Beginning with early Arab American playwright, poet and novelist Kahlil Gibran and concluding with contemporary playwright Yussef El Guindi, this book provides an historical overview and critical analysis of the plays, films and performances of self-identified Arab Americans. Playwrights, filmmakers and performers covered include Ameen Fares Rihani, Danny Thomas, Heather Raffo, Ahmed Ahmed, Mona Mansour and Cherien Dabis. These artists, traditionally underrepresented in entertainment, publishing and academia, have created works that exemplify the burgeoning Arab American arts movement. By addressing cinema, stand-up comedy and solo performance, the author introduces audiences to contemporary genres that are shaping Arab American culture in the United States.

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.

The collected essays from noteworthy dramatists and scholars in this book represent new ways of understanding theater in the Middle East not as geographical but transcultural spaces of performance. What distinguishes this book from previous works is that it offers new analysis on a range of theatrical practices across a region, by and large, ignored for the history of its dramatic traditions and cultures, and it does so by emphasizing diverse performances in changing contexts. Topics include Arab, Iranian, Israeli, diasporic theatres from pedagogical perspectives to reinvention of traditions, from translation practices to political resistance expressed in various performances from the nineteenth century to the present.

Four Arab American Plays is the first published collection of plays by contemporary Arab American playwrights. Based on true stories from her life as the daughter of a Lebanese mother and American diplomat father, Leila Buck's ISite invites the audience on an intimate journey in search of identity, home, and the space in between. Jamil Khoury's drama Precious Stones boldly examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the "safe" yet turbulent terrain of the American Diaspora. Yussef El Guindi's Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat is a darkly humorous and sensual look at identity, media-representation, love and lust in the Arab American community. In Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader's Food and Fadwa, a Palestinian family living under occupation fights to hold onto their culture and traditions while still celebrating love, joy and hope. A preface by Arab American scholar Michael Malek Najjar and a new essay titled "Towards an Arab American Theatre Movement" by Silk Road Rising's artistic director, Jamil Khoury, concludes the book--a valuable expression of Arab American life and theatre in the United States. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Troubling Traditions takes up a 21st century, field-specific conversation between scholars, educators, and artists from varying generational, geographical, and identity positions that speak to the wide array of debates around dramatic canons. Unlike Literature and other fields in the humanities, Theatre and Performance Studies has not yet fully grappled with the problems of its canon. Troubling Traditions stages that conversation in relation to the canon in the United States. It investigates the possibilities for multiplying canons, methodologies for challenging canon formation, and the role of adaptation and practice in rethinking the field’s relation to established texts. The conversations put forward by this book on the canon interrogate the field’s fundamental values, and ask how to expand the voices, forms, and bodies that constitute this discipline. This is a vital text for anyone considering the role, construction, and impact of canons in the US and beyond.

This book is a ground-breaking collection on contemporary Arab theatre. Through three sections discussing occupation and resistance, diaspora, migration, and refugees, and nationalism and belonging, this study provides nuanced responses to the contested points of intersection between Arab culture and the West, as well as many of the major concerns within contemporary Arab theatre. The collection draws together scholars from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States who write about Arab theatre and the representation of Arabs on European and American stages. It introduces concerns in contemporary Arab theatre, the regions in which Arab theatre is performed, and the issues with representations of Arabs onstage. This volume will be of great significance for those interested in expanding the range of global, postcolonial, African, Asian, or diasporic theatre that they study, teach, or stage.

Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group - which includes Arabs, Armenians, Iranians, Jews, and Turks - and religions that include the Baha'i faith, Christianity, Chaldean, Druze, Ishik Alevism, Judaism, Islam, Mandaeism, Samaratin, Shabakism, Yazidi, and Zoroastrianism - the rich and paradoxical nature of the term 'Middle Eastern' is interrogated through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora. Featuring a clear introduction and examination of the context and the various push and pull factors that have contributed to the mass migrations to North America - including the so-called “Great Migration” of 1890-1915, the Armenian Genocide, the European Holocaust, the two world wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and other social and political conflicts. With chapters devoted to Arab American, Israeli American, Iranian American and Turkish American theatre, Middle Eastern American Theatre traces the history and examines the work of key artists and directors including Heather Raffo, Yussef El Guindi, Jamil Khoury, Mona Mansour, Danny Bryck, Ken Kaissar, Ari Roth, Torange Yeghiazarian, Reza Abdoh, Sedef Ecer, Torange Yeghiazarian, of Golden Thread Productions, and Jamil Khoury, of Silk Road Rising. The volume provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of millions of Middle Eastern Americans, and how they have contributed to American theatre today.