Laban and Faith Zeadey analyzed anti-Arab prejudice in the media, educational curricula, and local labor organizing as the “product of several interactive and mutually reinforcing elements in the institutional structure of American society.” This structural understanding of anti-Arab prejudice opened up the possibility of thinking relationally across racialized systems of oppression. Abu-Laban and Zeadey noted that while “Arab Americans face essentially the same difficulties as do other minority groups,” distinctive is the “cardinal significance” of the Arab–Israeli conflict in the United States, one that of necessity demanded transnational analyses of race and empire.85

At the end of the 1970s the AAUG explored the possibility of coalitions with Black civil rights groups. In the spring of 1979 the organization approached the longtime Black organizer and strategist Jack O’Dell of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) coalition, to consider sponsoring delegations to tour the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and meet with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Samih Farsoun was the AAUG’s point person and, with O’Dell and Jacqueline Jackson, assembled a civil rights and peace delegation that included at least a dozen other veterans of the Black freedom movement.86 After Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the UN and Black freedom struggle veteran, had to resign from his post for having met with Zehdi Terzi, Farsoun drafted a “proposal for Black and Arab dialogue in the United States,” and the AAUG embarked on what it called the “Black America Project.”87 Farsoun was subsequently instrumental in arranging for delegations to Palestine and Lebanon in September 1979, one led by Dr. Joseph Lowery and another in October, led by Rev. Jesse Jackson.88 An additional outcome of this outreach was the development of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, an organization that, in 1980, partnered with Jack O’Dell to publish Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace.89

Theorizing Arab racialization as linked to U.S. foreign policy was only one strand of AAUG’s knowledge project. Such an analysis was not uniform within the organization, as recent reflections make clear.90 Neither were practices of coalition building. Some members in the organization feared losing the trust of the American public and were wary that political alignment with Palestinian resistance or Black freedom struggles in the United States would impinge on scientific objectivity or neutrality. Likewise, since the group emphasized critical knowledge production, explicitly juridical levers on justice and American democracy were often outside the purview of the organization’s reach. Instead, the AAUG focused on producing more accurate portrayals of state and society dynamics in Arab countries and investigating the historical and contemporary conditions of Palestinian life.

Shadows and Beginnings: “The Arab Portrayed”

It is precisely in these shadows of fractured assimilation narratives, area studies epistemes, and anticolonial imaginaries, then, that we can situate the emergence of a nascent Arab American studies, one that was a crucial counterpoint to Said’s Orientalism. His scholarship and political activism in the 1970s emerged in conversation with the AAUG. Said served in leadership roles in the organization, first as vice president of the AAUG’s board and then as an at-large member. He frequently gave lectures at the AAUG’s annual conferences and coedited the proceedings of the fourth convention, “The Arabs Today: Alternatives for Tomorrow.” He and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod cofounded the association’s journal, Arab Studies Quarterly, in 1979.

This context sets into relief the relational analysis of race and empire that Said crafted in “The Arab Portrayed.” While Said noted that “The Arab Portrayed” was the origin of Orientalism, the differences between an almost ephemeral early draft written at Abu-Lughod’s behest for the Arab World’s special issue on the 1967 war, and its fully elaborated realization a decade later are notable indeed. Between the two, Said revises the substance, arc, and architecture of the argument. Yet a single paragraph moves almost verbatim between them. It likewise appears in a brief essay titled “Arab and Jew” that Said published in the New York Times in the heat of the October 1973 War, and was part of a longer version that he presented to the AAUG conference days later. How to account for this textual recurrence? What to make of its repetition? Under close scrutiny, this repetition with a difference exemplifies Said’s relational imaginary forged in and for a particular conjuncture and, in recasting it three different times, submits this relational imaginary to iterative experimentation and revision.

The paragraph in question appears first in “The Arab Portrayed” just after a claim that, in “the mind’s syntax . . . , the Arab, if thought of singly is a creature without dimension.”91 Evacuating the figure of the Arab from the spatial density of language was a result, Said argues, of rendering Jewish suffering after World War II the benchmark against which the experience of all human atrocity was to be measured. There was precious little room—no room, indeed—to articulate the grave consequences of Arab suffering at the hands of an Israeli conquest seemingly inoculated from critique by the catastrophic history of Jewish suffering. Said draws from Sartre to grasp a “complex truth” illegible and unsustainable in the United States, that “two bodies of live history sat next to each other in the Near East, each inert to the other except as a pure antagonist” (5). The analytical and political question that followed from such a formidable compression becomes how to activate an ethical relation between Jew and Arab beyond the confines of its violent reduction. Said continues with the following paragraph:

If the Arab occupies space in the mind at all, it is of negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of Israel’s continuing existence, or, in a larger view, a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. This has been, of course, part of the Zionist attitude toward the Arab, especially in the years before 1948 when Israel was being promulgated ideologically. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants imagined as inconsequential nomads possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence. At worst, the Arab is conceived as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadow (because Arab and Jew are Semites) can be placed whatever traditional latent mistrust Americans might feel toward the Jew. The Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has split in two: what we now have is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a revived cult of the adventurer-pioneer, and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab. Thus isolated from his past, the Arab is chained to a destiny that fixes and dooms him to a series of spastic reactions, which are periodically chastised by what Barbara Tuchman imperiously calls “Israel’s terrible swift sword.” (5)

In the comments that immediately precede this key paragraph, Said figures the Arab beyond language’s capacity to articulate the manifold experience of human suffering, compressed into an almost ontological oblivion. As the paragraph unfolds, though, the figure of the Arab is returned its density, but only as a negative relation, as a constitutive absence for Zionism. The narrative of settler colonialism, Said intimates, formulates the figure of the Arab as the descendant of a quasi-Lockean indigeneity—portraying those communities living in Palestine without “stable claim to land” and hence inconsequential and temporary. This settler colonial framing of the figure of the Arab as an obstacle, to be transferred out of the frame of history, is necessary to understanding Zionism’s portrayal of Arabs, as many Arab scholars had been clarifying since at least the early 1960s. The essay adds a crucial analytical dimension to understanding how settler colonialism is operating in Palestine. As Said emphasizes, the momentous effects of the Holocaust also bear decisively on this portrayal. The debased figure of the Arab must be thought as part of a post-Holocaust bifurcation of the Jew in the Euro-American imaginary. This cataclysmic event forges the Arab as a constitutive absence that “doggedly shadows” the Jew in the wake of genocide, becoming the receptacle and recipient of an otherwise delegitimated anti-Semitism. The Arab is left to trail, in shadow form, alongside the Jew as “adventurer-pioneer,” doubly deracinated by the effects of an enduring settler mythos and a displaced wretched anti-Semitism. Attempts to break from this negative relation, Said claims, are thus understood in the United States only as a “series of spastic reactions,” inviting caustic rebuke from American pundits.

The repercussions of Said’s relational analysis are important. The essay offers a more expanded field for investigating race and empire than the one promulgated by other AAUG-affiliated scholars. By distinguishing between the figure of the Jew and Zionism, Said avers that any just response to genocide must recognize the persistence of anti-Semitism, even in its displacement onto Zionism’s racial others. It stresses understanding anti-Arab stereotypes not only as linked to the vicissitudes of U.S. foreign policy but also as the popular expression of an American settler imaginary sutured to an enduring Euro-American anti-Semitism transmuted in the aftermath of World War II. In this way, critics of such stereotypes must of necessity contend with the abiding imprint of U.S. national narratives of frontier violence and the differentiated legacies of the Holocaust.

The claim embedded in this evocative paragraph is an elaboration of a larger one made at the essay’s outset. There Said accentuates the condensed antagonism of frontier violence that characterizes U.S. imperial culture, a residue, he suggests, of how the habitual horizon of American expansion had long been oriented westward. Such a claim, that the “American imagination has always turned westward,” enables Said to juxtapose present-day imperial warfare with its bloody historical antecedent: “In the case of Vietnam, the adventure was incorrigibly misguided, or . . . as in the case of the Indian wars, cruelly dedicated” (2). Against this backdrop of U.S. imperial violence, Said reads the media portrayals of the June war as repetitions of “the simple pattern of a [James Fenimore] Cooper novel” (2). Israelis are cast as “stalwart individuals” painted in tones of “heroism, sentimentality, earthy practicality, and life near the apocalypse.” They are pitted against the portrayal of Arabs—“large numbers of people, mobs of hysterical anonymous men.” The specialist in Joseph Conrad could spot such pat imperial patterns with ease. “Was not the June War the conflict between the white European bravely facing the amoral wilderness in the person of savage natives bent on destruction? As an intelligible unit in the mind, the Arab has been reduced to pure antagonism to Israel” (2–3). The massification and representational reduction of the Arab into pure antagonism evaded what Said understatedly calls “the uncomfortable moral demands [the Arab’s] history and actuality might make” (3). The result is that the “gigantic tragedy” of the Nazi genocide and the outrageous suffering inflicted on the Jews becomes “a sop for the bewildered conscience of Western supporters of Israel,” while the tragedy of Arab dispossession and ethnic cleansing “disappears in exertions on behalf of the former” (3). Anti-Arab stereotypes register, in this sense, not simply as the result of poor U.S. foreign policy decisions, as other scholars in the AAUG would suggest, nor do they only reflect an enduring settler symbolic framework and a delegitimized anti-Semitism. They also signal a short-circuited evasion of the complex moral gravity that marks the dire conditions of possibility for the violence and aftermath of the June war.

When read retrospectively, this compact formulation—written as it was for the Arab World’s popular audience—reveals in embryonic form the kinds of contrapuntal nonequivalences that Said made in facing the legacies of the Holocaust. Even when ruminating on the anger and frustration of Arab military defeat, as he and so many Arab Americans were witness to their probationary privilege forcibly revoked, even as he was beginning to articulate a political consciousness that held out Palestine as a pressing site of revolutionary transformation, Said’s work fashioned a relational imaginary adequate to the task of coexistence.

Said continues this project in “Arab and Jew,” delivered as a paper five years later at the AAUG conference in Washington, D.C., and published in much-condensed form in the New York Times, here with the evocative subtitle, “Each Is the Other.” He replaced the early essay’s focus on media representation with a pressing theorization of intersubjectivity in a time of war. There is no way around the century-long historical intertwining of Arabs with Jews, Said writes. As two peoples, Arabs and Jews have “chosen each other for a struggle whose roots seem to go deeper with each year, and whose future seems less thinkable and resolvable each year.” Intersubjective dependency deepened as the intertwined histories of Israel and Palestine became more enmeshed. A psychic entanglement was unavoidable: “No Arab today has an identity that can be unconscious of the Jew, that can rule out the Jew as a psychic factor in the Arab identity.” A mirrored identificatory structure holds true for Jews as well: “No Jew can ignore the Arab in general, nor can he immerse himself in his ancient tradition and so lose the Palestinian Arab in particular and what Zionism has done to him.”

With only slight revision, Said returns to the same paragraph that appears in the “Arab Portrayed.” The New York Times op-ed repeats the formulation of the heroic Jew as adventurer-pioneer and the Arab as his “creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow,” a relation that, again, emerges from the history of Nazi Europe. Rather than becoming the recipient of an otherwise delegitimized anti-Semitism, however, the Arab shadow here is condemned to “chastisement at the hands of Israeli soldiers and tourists, kept in his place by American Phantom jets and U.J.A. Money.” Said’s invitation to an ethic of connection forged in his earlier essay is muted in the op-ed. Instead, he implicates a broad American readership in the conditions of violence of open warfare playing out in the Middle East. U.S. imperial culture is, in this essay, not only responsible for the tropes and narrative frames of frontier violence; it also provides the tax dollars and military armaments for its enactment. The essay closes, then, with a brief lament for how the war short-circuited as practical impossibility a proposed secular democratic state for “Arabs and Jews, for Jews with Arabs.”92

The long-form version of the argument, delivered at the AAUG’s 1973 conference, goes much further toward elaborating the kinds of connections warranted by this structure of intersubjective dependency. The same paragraph from “The Arab Portrayed” serves as a pivot to these connections. First Said elaborates on a self-described digression into the debasing portrayals of Islam in the West, a critique that will emerge in fuller form in Orientalism. Then he illuminates the paucity of Israeli “realism,” a discourse that presumes a permanent antagonism in the region that warrants ever-intensified security measures. Then he turns to the dire, disheartening, and, after the June war, depressingly expected media coverage of the October war in the United States. Said bellows, “How hard it is to watch the silent faces of Arab suffering on the anonymous, ruthless face of American TV!” (240). But even as he shares in his outrage with Arab friends and colleagues in the AAUG, and even as he maintains the centrality of the Palestinian cause for third world revolution, he warns of what he calls the war’s gravest threat: that whatever its outcome, the war will incite Arabs to believe that “our Middle East can be restored to us . . . as a pristine, unspotted land, free of its enemies, ours for the taking.” One could not turn back the clock on the structure of settler colonialism, as if the figure of the Jew, let alone the several million Israeli Jews, no longer existed. He says abruptly: “We cannot—I might even say that we must not—pretend that he will be gone tomorrow. . . . That he exists with a special attachment to the land, is something we must face” (242). Such is the kind of engagement that Said puts forward to the AAUG, one forged through an ethic of relation, even in the midst of war. The violence of war itself, Said goes on to say, “obstructs vision and impedes understanding,” no less for Arabs than for Israelis (243). “War leaves the major tasks undone.” Its stature on the media stage as much as in the domain of Cold War geopolitics narrowed, simplified, and reduced the immanent complexity of the region’s intertwined histories into the “symmetry of a blood feud,” one that obfuscated how the land itself was “central and absolute for both the Arab and the Jew” (244).

As a countermanding ethic to this formulation of violence, Said theorized “an interhuman violence of a constructive type.” This is the violence of Israelis and Jews having to reckon with Palestinian presence, namely, “a human and political and national and moral entity with which he, as a Jew and as an Israeli, must deal, and to which he must answer” (243). Such a confrontation with the presence of the other has mutually humanizing possibilities. “The fairly complex and rich process which connects Arabs with each other and with Jews,” Said notes in closing, is a crucial part of Palestine’s decolonization (246).

Said’s condensed inchoate analysis and his call for a humanizing form of Arab–Jewish relationality clarified the possibilities of decolonization in Palestine, evoking an ethical obligation to forge a secular democratic state as a kind of complex relation that, by 1997, Said would call the “bases of coexistence.” This formulation is present, if also remarkably muted, in Orientalism, which takes up a different aspect of the argument in “The Arab Portrayed.” The early essay theorizes the violent reduction of Arabs into a dimensionless abstract antagonism produced through the symbolic architecture of U.S. settler colonialism, the displacement of an otherwise delegitimized anti-Semitism, and an evasion of moral reckoning. These processes are sutured to the brute production of “facts” about the Arab that are generated for state agents by an “academic or enlightened liberal view” (8). Such facts are produced as instruments to service policy goals; they emerge from “regional studies” institutes to provide usable data to guide approaches to the management of new domains of global governance. Here the “Arab becomes simply an observable collection of factual statistics based on rigidly frozen categories of population, climate, trade, and so on” (8–9). Such a positivist form of knowledge invested with state interest truncates the mutability and heterogeneity of lived existence—what Said calls in the essay “the ambiguous, the nuanced, the in-between, and the precarious” (8). A fully elaborated critique of Cold War area studies and the fetishization of “expertise” that it produces is still to come in Said’s work, reaching its culmination in Orientalism.

However, notably absent from Orientalism is how “The Arab Portrayed” centered its concerns on the normalized violence of U.S. settler colonialism. The earlier essay’s west-facing geography of settler violence rendered a genealogy of manifest destiny as central to U.S. imperial culture. Orientalism does not substantively consider such a geography, perhaps because of the corporate institution’s eastward orientation, one pressed into producing an essential difference between West and East. Nevertheless, in Orientalism the paragraph from “The Arab Portrayed” that Said had revisited in the midst of the October 1973 War returns with a difference. Here it has much humbler aims than in its previous iterations. It functions to explain the broad circulation of the demeaning U.S. political cartoons ruefully skewering the OPEC oil embargo, and it is quickly subsumed in a catalog of racist anti-Arab stereotypes. What had been an evocative (if brief) relational analysis of an enduring settler symbolic framework, a delegitimized anti-Semitism, and a post-Holocaust moral evasion is reduced here to signal the lateral traffic between ostensibly “cultural” figures of anti-Semitism. These images produced in the context of the post-1973 oil shocks depicted Arabs with “clearly ‘Semitic’” features. “Their sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces,” Said suggests, “were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic population) that ‘Semites’ were at the bottom of all ‘our’ troubles.” He continues, “The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same” (286). What follows is a subtle but substantial revision of the original paragraph from “The Arab Portrayed,” now with the categories of the oriental, the orientalist, and the tradition of orientalism brought to bear on the analysis. The “adventurer-pioneer” becomes the “adventurer-pioneer-orientalist,” for example.

The most complicated change involved the two-sentence conceptualization of the bifurcated Jew in the wake of the Holocaust that had done such substantial work in its earlier iterations. In Orientalism, it reads: “The Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadow—because Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semites—can be placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towards the Oriental” (286; emphasis added). What to make of this argument that Jews are not only essentially Semitic figures but oriental ones? As Said had famously noted throughout the book, anti-Semitism and orientalism, especially its “Islamic branch,” were constitutively related, the latter a “strange, secret sharer” of the former (27). The book’s most thoroughgoing analysis of this relation grows out of Said’s critique of Ernst Renan’s theory of the “Semitic,” a category enunciated simultaneously by comparative philology and racial typology. Arab and Jew were considered Semitic insofar as they shared an ethnolinguistic designation that bound them to each other. The forms of racialized dehumanization were bequeathed their scientific legitimacy by having been proved “natural” in the development of their languages (see 132–48). One is harder pressed to understand the emergence of the Jew as an essentially oriental figure. There is nary a justification for such a claim in Said’s broader argument about orientalism’s function as a corporate institution predicated on cultural domination. On one level, then, the collapse occludes the more complex relational and intersubjective dynamic to think together Jew and Arab as conjoined by the historical conditions of extermination and dispossession. On another level, read against the grain, it offers a momentary glimpse of precisely the figure that is otherwise absent from so much of Orientalism, namely, the non-European Jew.

A Critical Theory of Arab Reality

“To say, therefore, that the Arab is a victim of imperialism,” Said notes in summarizing his argument in “The Arab Portrayed,” “is to understand the statement as applying not only to the past, but also to the present, not only in war and diplomacy but also Western consciousness” (9). In tracing the contours of U.S. anti-Arab racism, Said names empire’s pervasive epistemic violence that Orientalism will come to address in much more detail. At the same time, in a final dialectical turn, Said refuses to contain the argument in static conditions of domination. He captures a glimmer of resistance, an energy and commitment that resonates broadly across contestations with imperial power. He writes, in closing, “there are signs, however, that with much of the Third World, the Arab has now fully recognized this as his predicament: he is demanding of the West, and of Israel, the right to reoccupy his place in history and in actuality” (9). In the decades to come, Said would play a major role in demanding such a right.

Said amplifies the specific coordinates of this reclamation in his 1974 presentation to the AAUG, where he advances a challenge at the level of epistemology itself meant to transform the “Arab status from that of object to that of subject.”93 Such a transformation required not only a commitment to identify, enumerate, and disprove those instances of anti-Arab misrepresentation circulating in state and media discourses. Nor was it solely to situate an otherwise rarely documented history of Arab migration to the United States in a broader narrative of national assimilation, however partial and probationary such processes were. Both kinds of knowledge projects were central to the AAUG and the emergent domain of Arab American studies, as the monographs and related materials demonstrate. But stopping there would only satisfy what Said calls a “positivist pretense” that presumes the elaboration of facts themselves would render ineffectual the “mythifying” consequences of an episteme (110). They leave the historically sedimented relation of oriental object and Western subject unchallenged.

The task is instead to produce what Said calls a “critical theory of Arab reality” (106). The theoretical instruments elaborated by such a critical theory would be capable of disassembling myths “into the interests they serve but whose presence they always hide” (107). Doing so not only “reveals the plurality of forces, their fields, their dialectical connections”—as per the critique of orientalism—but also wields the production of theory itself as an intention to shape and reshape the world (109). It is an “act of will asserted against myths saying that ‘this, and only this, is Arab society’” (110). Such a theory of knowledge invited a collective project that worked not only to critique Eurocentrism but also to investigate “those activities in Arab society by which knowledge is transmitted, institutionalized, acted upon, preserved, reactivated, discarded” (110).

A contrapuntal reading of that moment when Said’s “life changed forever,” when Abu-Lughod recruited him to contribute to the Arab World, reveals precisely how central the meaning of Palestine had become for scholars of Arab descent in the ambit of post–civil rights U.S. imperial culture. It reveals both the invitation and the pressing limits of theorizing, organizing, and enacting forms of epistemic decolonization. “The Arab Portrayed” and the knowledge projects of the Association of Arab American University Graduates each, in different and limited ways, identified and attempted to displace institutional and epistemic violence through a transnational analysis of race and empire. In Said’s hands, the idea of Palestine served as a catalyst for a contrapuntal mode of being in the world. Said’s Palestine invites the difficult task of connection in a moment beset by ideologies of separation, from the monastic seclusion of the university from the terrain of the political, to the separatist confines of all manner of narrow nationalism, to the historic reality and abiding unwillingness to contend with the enduring linkages between mass extermination and mass dispossession. It refused the positivist pretense that, if one simply mobilized enough facts about Palestine that the enduring myths of Eurocentrism would be shattered, even as it refused, from another angle, a hegemonic post-structuralism that theorized the subject as only at most an effect of the discursive fields within which it is produced. This double move was all the more pressing in a conjuncture whose contradictions were mediated by the intensified absenting of the Palestinian from “history and actuality.”

The forms of relationality that Said’s work engenders suggest ways of inhabiting incommensurable, if also inextricable, connections. In the early 1980s shifting geopolitical configurations and shifting race politics would elicit new practices of relationality, with long-held questions about home and homelessness, solidarity and autonomy, in full view.