Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism
05.01.2014 | 5:30 – 8:00 PM | Multicultural Community Center in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union
In Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement.Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.
Keynote Bio:
Professor Nadine Naber received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a member of the Diaspora Studies Cluster. She came to the University of Illinois from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she co-founded Arab American Studies (an Ethnic Studies unit within the Program in American Culture). She is author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012). She is co-editor, with Amaney Jamal, of Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008). She is co-editor, with Rabab Abdulhadi and Evelyn Alsultany, of Arab and Arab American Feminisms Perspectives, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010). Nadine is an editorial board of the Middle East Research and Information Project ; an advisory board member of the Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality book series wit the University of Nebraska Press; and a member of the Arab Families Working Group.Nadine is co-founder of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, North America (cyber AWSA); Arab Movement of Women arising for Justice (AMWAJ) and Arab Women’s Activist Network (AWAN) and a former board member of Incite! Women of Color against Violence; Racial Justice 9-11; and the Women of Color Resource Center.
