Review of Arab and Arab American Feminisms

Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber (eds.), Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. ARAB AND ARAB AMERICAN FEMINISMS EMERGES AT A CRUCIAL HISTORICAL MOMENT for Arab populations across homelands and diasporas; the popularly dubbed "Arab Spring," a shorthand moniker for the revolutions that have been sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, provides a fitting metaphor for the anthology. Both are transnational efforts, both refuse to decentralize the powerful and diverse voices of Arab peoples, both acknowledge the violence of oppression and liberation, and both look forward with a cautious but determined hope. The anthology is remarkable for its depth and scope, with 32 pieces organized in five sections: Living with/in Empire, Defying Categories, Activist Communities, On Our Own Terms, and Home and Homelands. The themes of gender, violence, and belonging appear across all sections, while others emerge organically, including reexaminations of Orientalism (in Nadine Naber's "Decolonizing Culture"), as well as critical discussions of culture (in Kyla Wazana Tompkins' "History's Traces") and coalition and movement building (in Therese Saliba's "On Rachel Corrie, Palestine, and Feminist Solidarity"). Several pieces on class and queerness critically discuss class and sexuality, a topic insufficiently addressed in previous Arab and Arab American feminist texts. They provide a point of departure for continuing these lines of inquiry. The anthology frequently returns to Palestine as a central concern for Arabs and Arab Americans. That emphasis is brave and vital in a global context that continues to ignore the decimation of Palestinian lives and lands while the U.S. administration steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the oppressive and repressive policies of the Israeli military and state. Carefully edited, the selections are multivocal and stretch generic boundaries between "theory" and "creativity," rendering poetic and narrative works as inherently theoretical and political and recognizing the artistry and affectivity of academic work. In this way, Suheir Hammad's stunning poem, "Beyond Words," is as evocative and provocative as Amal Amireh's analytically driven "Palestinian Women's Disappearing Acts: The Suicide Bomber Through Western Feminist Eyes." The broad scope of writing styles--poetry, narrative, interview, and prose--rhetorically enacts a refusal of disciplinary divisions that would place the academic, the personal, and the political in separate spaces. Instead, it performs interdisciplinarity across fictionalized public and private spheres, while taking seriously the imperative of intersectionality to examine oppression from multiple standpoints and across numerous axes. The works and authors are concerned with tracing gender across masculinity and femininity, privilege across class and poverty, and violence across material, discursive, and psychic lines. The collection holds violence in tension with gender and belonging, permitting readers to view their cross-pollination: how gender can create (non) belonging, how belonging is sometimes violent, how violence can be in the body or between disparate bodies. …