Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.

AbstractCentred around a May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a chain of actions and reactions that began with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and ended after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding two Palestinians. Situated among Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees and Syrian-Lebanese elites, authoritarian Paraguay was not only encompassed by but also accommodated the post-1967 Arab–Israeli conflict, revealing the connection between the 'areas' of South America and the Middle East through ideas about relocating Palestinians as well as their actual displacement.

George W. Bush hardly finished his declaration of war on terror when the U.S. government turned its attention toward a trinational region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, called the triple frontera (Triple Border, in Spanish) and the tríplice fronteira (in Portuguese). My article traces how border residents of Muslim Lebanese origins responded to this post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorist encompassment. I suggest that Arabs publicly mobilized through three media- and state-sponsored initiatives that sought to combat U.S.-derived suspicions. Beginning in September 2001, they led the Peace without Frontiers movement, bringing together some forty-five thousand Triple Border residents; in late 2002, they participated in a border city government's lawsuit against the Cable News Network (CNN) for defamation; and in mid-2003, they supported the publicity campaign that satirized the alleged visit of Osama bin Laden. Arabs crossed ethnic and national boundaries in order to collaborate with South American media and state powers against the U.S. war on terror. At the same time U.S. counterterrorism traversed the continent, Brazilians and Paraguayans of Arab origins mobilized across the post-9/11 Americas as well.

This article asks how Syrian-Lebanese men and non-Middle Eastern Brazilian women have enacted their relationship to belly dancingin São Paulo. While men and women of Arab origins have usually framed the dance as an essential link to their ethnic heritage, non-Arab female enthusiasts have generally treated it as a universal dance for women. I examine the interplay between these claims through performances in Syrian-Lebanese country clubs, a Brazilian belly dance festival, and the Brazilian Orientalist soap opera, O Clone (The Clone). As contractors, folk dancers, or spectators, Syrian-Lebanese men have joined with non-Middle Eastern women in reinforcing their respective ties to the belly dance phenomenon. These moves across gender and ethnic lines, I argue, not only reveal Syrian-Lebanese men's complicity in the marginalization of Arab women through the belly dance, but in so doing, also show the reproduction of the sexual and racial hierarchies in Brazilian nationalist ideology.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Latino America in the Umma/ the Umma in Latino America -- Part I Reconsidering History -- Chapter 1 "De los Prohibidos": Mu slims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America -- Chapter 2 African Rebellion and Refuge on the Edge of Empire -- Chapter 3 Ethnic and Religious Identification among Muslim East Indians in Suriname (1898–1954) -- Part II Contemporary Cartographies -- Chapter 4 Institutionalizing Islam in Argentina: Comparing Community and Identity Configurations -- Chapter 5 Conversion, Revivalism, and Tradition: The Religious Dynamics of Mu slim Communities in Brazil -- Chapter 6 Guests of Islam: Conversion and the Institutionalization of Islam in Mexico -- Chapter 7 Cubans Searching for a New Faith in a New Context -- Chapter 8 Muslims in Martinique -- Chapter 9 Forming Islamic Religious Identity among Trinidadians in the Age of Social Networks -- Part III Islam Latina/o -- Chapter 10 Discovering a Historical Consciousness: The Creation of a US Latina/o Muslim Identity -- Chapter 11 Mapping Mu slim Communities in "Hispanicized" South Florida -- Chapter 12 Double-Edged Marginality and Agency: Latina Conversion to Islam -- Conclusion -- Contributors -- Index