Arab American Aesthetics
Arab American Aesthetics enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics in literature, material culture, film, and theatre.
This book seeks to unsettle current conversations within Arab American Studies that neglect aesthetics as a set of choices and constraints. Rather than divorce aesthetics from politics, the book sutures the two more closely together by challenging the causal relationship so often attributed to them. The conversations include formal choices, but also extend to the broad idea of what makes a work distinctly Arab American. That is, what about its beauty, ugliness, sublimity, or humor is explicitly tied to it as part of a tradition of Arab American arts? The book opens up the ways that we discuss Arab American literary and fine arts, so that we understand how Arab American identity and experience begets Arab American artistic enterprise. Split into three sections, the first offers a set of theoretical propositions for understanding aesthetics that traverse Arab American cultural production. The second section focuses on material culture as a way to think through the creation of objects as an aesthetic enterprise. The final section looks at narratives in theatre and how the impact of such a medium has the potential to recreate in both senses of the word: play and invention.
By shifting the conversation from identity politics to the relationship between politics and aesthetics, this book provides an important contribution to Arab American studies. It will also appeal to students and scholars of ethnic studies, museum studies, and cultural studies.
Ther A. Pickens is an Associate Professor of English. She is the author of New Body Politics: Narrating Black and Arab Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014). You can find out more about her work at www.tpickens.org.
Routledge Studies on Middle Eastern Diasporas
Arab American Aesthetics
Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre
Edited by Ther A. Pickens
Arab American Aesthetics
Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre
Edited by Ther A. Pickens
First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 selection and editorial matter, Ther A. Pickens; individual chapters, the contributors
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ISBN: 978-1-138-09981-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10391-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
To Arab and Arab American artists
for your labor
for your creativity
for your play
with admiration
with appreciation
with affection
Contents
PART I
Literary aesthetics
PART II
Material culture
PART III
Film and theatre
Figures
Contributors
Ther A. Pickens is the author of New Body Politics: Narrating Black and Arab Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014) and the forthcoming monograph Black Madness: Mad Blackness (Duke UP). She also edited the 50th anniversary special issue of African American Review on Blackness and Disability. Find more about her work at www.tpickens.org.
Carol N. Fadda is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University. She attended the American University of Beirut for her BA and MA, after which she went on to receive her PhD in English from Purdue University. She focuses in her research and teaching on Arab American literature and cultures, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and transnational and diaspora studies. She is the author of Contemporary Arab American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Home and Belonging (NYU Press, 2014), and is a recipient of an NEH summer grant and a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship. Her essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, and College Literature, as well as in the edited collections Arabs in the Americas (2006), Arab Womens Lives Retold (2007), Arab Voices in Diaspora (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of the Arabic Novel (2017).
Sirne Harb is Associate Professor in the English Department at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), where she teaches American and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on transnational feminism, cultural and literary resistance, and discourses of solidarity and liberation in post-colonial, African-American and Arab American Literature. Her publications have appeared in MELUS, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Humanities, Feminist Formations, Arab Studies Quarterly, Discursive Geographies, On Evelyne Accad, and Warfare in the American Homeland.
Leila Moayeri Pazargadi is an Assistant Professor of English at Nevada State College and she currently teaches composition, postcolonial literature, life writing, ethnic American literature, and Middle Eastern literature courses. Her research in particular focuses on Middle Eastern women writers producing autobiographical material in fiction and nonfiction after 9/11. Recently, she has begun working on Persian photography from the Qajar era. She received her Doctorate of Philosophy in Comparative Literature with certification in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012. At Nevada State College she is most proud of her work of co-founding the Nepantla Program and serving as the Director of its Summer Bridge Program.
Matthew Jaber Stiffler is the Research and Content Manager at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI, where he works to accurately represent the diverse Arab American community through the museums collections, exhibits, and educational programming. Matthew has also lead the development of the museums food-based programming, particularly the Yalla Eat! Culinary Walking Tours. He received his PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2010, where he serves as a lecturer in Arab and Muslim American Studies.
