Presents nine Arab-American and Muslim authors, providing a biography of each writer, a summary of their works, and an analysis of their style and major themes.

The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

Media depictions of Arabs and Muslims continue to be framed by images of camels, belly dancers, and dagger-wearing terrorists. But do only Hollywood movies and TV news have the power to frame public discourse? This interdisciplinary study transfers media framing theory to literary studies to show how life writing (re-)frames Orientalist stereotypes. The innovative analysis of the post-9/11 autobiographies »West of Kabul, East of New York«, »Letters from Cairo«, and »Howling in Mesopotamia« makes a powerful claim to approach literature based on a theory of production and reception, thus enhancing the multi-disciplinary potential of framing theory.

In this essay Yvonne Haddad explores the history of immigration and integration of Arab Muslims in the United States and their struggle to legitimate their presence in the face of continuing exclusion based on race, nationalist identity, and religion.

Through his own life story, from childhood through is life as an adult, El Rassi illustrates the prejudices and discrimination Arabs and Muslims experience daily in American society. He contends with ignorant teachers, racist neighbours, bullying classmates and a growing sense of alienation. He also examines the roles that media and popular culture play and with examples from film and news media, he shows how difficult it is to have an Arab identity in a society saturated with anti-Arab messages.

Bringing the rich terrain of Arab American histories to bear on conceptualizations of race in the United States, this groundbreaking volume fills a critical gap in the field of U.S. racial and ethnic studies. The articles collected here highlight emergent discourses on the distinct ways that race matters to the study of Arab American histories and experiences and asks essential questions. What is the relationship between U.S. imperialism in Arab homelands and anti-Arab racism in the United States? In what ways have the axes of nation, religion, class, and gender intersected with Arab American racial formations? What is the significance of whiteness studies to Arab American studies? Transcending multiculturalist discourses that have simply added on the category “Arab-American” to the landscape of U.S. racial and ethnic studies after the attacks of September 11, 2001, this volume locates September 11 as a turning point, rather than as a beginning, in Arab Americans’

WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.