Author's Department
English & Comparative Literature Department
Document Type
Research Article
Publication Title
CR: The New Centennial Review
Publication Date
Fall 2006
doi
https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2007.0011
Abstract
This article will be broken into three parts: The first part will justify my disprivileging of the terms Orientalism and Islamophobia and outline the features of anti-Arab racism according to the intensive research of corporate American media I conducted during production of my book Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes from and What It Means for Politics Today (2006); the second part will examine the way anti-Arab racism is interpolated across cultural, religious, and linguistic institutions in the United States and reinvents itself continually based on the peculiarities of American history and the United States’ geopolitical relationship with the Arab World; the third part will assess some of the syncretic dimensions of American racism in general, and anti-Arab racism in particular, drawing from, among other theoretical writings, Vincent Leitch’s analysis of postmodern disaggregation and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s categories of intrinsic and extrinsic racism. Following Anouar Majid’s lead (2000), I have difficulty totalizing Arabs as a singular ethnic group when no evidence suggests that such a totalization is viable. In this spirit, I make little distinction between Arabs and Arab Americans, conceptualizing Arabs instead as a globalized ethnic group manufactured into ostensible unity by purveyors of racial or religious dogma, a group that in reality has no binding feature other than an intercontinental geographical origin, itself too vast to facilitate unity realistically. While this article, therefore, is concerned primarily with Arab Americans, it is in a broader sense focused on anti-Arab racism as it affects the globalized Arab and as it is facilitated—indeed, sometimes inspired—by the existence of an Arab community in the United States.
First Page
245
Last Page
266
Recommended Citation
Salaita, Steven. “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 245–66.