Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling
04.23.2025 | 12 - 1:30 PM | 691 Social Sciences Building (CRG Conference Room)
with Charlotte Karem Albrecht (Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor)
and
discussant Amir Aziz (2023-2025 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley)
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she is also a core faculty member for the Arab and Muslim American Studies program and affiliated faculty for the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Her research interests include Arab American history, histories of race, gender, and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was published with University of California Press and is also available as an open access ebook. Karem Albrecht holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her work has also been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and multiple edited collections.
Event organized by Professor Elora Shehabuddin (Department of Gender and Women's Studies).
Event hosted by the Center for Race and Gender and co-sponsored by the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women's Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the South Asian, Southwest Asian, and North African (SSWANA) Initiative, and the Palestinian and Arab Studies Program.