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The Arab Diasporic Condition and the Representational in Selected Short Stories
Abstract
This chapter offers an extensive understanding of the concept of diaspora as a force of cultural dispersion. It explores the links between diaspora and identity in terms of displacement, exile, and the sense of being trapped between two worlds. As part of its attempt to provide empirical evidence, this chapter examines how Arab-Canadian students negotiate a sense of double consciousness as they interpret short stories written by Anglophone Arab authors. The chapter explains how the three short stories, written by different Anglophone Arab writers, resonate with the notion of double consciousness as a representation of the Arab diasporic condition. It examines double consciousness in the context of terrorism, discusses how radicalization has infiltrated the diasporic condition and become a horrifying reality, and explains how the rise of the rhetoric of intolerance, marked by xenophobic behaviour and extreme political views, has undermined the safety and welcoming multicultural narrative of Canadian society.
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Despite the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's recent concern with the growing threat from right-wing extremists nationwide, we have little contemporary scholarship on the far right movement in Canada and fewer attempts to systematically analyze their ideologies and activities. Drawing on a three-year study involving interviews with Canadian law enforcement officials, community organizations, and right-wing activists, as well as analyses of open source intelligence, this article examines the endogenous factors that facilitate and inhibit the right-wing extremist movement in Canada. Findings suggest that strengths and weaknesses of the groups themselves can be exploited as a means of debilitating them.
The author presents the methodology and selected results from his original chronology and data set on Canadian terrorist events. The data base covers the years 1960–1985, includes almost 500 separate events, is coded on forty variables, and is more detailed, rigorous, and comprehensive than other compilations. The domestic events were analyzed in order to determine their frequency, nature, severity, scope, range, and intensity. Analyses of selected variables of this data set are presented in this article.
Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction examines the origins of diaspora as a concept, its changing meanings over time, its current popularity, and its strengths and limitations as an explanatory device. The book proposes a flexible approach to diaspora that can provide insights into the motives for migration; the networks through which migrants travel; the political, economic, and cultural connections they form among themselves, with their homelands, and with fellow diasporas in other locations around the world; the idea of return to a homeland; and recent developments concerning refugees and globalization. Diaspora emerges as a concept that helps people to make sense of the experience of migration.
This book provides a comprehensive guide to the different aspects of deradicalization theories, programs and methods.
It analyzes the practical and theoretical aspects of deradicalization programs and the methods being employed to bring extremists and terrorist back to a non-violent life. The book includes in-depth case studies on programs and former extremists, including interviews with former German neo-Nazis and families of Jihadists who have received deradicalization counselling. Using a coherent theory of radicalization and deradicalization, it integrates existing programs into a typology and methodology regarding the effects and concepts behind deradicalization. In addition, a current state of the art assessment of deradicalization programs around the world provides a collection of programs and landscapes worldwide. It thereby functions as a unique guide for practitioners and policymakers in need of evaluation or construction of such programs, as well as a resource pool for academics interested in research about deradicalization programs and processes. The major aim of this book is to consolidate the existing scholarship on deradicalization and to move the field forward by proposing a coherent theory of deradicalization, including ways to measure effectiveness, standard methods and procedures, different actors of such programs and cooperation on national and international level. In essence, this work enables the reader to identify how, when and why deradicalization programs work, how they can be built and structured, and to identify their limitations.
This book will be of interest to students of radicalisation, counter-terrorism, radical Islam, criminology, security studies and IR.
The first edition of Dinarzad's Children was a groundbreaking and popular anthology that brought to light the growing body of short fiction being written by Arab Americans. This expanded edition includes sixteen new stories "thirty in all" and new voices and is now organized into sections that invite readers to enter the stories from a variety of directions. Here are stories that reveal the initial adjustments of immigrants, the challenges of forming relationships, the political nuances of being Arab American, the vision directed towards homeland, and the ongoing search for balance and identity. Copyright © 2009 by The University of Arkansas Press. All rights reserved.
Contributors explore the trauma, unexpected political gains, and moral ambiguities faced by Arab Detroiters in post-9/11 America. © 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.
Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.
In the aftermath of 9/11, many Arab and Muslim Americans came under intense scrutiny by federal and local authorities, as well as their own neighbors, on the chance that they might know, support, or actually be terrorists. As Louise Cainkar observes, even U.S.-born Arabs and Muslims were portrayed as outsiders, an image that was amplified in the months after the attacks. She argues that 9/11 did not create anti-Arab and anti-Muslim suspicion; rather, their socially constructed images and social and political exclusion long before these attacks created an environment in which misunderstanding and hostility could thrive and the government could defend its use of profiling. Combining analysis and ethnography, Homeland Insecurity provides an intimate view of what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim in a country set on edge by the worst terrorist attack in its history. Focusing on the metropolitan Chicago area, Cainkar conducted more than a hundred research interviews and five in-depth oral histories. In this, the most comprehensive ethnographic study of the post-9/11 period for American Arabs and Muslims, native-born and immigrant Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese, Jordanians, and others speak candidly about their lives as well as their experiences with government, public mistrust, discrimination, and harassment after 9/11. The book reveals that Arab Muslims were more likely to be attacked in certain spatial contexts than others and that Muslim women wearing the hijab were more vulnerable to assault than men, as their head scarves were interpreted by some as a rejection of American culture. Even as the 9/11 Commission never found any evidence that members of Arab- or Muslim-American communities were involved in the attacks, respondents discuss their feelings of insecurity-a heightened sense of physical vulnerability and exclusion from the guarantees of citizenship afforded other Americans. Yet the vast majority of those interviewed for Homeland Insecurity report feeling optimistic about the future of Arab and Muslim life in the United States. Most of the respondents talked about their increased interest in the teachings of Islam, whether to counter anti-Muslim slurs or to better educate themselves. Governmental and popular hostility proved to be a springboard for heightened social and civic engagement. Immigrant organizations, religious leaders, civil rights advocates, community organizers, and others defended Arabs and Muslims and built networks with their organizations. Local roundtables between Arab and Muslim leaders, law enforcement, and homeland security agencies developed better understanding of Arab and Muslim communities. These post-9/11 changes have given way to stronger ties and greater inclusion in American social and political life. Will the United States extend its values of freedom and inclusion beyond the politics of "us" and "them" stirred up after 9/11? The answer is still not clear. Homeland Insecurity is keenly observed and adds Arab and Muslim American voices to this still-unfolding period in American history.
Scandalous Bodies is an impassioned scholarly study both of literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it is produced. It explores topics ranging from the Canadian government's multiculturalism policy to media representations of so-called minority groups, from the relationship between realist fiction and history to postmodern constructions of ethnicity, from the multicultural theory of the philosopher Charles Taylor to the cultural responsibilities of diasporic critics such as Kamboureli herself. Smaro Kamboureli proposes no neat or comforting solutions to the problems she addresses. Rather than adhere to a single method of reading or make her argument follow a systematic approach, she lets the texts and the socio-cultural contexts she examines give shape to her reading. In fact, methodological issues, and the need to revisit them, become a leitmotif in the book. Theoretically rigorous and historically situated, this study also engages with close reading-not the kind that views a text as a sovereign world, but one that opens the text in order to reveal the method of its making. Her practice of what she calls negative pedagogy-a self-reflexive method of learning and unlearning, of decoding the means through which knowledge is produced-allows her to avoid the pitfalls of constructing a narrative of progress. Her critique of Canadian multiculturalism as a policy that advocates what she calls "sedative politics" and of the epistemologies of ethnicity that have shaped, for example, the first wave of ethnic anthologies in Canada are the backdrop against which she examines the various discourses that inform the diasporic experience in Canada. Scandalous Bodies was first published in 2000 and received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism.
This article explores how the notion of double-consciousness peculiar to the African dispersion is not distant from the condition of most Arabs in diaspora. Arguably, it is similarly creolized as a syncretic product of continuous historical, cultural and linguistic processes, and is correspondingly an immediate consequence of the advent of the colonized world. Although connections with the Arab ties, whether emotional or cultural, vary largely, the politicized aspect of double-consciousness remains salient. This article examines internalized personality formation and the process of forming ethno-cultural identity within the Arab diasporic community through the Duboisian narrative of double-consciousness.
Few groups face as many misconceptions within their new countries as do Muslim immigrants. This book challenges the common misperceptions of Muslim immigrants as a homogeneous, religiously driven group and identifies the tensions they experience within their host countries. A comparative, multi-ethnic study, based on over two thousand interviews, Diaspora by Design examines Muslim populations that have settled in Canada, Britain, Iran, and Palestine. Utilizing hard socio-economic data as well as qualitative analysis, the authors show the remarkable diversity and divisions between Muslim immigrant populations along urban-rural, cultural, class, and gender lines. They argue that integration is a two-way exchange that requires a readiness on the part of the host society to remove barriers that prevent the full social and economic participation of immigrant populations. Extensively researched and thoughtfully provocative, Diaspora by Design is a much-needed work that provides an accurate and dynamic depiction of the lives of Muslim immigrants away from their homelands.
The article examines how global trends related to militant Islamism have influenced patterns of homegrown terrorism in Canada. It seeks to understand how an evolving movement has shaped three case studies, two cases of homegrown terrorism, the case of Momin Khawaja, the “Toronto 18” plot, and the emerging trend of extremist travelers. Recognizing the notable gap in the literature, a growing number of cases of homegrown terrorism and extremism in Canada suggest that further study is required. The article asks why Canadians choose to participate in this movement and why militant Islamist movements are actively recruiting them.
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
Drawing on Derrida's double conceptualization of the ‘la question de l’étranger’, which he utilizes to unpack the notion of hospitality, this paper explores the question of foreignness in Ahdaf Soueif's short story ‘Knowing’, from her collection I Think of You: Stories (2007). Jacques Derrida uses the interrogative mode to examine the diasporic situation by looking at ‘the question of the foreigner’, which ‘is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner’. To Derrida, the diasporic condition is determined by the type of hospitality offered or withheld by visiting and hosting countries. Likewise, Soueif questions the notion of hospitality as she introduces homes and locales that seem uncongenial to foreign dwellers. In ‘Knowing’, Soueif portrays the foreigner's position as being marked by the presence or absence of hospitality. In this context, the Derridean conditioned hospitality could become invasive as it colours diaspora with its own peculiar brush. As she fictionalizes hospitality, Soueif blurs the line between home and host as well as that between guest and stranger. In the short story, she introduces the insidious effects of the new receiving culture as her fictional girl is not a guest since the host country withholds the Derridean unconditional hospitality; neither is she a stranger as foreignness dictates a sense of cultural dislocation, which is that of not ‘knowing’.
As the use of 'diaspora' has proliferated in the last decade, its meaning has been stretched in various directions. This article traces the dispersion of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space; analyses three core elements that continue to be understood as constitutive of diaspora; assesses claims made by theorists of diaspora about a radical shift in perspective and a fundamental change in the social world; and proposes to treat diaspora not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim.
A new cinema of the Caribbean is emerging, joining the company of the other 'Third Cinemas'. It is related to, but different from the vibrant film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) 'blacks' of the diasporas of the West - the new post-colonial subjects. All these cultural practices and forms of representation have the black subject at their centre, putting the issue of cultural identity in question. Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak? Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write - the positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say 'in our own name', of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity', lays claim. We seek, here, to open a dialogue, an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and representation. Of course, the 'I' who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, 'enunciated'. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always 'in context', positioned. I
Yossi Shain is assistant professor of political science at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (Wesleyan University Press, 1989) and the editor of Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (Routledge, 1991), along with numerous articles on the politics of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes and the key role that sometimes hastily assembled transition governments play in determining enduring outcomes.
I would like to thank Khachig Tölölyan for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. Cold war liberalism is defined by "anticommunism" and Wilsonian liberalism by "support for international organizations and self-determination of peoples" (Stedman 4).
2. There are limits to this latter position. "Self-determination" is not favored when diasporas advocate it for compatriots whose territory is ruled by a sovereign state, e.g., Hungarians in Transylvania or Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabagh region of Azerbaijan. Strong diasporic advocacy has not altered the US position in these cases, where the concept of the inviolability of international borders has taken precedence.
3. The impending fragmentation of empires necessarily mobilizes diasporan populations that seek to seize the opportunity of influencing the new maps to come. For a brisk survey of the involvement of American diasporas during and after World War I, see Harrington 122-23.
4. This essay began as a review of DeConde's book, but as it addressed broader issues implicit in my own research and that of others, it grew into an independent essay that nevertheless remains indebted to DeConde's recent intervention.
5. "Black radicalism" refers to some groups that emerged in the civil rights struggle and developed domestic and international alliances not obviously driven by the domestic concerns that led to that emergence (see Young 71).
6. For a critical evaluation of Reagan's human rights record see Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina's Dirty War against Human Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, 247-319); the quote is from p. 259.
7. See Maina Kiai, "Getting Serious About Democracy in Africa," Christian Science Monitor, 1 May 1991: 19.
8. Statement of Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Africa, 16 May 1991. The transcript is available from TransAfrica.
9. On the growing tendency to rally "civilizations" in local and national conflicts, see Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993): 35.
Second generation youth are currently the focus of much research and policy attention with respect to their integration, which is not yet well understood. Based on graphic and narrative data recently collected in three cities, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto, we analyse second generation youth's patterns in glocal spaces where transcultural modes of belonging are created and lived. Our analysis focuses on attachments to locality and a continuum of mobilities of mind, body, and boundaries. The findings are interpreted in terms of the complexities of their integration processes as well as their relevance to social policy development.
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