Between the Middle East and the Americas: the cultural politics of diaspora

Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora traces the production and circulation of discourses about "the Middle East" across various cultural sites, against the historical backdrop of cross-Atlantic Mahjar flows. The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. The essays cover such themes as Arab hip-hop's transnational imaginary; gender/sexuality and the Muslim digital diaspora; patriotic drama and the media's War on Terror; the global negotiation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy; the Latin American paradoxes of Turcophobia/Turcophilia; the ambiguities of the bellydancing fad; French and American commodification of Rumi spirituality; the reception of Iranian memoirs as cultural domestication; and the politics of translation of Turkish novels into English. Taken together, the essays analyze the hegemonic discourses that position "the Middle East" as a consumable exoticized object, while also developing complex understandings of self-representation in literature, cinema/TV, music, performance, visual culture, and digital spaces. Charting the shifting significations of differing and overlapping forms of Orientalism, the volume addresses Middle Eastern diasporic practices from a transnational perspective that brings postcolonial cultural studies methods to bear on Arab American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Latin American studies. Between the Middle East and the Americas disentangles the conventional separation of regions, moving beyond the binarist notion of "here" and "there" to imaginatively reveal the thorough interconnectedness of cultural geographies.

Includes index.

The cultural politics of the Middle East in the Americas : an introduction / Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany -- The Moorish Atlantic : orientalism/occidentalism between the Middle East and the Americas / Ella Shohat -- Mahjar legacies : a reinterpretation / Jacob Berman -- Turcos in the mix : corrupting Arabs in Brazil's racial democracy / John Tofik Karam -- From baisanos to billionaires : locating Arabs in Mexico / Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp -- Ali Bla Bla's double-edged sword : Argentine president Carlos Menem and the negotiation of identity / Christina Civantos -- They hate our freedom, but we love their belly dance : the spectacle of the shimmy in contemporary U.S. culture / Amira Jarmakani -- From Arab terrorists to patriotic Arab Americans : representational strategies in post-9/11 TV dramas / Evelyn Alsultany -- When Pakistanis became Middle Eastern : visualizing racial targets in the global war on terror / Junaid Rana -- A strip, a land, a blaze : Arab American hip-hop and transnational politics / Sunaina Maira -- Muslim digital diasporas and the gay pornographic cyber imaginary / Karim Tartoussieh -- Drawing the line : a rhetorical analysis of the Mohammed cartoons controve…