Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans

There has not been a more comprehensive ethnography of contemporary Arab American political and civil associations in New York City than Emily Regan Wills's Arab New York. Wills is Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. She received her PhD in Politics at the New School for Social Research in 2012, and Arab New York is based on her dissertation. Wills has published widely concerning politics and organizing on Arab groups in both the United States and the Middle East. Despite the innovative political analysis and depth of ethnographic immersion, one of the deep faults of Arab New York is the lack of engagement with interdisciplinary sources and pre-existing literature on Arab Americans in other fields such as history.In Chapter 1, Wills lays out her thesis and describes the social and political contexts within which Arab Americans practice politics. According to Wills, many Arab Americans do not practice politics on the national stage for several reasons, including racism, Islamophobia, and political isolation, leading to what Wills terms “discursive misrecognition.” Rather, their experiences within American politics are lived out in “everyday politics” in more informal spaces. Therefore, it is important for researchers wishing to understand the political behaviors and activities of Arab Americans to examine them where they function on a day-to-day basis, whether in after-school programs or between shared meals. In Chapter 2, Wills maps out the demographic distribution of Arab Americans, their service organizations, and activist groups in New York. Functioning as a prosaic representation of multiple ethnic, religious, and political distribution graphs, this chapter does not interrogate the historical progress of how many portions of New York in fact became Arab, a phenomenon that began in the late nineteenth century, or how they became politicized over time.Chapter 3 discusses how the identities of young Arab Americans are shaped by local and national contexts, a dialectical relationship that often lands on no solid ground either wholly Arab or wholly American, a term she defines as “‘arabiya.” Wills's definition of “‘arabiya,” or arabness, as constructed through shared ideas of a “homeland” or “Islam,” is made with very little reference to other studies on the same issue of identity. Wills references prior histories of transnational pan-Arabism even as they pertained to Arabs outside of the Middle East but does little to work out what “‘arabiya” means and how it is made for Arabs in a post-Nasserist reality. Instead, she insists that “‘arabiya” is aided in its construction through the everyday formations of shared conceptions of gender, sexuality, religion, and culture. She then filters her ethnographic work with the Arab American Association of New York and the two activist groups, Al-Awda and Al-Adayah, through these categories. Unfortunately, Wills does not parse out these shared conceptions, leaving Arab ideas about gender and sexuality, for instance, critically unexamined and static.In Chapter 4, Wills examines the “internal panopticism” experienced by Arab American women and how, for example, they must navigate culturally stifling situations while performing political organizing. The ways in which this chapter excels at ethnographic data and in gathering intimate details from interlocutors concerning sexism in the Arab American community is dwarfed by Wills's assumptions concerning Arab cultural standards of female behavior, another static trope that features throughout the subtext of this chapter.In the last two chapters of the book, Wills examines Arab American activist groups and the multifarious negotiations their members undertake in forming both racial and political identities. In examining the many ways that pro-Palestinian groups like Al-Awda engage in politics, she argues that the group's insistence on very specific forms of identity and political language for members bar them from ever achieving nominal political recognition, and instead Al-Awda and groups like it suffer from mainstream marginalization. Wills never considers the idea that members of Al-Awda and other similar protest groups may not even want to join mainstream politics, nor does she get the opportunity to ask members what they think of mainstream politics and whether it is worth it to join in nominal American politics. Instead, entering mainstream political discourse represents an implied positive and an unqualified step in the right direction, whether or not Arab American activists feel the same way.As a staunch work of ethnographic political science, Arab New York attempts to explain Arab Americans’ experience of “discursive misrecognition” in the political arena. Wills rightly exhorts political scientists to examine “everyday politics.” Unfortunately, she ignores the socio-cultural and political landscape engendered by events occurring over a century of historical anti-Arab racism in the United States, especially concerning Palestinians. For Wills, even 9/11 is too historically distant to affect current formations of Arab American political identities. There is simply not enough attention given to Arab American political history.