Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream is a book published by Wayne State University Press in 2000, edited by Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock. It discusses the Arab population in Metro Detroit. [1]
The book's subtitle refers to the question of whether Arabs in Metro Detroit have joined the mainstream American culture and society or whether they are still marginalized. [2]
It originated from Creating a New Arab World: A Century in the Life of the Arab Community in Detroit, a 1994 project of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). [1] The editors are anthropologists, [3] and Abraham, a Palestinian American, has a father from Bayt Hanina and a mother from Jerusalem. [4] Of the 25 authors, [5] among them immigrants and scholars, [3] many had lived and/or worked in the Arab community of Detroit and therefore had personal ties there. [5]
The volume includes over 30 essays, articles, poems, [2] and memoirs. [4] If the introductions are included, there are a total of 39 entries. [5] They are divided into six sections, each with an introduction: Qualities/Quantities, Work, Religion, Politics, Life Journeys, and Ethnic Futures. [5] While each section has a theme, certain themes cross-over into different sections. [6] The editors wrote the introductions. [3]
Victoria Bernal of University of California, Irvine wrote that many of the essays are personal reflections, and a reader may not understand the personal context. Therefore, she recommended reading the final section of the book, "Family Resemblances: Kinship and Community in Arab Detroit" by Shryock, first. [5] Bernal stated that non-specialists, including university undergraduates, would easily understand the book due to a lack of jargon. [7]
Bernal wrote that the book "has accomplished an important task in laying the groundwork for future studies of Arab communities in Detroit and elsewhere in America." [7] Bernal argued that many readers may not understand the wider context of the Arab experience since so much material is related to individual families. She also stated that the editors rarely discuss reasons why Americans may be hostile to Arabs, [8] and that the "culture of racism" of the term "Americanization", [9] used in the book "as if this was unproblematic", [8] was not examined. [8]
James Goode of Grand Valley State University wrote that the book's editors "have made an important contribution to immigrant studies, while providing a work that is easily accessible to the general public." [10]
Garbi Schmidt of the Danish National Institute of Social Research wrote that Arab Detroit "is a book well worth reading". [11] Schmidt argued that in some cases the authors did not adequately explain their perspectives and choices of subjects, and he also stated that the book should have explored inter-ethnic relations within the Muslim community. [11]
Sridevi Menon of Bowling Green State University wrote that the book is "an exceptional portrait of a vibrant "ethnic" community." [12]
Khaled Mattawa of the Michigan Quarterly Review stated that overall book "is essential reading for anyone interested in Arab American social dynamics and in ethnic America in general." [13] He suggested that the book should have only used a "discursive" amount of poetry rather than simply more poetry. [13] In regards to the essays, he had a positive reception to those by the editors, with the memoirs by Abraham having "the makings for one of the best Arab American autobiographies in quite some time." [14] He also had positive reception to essays by Sally Howell, William and Yvonne Lockwood, [15] Alixa Naff, [13] Anne Rasmussen, [15] and Kim Schopmeyer: he argued that Schopmeyer's, a demographic study, is, like many other studies of demography, "informative if at times plodding". [13] He had a negative reception to the essays by Linda Walbridge's and T. M. Aziz, and by Sharkey Haddad; he said that the former, "reads more like a lament than an analysis of" the refugee Iraqi Shias, while the latter, about Chaldeans, "is badly written and full of generalizations". [13]
Israel Zangwill was a British author at the forefront of cultural Zionism during the 19th century, and was a close associate of Theodor Herzl. He later rejected the search for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and became the prime thinker behind the territorial movement.
Heavenly Discourse is a collection of satirical essays by Charles Erskine Scott Wood, published in 1927.
The three-volume, pseudoarchaeological Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, published in 1987, 1991, and 2006 respectively, is a controversial book by Martin Bernal proposing an alternative hypothesis on the origins of ancient Greece and classical civilisation. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's North African and West Asian neighbours, especially the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians who, he believes, colonized ancient Greece. Bernal proposes that a change in the Western perception of Greece took place from the 18th century onward and that this change fostered a subsequent denial by Western academia of any significant Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American scholar of Classics. She is the Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she previously worked from 1959 to 2005. She has published ten books over the course of her career.
Thaddeus C. Radzilowski or Thaddeus C. Radzialowski or Tadeusz Radziłowski was a Polish-American historian, scholar, author, professor and co-founder of the Piast Institute, a national institute for Polish and Polish-American affairs. Radzilowski's work focused on Poland and other Central and Eastern European nations, including Russia. He wrote extensively on the histories of these regions as well as the migration of peoples from Central and Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on social history and historiography. He lectured widely in Europe and North America and published more than 100 monographs, edited collections, journal articles, book chapters and scholarly papers.
Khaled Mattawa is a Libyan poet, and a renowned Arab-American writer, he is also a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English. He works as an Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, where he currently lives and writes.
A middleman minority is a minority population whose main occupations link producers and consumers: traders, money-lenders, etc. A middleman minority, while possibly suffering discrimination and bullying, does not hold an "extreme subordinate" status in society. The "middleman minority" concept was developed by sociologists Hubert Blalock and Edna Bonacich starting in the 1960s but is also used by political scientists and economists. This idea was further developed by American economist Thomas Sowell.
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.
Salom Rizk was a Syrian-American author, best known for his 1943 immigrant autobiography, Syrian Yankee, perhaps the best-known piece of Arab American literature in the middle part of the century. The book has been called "a classic of the immigrant biography genre", especially for the way Rizk's story portrays the American Dream and the virtues of cultural assimilation at the expense of his home country, which he finds loathsome when he returns for a visit. Rizk became well known enough that Reader's Digest sponsored him on a lecture tour around the United States as "the quintessential American immigrant". He also sponsored a drive for the Save the Children Federation, using advertisements in such magazines as Boys' Life to request families send their extra pencils, so that these could be donated to needy school-children around the world as a way of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting tyranny.
As of the census of 2010, there were 5,196,250 people, 1,682,111 households, and 1,110,454 families residing within the Detroit–Warren–Ann Arbor Combined Statistical Area. Within the Detroit–Warren–Dearborn Metropolitan Statistical Area, there were 4,296,250 people residing. The census reported 70.1% White, 22.8% African-American, 0.3% Native American, 3.3% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 1.2% from other races, and 2.2% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 6.2% of the population. Arab Americans were at least 4.7% of the region's population.
The Detroit metropolitan area has one of the largest concentrations of people of Middle Eastern origin, including Arabs and Chaldo-Assyrians in the United States. As of 2007 about 300,000 people in Southeast Michigan traced their descent from the Middle East. Dearborn's sizeable Arab community consists largely of Lebanese people who immigrated for jobs in the auto industry in the 1920s, and of more recent Yemenis and Iraqis. In 2010 the four Metro Detroit counties had at least 200,000 people of Middle Eastern origin. Bobby Ghosh of TIME said that some estimates gave much larger numbers. From 1990 to 2000 the percentage of people speaking Arabic in the home increased by 106% in Wayne County, 99.5% in Macomb County, and 41% in Oakland County.
Yemeni Americans are Americans of Yemeni ancestry. According to an estimate in 2010, more than 100,000 Yemenis live in the United States.
Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature is a collection of essays edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe and published in 1997 by New York University Press.
The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston is a 2006 book by Roberto R. Treviño, published by the University of North Carolina Press. The work covers the years 1911-1972 and discusses the relationship between the Mexican-American community and the Catholic church, and the "ethno-Catholicism" among Houston's Mexicans. This ethno-Catholism consisted of the cultural interaction between Irish American priests, religious practices of the indigenous Mexicans, and Mexican customs.
Metro Detroit includes Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other groups.
Islam is practiced by several Muslim American groups in Metro Detroit.
Laura Goode is an American author, novelist, essayist, poet, screenwriter, producer, and feminist. She is the author of the young adult novel Sister Mischief, the co-writer and producer of the feature film Farah Goes Bang, and writes the ANTIHEROINES column for Bright Ideas Magazine. She lives in San Francisco.
Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin is a 2000 book edited by Sonia Ryang and published by Routledge. It discusses Zainichi Koreans in Japan.
Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend is a 2010 book edited by Andrew Shryock, published by Indiana University Press.
Nabeel Abraham is an American anthropologist and activist. His research focuses around Arab-Americans and how Arabs and Palestinians are represented in mainstream American media.