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Narrating Arab American History: The Peddling Thesis
Abstract
Alixa Naff's book Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience is a foundational text for Arab American studies. Becoming American centered the voices of first- and second-generation Arab Americans through Naff's extensive use of oral histories. In large part due to Naff's work, pack peddling has had a central place in Arab American historical narratives as being the key to the early Syrian immigrants' integration into US society. This article shows how the claim that peddling facilitated assimilation is dependent upon certain ideological currents regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. Then, I situate Naff's work within the context of US immigration history and liberal multiculturalism. I revisit the importance of Naff's work in order to show how the study of race, gender, class, and sexuality is crucial for understanding early Arab American history.
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Author and article information
Notes
I use the term “Syrian” to denote people coming from the region of Bilad al-Sham or Greater Syria under the Ottoman Empire (the present-day regions of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel/Palestine). “Syrian” is also the term that these migrants used to refer to themselves in diaspora.
Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States (Westport: Praeger, 1997); Matthew Jaber Stiffler, A Brief History of Arab Immigrant Textile Production in the U.S . (Dearborn, MI: Arab American National Museum, 2010).
Stiffler, A Brief History , 2.
Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).
By “assimilation,” I mean the process by which Syrians ceased to identify themselves as Syrians/Lebanese/Arabs and different in some way from “Americans,” as well as the disappearance of markers that allowed others to identify them as Syrian/Lebanese/Arab and different from “Americans.” Examples could include the cessation of communicating in Arabic, the Anglicization of Arab names, and the “whitening” of Arab phenotypes (varied as they may be) through reproduction with Americans of European descent. Other scholars have challenged any simplistic view regarding this early generation and assimilation. See Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 12–14; and Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 15.
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White , 143–145.
Section 2169 of the Revised Statutes (1878) stipulated that anyone wanting to naturalize must be considered “a free white person” or a person “of African nativity or African descent.”
See Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and Kim Benita Furumoto and David Theo Goldberg, “Boundaries of the Racial State: Two Faces of Racial Exclusion in the United States Law,” Harvard Black Letter Law Journal 17 (2001): 85.
The “ascension” into whiteness refers to a play called Anna Ascends, written by Henry Chapman Ford, in which a Syrian immigrant woman learns English, Americanizes herself, and wins a white male suitor. See Gualtieri's chapter “Marriage and Respectability” in Between Arab and White .
Moon-Ho Jung, “Outlawing ‘Coolies’: Race, Nation, and Empire, in the Age of Emancipation,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 677–701; Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History , ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–212.
Umayyah Cable, “New Wave Arab American Studies: Ethnic Studies and the Critical Turn,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2013): 232.
Baha Abu-Laban and Michael W. Suleiman, eds., Arab Americans: Continuity and Change (Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1989); Barbara C. Aswad, ed., Arabic Speaking Communities in American Cities (Staten Island: Center for Migration Studies of New York, 1974); Elaine C. Hagopian and Ann Paden, eds., The Arab-Americans: Studies in Assimilation (Wilmette, IL: Medina University Press International, 1969).
Nabeel Abraham, “Arab-American Marginality: Mythos and Praxis,” Arab Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1989): 17–43; Ernest Nasseph McCarus, ed., The Development of Arab-American Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Helen Hatab Samhan, “Politics and Exclusion: the Arab American Experience,” Journal of Palestine Studies 16, no. 2 (1987): 11–28; Michael W. Suleiman, ed., Arabs in America: Building a New Future (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
Gary Y. Okihiro, “Oral History and the Writing of Ethnic History: A Reconnaissance into Method and Theory,” Oral History Review 9, no. 1 (1981): 47.
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White , 137.
Naff, Becoming American , 233; Gualtieri, Between Arab and White , 137.
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Nayan Shah, “Between ‘Oriental Depravity’ and ‘Natural Degenerates’: Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 703–725; Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the American Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). While Canaday's work elucidates how these concerns of sexual deviance centered upon same-sex sexuality among white men, homosexual acts between white and non-white men also triggered disciplinary actions. Nayan Shah's work documents the sexual encounters between South Asian migrant workers and white men during this period—encounters that did not surface in community archives, but rather have been recorded in the arrest records of many of these men.
Naff, Becoming American , 164.
Ibid., 178.
Ibid., 168.
Edward E. Curtis, “WPA Interviews with Mary Juma and Mike Abdallah (1939),” in The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States , ed. Edward E. Curtis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 29–39.
Akram Khater, “Like Pure Gold: Sexuality and Honour Amongst Lebanese Emigrants, 1890–1920,” in Sexuality in the Arab World , ed. Samir Khalaf and John H. Gagnon (London: Saqi Books, 2006), 93.
David de Sola Pool, “The Immigration of Levantine Jews into the United States,” Jewish Charities 4 (1914): 12. Within Arab American history, there is a dearth of information on Arab Jews, while simultaneously Arab Jews have largely been subsumed within the rubric of Ashkenazi immigration to USA. The combination of ethnocentrism, orientalism, and androcentrism present in the existing scholarship has largely occluded significant illuminations on the early history of Arab Jews in USA. Thus, little is known about the laboring practices of Syrian Jewish women, particularly their relationship to peddling.
Guita Hourani, “‘Aqlah Brice Al Shidyaq: A Woman Peddler from Northern Lebanon,” Al-Raida 24, no. 116–117 (2007): 52–55.
Edward Brice al Shidyaq, “Sitta 'Aqlah: A Woman of Faith, Strength, and Dignity. From Blawza to Wheeling, West Virginia,” Journal of Maronite Studies 1, no. 3 (1997), http://maroniteinstitute.org/MARI/JMS/july97/Sitta_Aqlah.htm
Jon Gjerde, “New Growth on Old Vines: The State of the Field: The Social History of Immigration to and Ethnicity in the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (1999): 40–65.
Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 4–5. Winant uses the term “racial break” to describe the global opposition to white supremacy that happens as a response to Nazism and the holocaust after World War II.
Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 21–22.
Ibid., xvi.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., xvi.
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White , 10.
Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Pérez argues that the occlusion of a colonial past in the historical narratives of Chicano/as produces this effect. In the case of Arab immigrants, their colonial resistance to the Ottoman Empire did not disrupt the creation of this shared experience, because their colonial experience did not implicate the United States before World War I.
Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 2009), 6. I make this claim based on Emma Pérez's observation that Chicano/as and Native Americans in the Southwest challenged histories of the Southwest through the subjectivities they produced.
Therese Saliba, “From ‘Becoming American’ to Transnational Alliances: Feminist Methodologies and Transformations in Arab American Studies” (Unpublished paper delivered at Arab American Studies Association Conference, Dearborn, MI, 2014), 3–4.
Joe Kadi, Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (Boston: South End Press, 1994); Shakir, Bint Arab .
Helen Hatab Samhan, “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience,” in Arabs in America: Building a New Future , ed. Michael Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 209–226.
Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Arab-American Literature: Origins and Developments,” American Studies Journal 52 (2008), 1–23.