A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America by Keith P. Feldman

Author:Keith P. Feldman [Feldman, Keith P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9780816694501
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2015-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

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

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