AMAS 215 Quiz 1

American

• Shorthand for citizen of US

• Broad, general refrence to two continents

• CULTURAL 9not ethnic or racial)

Arab

• NOT interchangeable with Muslim

• An ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity

• Muslim is a faith-based cultural identity, follower of Islamic faith

• US context: arab is not a racial category, still racialized tho

Colonialism

THE CONQUEST AND CONTROL OF OTHER PEOPLE’S LAND AND GOODS, AND PEOPLE IN THE PLACE TO BEGIN WITH

• Pre modern (before 1500s) lots of exploiting territories

• Modern (1500s-present) helped usher in and develop capitalism, Flow of human and natural resources bc of capitalism

First Wave

1870s - WW2

• CHARACTERISTICS

  • Little formal education, often poor, and illiterate

  • Predominately Christian

  • Considered themselves sojourners (temporary)

    • Ottoman Empire Collapses

  • 130,000 Syrian immigrants by the 1930s

  • 350,000 syrian immigrants by WW2

• EXPLANATIONS

  • Economic

    • Suez Canal, 1869

    • Phylloxera (grape leaf aphid) outbreak, 1890s

  • Cultural

    • “The American Dream”

    • The Christian Persecution Thesis, 1860s

Hegemony

• SOMETHING THAT IS, AND THE ELITES WANT TO REMAIN, DOMINANT IN SOCIETY

• A PROCESS THAT MAKES THE DOMINANCE OF ONE PERSON/GROUP/IDEA SEEM NORMAL OR NATURAL

Heteronormativity

• Sex/Gender binary and traditional gender roles

• Insistence that heterosexuality is and must remain the norm

• Heterosexual relationships and nuclear family are considered superior (i.e., heterosexual supremacy)

• Patriarchal (i.e., men and masculinity are privileged. Society is organized and controlled by men. Women, children, and anyone considered gender- or sexually deviant from the norm are subordinate or even considered dangerous)

Imperialism

• Global system, relies on colonialism, gigantic sytem that happens because of colonialism

• Most ultimate, advanced form of capitalism, mass extractions for profit, a political system in which an imperial center governs colonized countries, spatial relationship and global system

• Upper level of colonialism and capitalism

Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924

• Asian exclusion

• Quota system

• “Undesirables”

• Eugenics

• Nativism

Little Syria

• Neighborhood in NYC

• Major origin point for East Coast Syrian immigrant history

• Arabic-language intellectual community

• Getting destroyed and having its history taken away, a form of racism? against syrian community

• Way to fix the increasing apartment buildings is to make housing affordable for the communities there

Naturalization Act of 1790

• Racial prerequisite to citizenship

• “Free white person”

• “Of good character”

• Post Civil War/Reconstruction era (1865 on) “free white person or of African nativity or descent (aka slave populations)

Orientalism

• DESCRIBES THE STEREOTYPICAL, DISTORTED, AND PATRONIZING WAY THE WESTERN WORLD HISTORICALLY VIEWS AND PORTRAYS THE EASTERN WORLD

• Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a verdict [truthful] discourse about the Orient

• As an ideology, Orientalism produces representations as a method of power and control

• An imaginative geography that demarcates and distinguishes between “the Occident” or “the West” (Europe, settler-colonial North America) and “the Orient” or “the East” (Asia, North Africa)

Origins of the Field

• Started in the early 20th century

• Picked up a bit with Naff and in the 1960s with school protests and movements

• 9/11 and the wars in the 90s and 2000s shifted the focus and picked up the studies even more

Obstacles to Field Formation

• Illegibility bc of social formations

• invisibility

• refusal to recognize as racialized groups

• censorship bc of Palestine

Peddling

• Selling goods from a pack on your back, essentially like door-to-door sales

• Made good money compared to factory work and helped them learn English

• Upgraded from pack to cart to wagon + horses

• Lower education, young men, Syrian immigrants

• Critical to Assimilation and Americanization

The Peddling Thesis

• Assimilation 

  • Language 

  • Cultural norms (hegemony enters chat)

• Americanization

  • Settler-colonialism

  • Individualism

  • Capitalism

• Helped them get into the American culture and American middle class

The Queer Ecology of Peddling

• Gendered labor practices of peddling

• Non-normative gender roles

• Same-sex sociality

• Possibilities!

• Anxieties about the “queerness” of peddling vis-a-vis dominant, white American norms

• CHALLENGES THE PEDDLING THESIS

Race

• A CONCEPT WHICH SIGNIFIES AND SYMBOLIZES SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND INTERESTS BY REFERRING TO DIFFERENT TYPES OF HUMAN BODIES

• Race is a social construction

• An unstable category of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle

• A tool of colonialism and imperialism

• The use of that tool impacts the material conditions of racialized people’s lives

Racialization

• THE EXTENSION OF RACIAL MEANING TO A PREVIOUSLY RACIALLY UNCLASSIFIED RELATIONSHIP, SOCIAL PRACTICE, OR GROUP

• Informed by ideas about gender and sexual norms

SWANA

• South West Asia and North Africa

• Middle East is a Eurocentric/Imperialist construct

• COUNTRIES

  • Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

Syrian

Classification of Arabic-speaking immigrant of the First Wave (1870s-WW2)

• Imperialism

• Geography

• Pre-nationalist identity

• Historically inaccurate

The Wave Models (and critiques of)

TYPICAL WAVE MODEL1880s-WW2, Post WW2-1965, Post 1965

• Critiques

  • Eurocentric; going chronologically leaves out a lot of parts of the story; lumps people into giant pools together; orientalist way of categorizing people

• OTHER WAVES MODELS

  • 1880s - WW2 (1945)

  • WW2 (1945) - 1965

  • 1965 - 1990

  • 1990 - Present

  • Present - infinity…