Status Audio Magazine

Bassam Haddad (BH): Professor Ella Shohat, we are very happy that you are joining us. We are delighted that you are giving us this interview about your intellectual journey. We would love for you to start with those aspects of your background that you think will help us understand your journey.

Ella Shohat (ES): Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be here and speak about something that I normally do not do, or do not have many opportunities to do. Intellectual journey? It is sometimes hard to capture in one narrative or in one particular storyline, what an intellectual journey is. Obviously one’s life is always more complex than it seems, but sometimes it is easier to start with a basic story of an identity. The biological, the geographical, the linguistic. But it really would not capture, I think for many intellectuals, why it is that they are interested in one particular issue and not another.
 
For me, if you look throughout my work, I think one issue has been the difficulties of containing my work into one geography. While my work is very much associated with Middle Eastern studies, I have not really been formed in Middle Eastern studies. I have always had a kind of inside/outside relationship to that field of study, as well as to the region itself, even though I was born and grew up in the region. But I think it has to do with the very fact that at the moment that I was born, life was already determined for me that I was born to dislocated, displaced people. And when you are born and grow up with that sense of loss, with that sense of the impossibility of return—because that other place from which you have millennial history in (in this case Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Iraq) is inaccessible to you. And in fact it is the enemy country of your present country--that is Israel.

Growing up in that situation, the notion of border or hudud becomes more significant than anything else. I think growing up I had the kind of “cross-border envy” of those Europeans that I later discovered traveled. At the age of sixteen I first traveled to Europe as part of a delegation. I envied those Europeans who could just easily cross the border, moving from Germany to France to Italy to Greece. And then they could come and visit us and they could move from Israel/Palestine and cross the border to Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq. And here we are. I grew up with that tasqit, Laissez Passer papers of my parents, and with the Israeli passport. And that meant that all of those places from which we came, or that country from which I came from and longed for—Iraq—(the country from which I had) heard the radio and watched TV. But to actually cross the border was an impossibility. 

So I think as an intellectual that notion of being dislocated, cast doubt on this whole notion of what is the Jewish state, what is Zionism, what is a Jewish identity. I think it really goes back to something that perhaps I could not formulate as a child, but as an adult, that tension between my identity papers—that official passport or national identity card—the Israeli identity card, and what my life carried for me—for my family, for my neighbors, for my community—developed tension. I always lived that kind of contradiction. 

Years went by and when I wrote my first personal narrative essay “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew”- and it was written during the so-called first Gulf War. And I do not think it was a coincidence that I wrote in the first voice (first person) for the first time in my life. And I think the reason why I wrote it in the first voice, is that many of the things that I believed in and wrote about in my early book, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, and in my first essay “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims”—(one of the issues being Orientalism) all of those issues suddenly resonated in a very visceral way that I could no longer hide or simply just talk about under the mask of scholarly work. It had to also be articulated in a personal narrative. Generally I was hesitant simply due to a simple shyness about speaking in the first voice and certainly I would dare say with the culture of ‘ayb (shame) that I grew up with.  

And so even though I believed as an intellectual in the importance of speaking in first voice narrative, especially because I was influenced by many of the Latina and Black Feminists writers such as Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua, and I really respected what they had done because by exposing personal narratives they were also able to speak about the silences in academia and in scholarly work. But for me it was tough. So I did it for a long time only in a scholarly, political intellectual investigation. But with the Gulf War I was no longer able, and it was very difficult for me to have the three countries that I belonged to, in one way or another, come into war and conflict. Iraq was being bombed, Israel had SCUDS falling, and I still had family there, and then the United States that was sending all of those smart bombs on Iraq. Seeing the devastation and the destruction—of course like all Middle Easterners—we all grew up in the warzone. We know what casualties are, we know what blood is—I think we are all traumatized people, frankly. We are all traumatized people in one way or another. We may deal with it with humor. We may deal with it with our intellectual ability to analyze and offer complex narratives in contrast to the dominant media. But ultimately we all carry those scars in one way or another, whatever our political affiliation is. 

So ironically, the Gulf War freed me to write in a personal voice. And that is when I wrote “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew.” I actually did not initiate the essay. A student of mine who worked at the time at The Village Voice in New York asked me. She knew my personal story and wanted me to say something about it. The essay was about to go to print, it was copy edited and then at the minute for some reason they decided not to go through with it. This was a relatively progressive newspaper at the time, but I was not surprised in a way. I was actually surprised that they even initiated the invitation. And then at the last minute the essay was ready to go to print and they did not publish it. I received the explanation that it was “inappropriate” or “irrelevant.” But the nice thing is that when I received my paycheck - because at the time I learned of the term “kill fee” which is when a newspaper invites you and then they decide to “kill” the essay or the article, you receive a “kill fee.” And the nice thing was that I still kept that. I made a xerox of that because it was too good to be true. The name for the paycheck was “kill” and then on the subject line was “Arab-Jew.” Kill Arab-Jew.  

And so from that point on, I learned that it is not enough that I say that I am an Arab-Jew. That is already a problem, and I am still being attacked in scholarly journals for using that term. But it is also the kind of interpretation that I give to the term and why I use it. So while it is in certain circles - the Jewish studies circles—(the term) Arab-Jew is okay. Perhaps to use historically for Jews who lived in Arab lands - sometimes even that is a taboo. But for someone who did not grow up in Iraq, to claim or reclaim that term seems as though it is inauthentic. So I actually had to do develop an [audio unclear] of using the term as enabling a whole other kind of critical discourse that refuses the “natural way” in which the Arab versus Jew dichotomy has emerged in academic, intellectual, and political circles. So much so that it has been so naturalized that the notion [. . . sentence ends]. I remember during the Gulf War in one article in The New York Times, in the book review section—sort of as an aside comment—it was not even central to the article was written, “This idea is as absurd as having a synagogue in Baghdad.” Well for anyone who does not know, we had plenty of synagogues in Baghdad. So the whole question of the Arab-Jew for me has been both to open up the discussion and debate about the paradigms that we use within Middle Eastern studies, within Arab studies, Jewish studies and beyond. My purpose has been to denaturalize this binarism between the Arab and the Jew and introduce an important hyphen that is the “taboo” hyphen between the Arab and the Jew.

In some ways I think if you look into the whole question of Orientalism, and Edward Said speaks about the splitting of the Semite figure in Orientalist discourse between the Arab and the Jew. Indeed the splitting happened because of the post-Enlightenment discourse and the assimilation of the Western Jew into European civilization, so much so that the Arab, which remains still in the colonial and colonized regions could be seen as an “other.” Whereas the Jew, the intimate other—the “Western Jew” in France or in Britain or in Germany, could be seen as now with his or her assimilation becoming part of Western civilization and therefore no longer subjected to Orientalist discourse. So my question has been—yes the splitting of this Semitic figure has occurred—but what has happened with the Arab-Jew? At that very same time, because the Arab-Jew, the Algerian, the Lebanese, the Iraqi, the Egyptian—are still under and within the territories of the East, within the territories of the Arab world. They are subjected to direct or indirect colonialism and therefor are still part of a civilization that is being Orientalized. But something interesting happens with the arrival of Western Jewish schooling systems to the region—such as the Alliance Israelite - which installed the French educational system—similar to the general Alliance system and the French educational system in the colonized or semi-colonized regions. And the Jews were now split and were beginning to be separated, just as I believe the Christian Arabs were seen as different than the Muslim Arabs -subjected to the true Orientalists representations. 

But I think with Zionism something further happened to the Arab-Jew. With Zionism the whole mechanism of splitting happened and with the establishment of the State of Israel, even more so. The Arab-Jew has been subjected, as I argued in my 1980s work, to a cleansing operation. Cleansing the Arab influences, the Arab traces in his Jewish identity. And I deliberately say “his” because this is the symbolic figure of the Arab-Jew being cleansed. And indeed with the establishment of the State of Israel and with the dislocation of Arab-Jews into Israel - the state apparatus, the schooling system has been all about separating the Arab-Jew from his or her “Arabness” and engender in that Arab-Jew a new kind of Western, Israeli identity. 

I spoke in my work about the schizophrenia because it is not only what they did that I was interested in, but also what that process has done to us. And that is why I started writing about the question of schizophrenia—about the splitting operations, the splitting of the Arab-Jew from the Arab. The idea that the Arab-Jew is no longer part of that Arab identity. And space has affected us, right? But what is interesting is that Zionist discourse to my mind has been caught in paradoxes because on the one hand we are separate and split, yet we continue to be subjected to Orientalist narratives and Orientalist representations within Israeli discourse. This is why my first book actually dealt with the history of Zionist representation of both Palestine and Arab-Jews—the Mizrahim in Israel—and refusing to split and separate those issues. For many, the question of the Arab-Jew and the Mizrahim in Israel would be separate, would be something that is an internal Israeli affair. I have often had this argument actually with Edward Said about this question. I said “yes, but no.” We have to see the question of the Arab-Jew as beginning already back with colonialism in the region, with the process of Westernization—especially of minorities in the region and the kind of dilemmas that colonial discourse has introduced in the region for minorities. But more so in the case of Arab-Jews because of the establishment of the State of Israel, that this cross-border movement cannot simply be viewed as the end of the story. Sure, it is the end of the story of Arab-Jews living in Arab countries, but it is also continuing—and the question persists but in different ways within the context of Israel, and in order to offer a complex analysis and understanding of the relationship between Mizrahim and Palestinians, we cannot simply speak about the question as Arab versus Jews and Israelis versus Palestinians. Yes, it is true but it only captures one dimension of the story and therefore we have to sabotage a simple nation-state analytical framework. 

We have to think beyond, we have to subvert nationalist framings of the debate and look into the complexities of every single nation-state in the region. And generally, not only nations are invented as we know, but in some contexts, I have argued that some nation-states perhaps are more invented than others. The borders, the hudud in the region as we know, are highly complicated. They are not just natural borders. They, as we know have historically been invented by the Sykes-Picot agreement. Sure, we believe in them to a certain extent and they correspond to something. We want to say, “We are Iraqis and this is the Iraqi nation-state.” We want to refuse the kind of simple partitions that have been offered by the American government. We know how simplistic partitions can be. Just as I talked about the fact that the Iraqi (Lesep Laissat) that was issued for my parents and the Israeli identity card that they were given, do not reflect the complexity of their cultural belonging and linguistic identity. We have to look and dig beyond those borders on the map to fully understand. When we speak about Palestinians we know, yes there is the Nakba story, we know some of the foundational traumatic narratives of dispossession. But at the same time, that would never capture fully the Palestinian identity - not only regionally from where they began in Palestine, but also their multiple cross-border identities—be it in refugee camps, be it in the khalij, be it in the West. How do we begin to narrate the Palestinian story without multiple cross-border narratives? The same thing is true for a lot of identities in the Middle East. To simply say, I am Lebanese, or I am Syrian, or I am Iraqi—it only captures one dimension of the story and then because it comes into conflict with religious identities and ethnic identities. And I think any time we impose one narrative, one single identity—we know truly when we look inside ourselves that it is only partially our identity. And therefore at the risk of sounding [. . . sentence ends]. I am not coming to the question of nationalism - and I know the history of colonialism—I know the history of Zionism from the perspective of Palestinians and at the same time I think it is important to think about what nationalism within Arab countries has not only succeeded in doing but also failed in doing in terms of capturing and giving place for the full complexities of the diversity of people in the Arab world. Because otherwise we would not be dealing with all of the tensions that we are still dealing with. We cannot just say it is colonialism, we cannot just say it is Zionism—yes it is true—we have to deal with what nationalism and every kind of nation-state in the region has on the one hand permitted to exist, but also suppressed, repressed, and has not allowed to be expressed, to be fully articulated. And therefore to deal with minorities, and I think it is so complicated especially for people who do not want to endorse say, imperialism, to also speak and offer a complex understanding of minority identities in the region because we immediately fall into a false “either-or [binary].” Either we are the West as minorities, or we are against the West and therefore we cannot speak about our minority identity in the name of true nationalist identities. And I think this is something that is important for all of us coming from different backgrounds in the Middle East, to have the courage to begin a conversation about it that is not an “either-or [binary]” conversation. That is a tough one. That is a demanding task that takes a lot of courage for all of us coming from very different backgrounds to refuse the simplistic “either-or [binary]” narratives. 

And I think this is the pressure, but I think that at this point in history when we are haunted by partition, where the future say of Iraq—one of the solutions is partition. Can we avoid those questions? Can we avoid not talking about it? Because I think that within our communities there are the reactionary forces that offer us simple solutions. Religious identities, ethnic identities. And it is very tempting. So how are we not going to be tempted by it? Especially when minorities are being killed. Where they feel insecure. They do not feel safe. They may think of a bleak future in the Middle East. Or, when we are here in the United States, we encounter so much Islamophobia that to speak about minorities in the Middle East suggests that we are participating in an Islamophobic discourse when we want to defend our Muslim friends and colleagues who are objected to Islamophobia, and we are not endorsing that. 

So there are many issues that are being torn with regards to the Middle East. And me personally, I find myself often in a situation where it is really about positionality. Which context are we talking about? Are we speaking about minorities here? Are we speaking about minorities there? Whose life is being threatened? Which existence as a community is vulnerable? And for me that becomes a very important criteria. It breaks my heart to see what is being done to the Christian minorities in Iraq. It just breaks my heart. It breaks my heart with the persecution of Muslim minorities in the West that is going on.
 
So it is a difficult question and a dilemma really. But we need to begin with a true and sincere conversation beyond slogans and easy paradigms, in order to begin to articulate our dilemmas. If I go back to my personal narrative, it is not only the Christian in Iraq that I feel sorry for, but I think partially when I look at the Christian in Iraq I begin to think about my own history of displacement. And knowing that minorities can be very vulnerable, what is the reason for that? When I think back, could it be that all Iraqi Jews were accused of being Zionists? That was an easy narrative perhaps. We were the collateral damage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There is no doubt about it. I am not saying that there were not some Arab-Jews that were Zionists. I am not denying that. But I think that [unclear (00:26:48)] are representing theorist dilemmas for Arab-Jews. [Unclear . . .] But to justify everything that has happened to Arab-Jews as because of Zionism—when I look at that history—it is also very hard for me to accept this narrative. Because even those Jews who remained afterwards, after the mass exodus, also lived very vulnerably any time there was conflict. But there was no real reason to defend a synagogue. Ironically as we know in Lebanon and in Beirut during the civil war, it was the PLO, the Palestinians who defended the synagogue in Beirut. But why would a synagogue have to be defended? Why would a synagogue in 1967 in Tunis have to be defended? Why would a synagogue in Baghdad have to be defended? To open up that wound is important to me. And I believe there is a younger generation that if I compare to the older generation, or even my generation early on - it was very hard to open up this conversation without you immediately being labeled and equated with a kind of Zionist attack on Arab nationalism. But that is a very sloganistic discussion. We have to have the courage to look into that history, looking at all of the contradictions. And I am not trying to be defensive here of Arab-Jews. I am not trying to suggest anything about any community. Communities are complex. They are not unified. Arab-Jews were not unified community ideologically, politically, in terms of their perspective on Zionism. And I believe the same is true of Arab Christians and of course it is true of Arab Muslims as well. But to open up the discussion is really important, and I am seeing more and more in the younger generation a kind of curiosity. I used to receive a number of letters over the years, but now I am receiving much more correspondence from younger people from different political standpoints. But nonetheless I think this question is not only about the past. I think this question is also about the future. It is certainly about the present. Because what we see happening—the anxieties, the fear, the killings, the bloodshed, the violence that is happening currently in the Middle East forces us to look beyond borders and see how borders have also created [. . . sentence ends]. I mean sometimes when I speak to my students I say, “Can you imagine a Middle East without borders?” “Do you know that there was a train that led from Baghdad to Haifa?” It is almost inconceivable. Just as I would say, “Do you know that there were many synagogues in Baghdad?” And this is within recent memory. Can we talk about it? Can we talk about what happened? Can we begin to understand it? 

But those kinds of “taboo” memories—which is why I called my book Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, are really about refusing to accept the dominant narratives. What we are being allowed to remember and what we are being told to forget. And I think this is our responsibility, as teachers, as educators to look beyond the current state of affairs. To look both into a past which did not have those borders exactly, and to imagine a different future that would transcend the current borders.  

BH: I would like to take this opportunity to ask you about how this might connect with your current work on transatlantic multiculturalism. If you could give us a brief on this current work, and how it was produced and how it connects with your trajectory as a writer, as a human being who faced these challenges. 

ES: Because, as I said before—to an extent—my work has been on the Middle East, but it has not reflected a traditional Middle Eastern studies or traditional area studies kind of work. Not only because I was not formed by it, but I did not choose to be formed by it intellectually. And I have often been interested in what is now called transnational analysis or for me it has been cross-regional or cross-border analysis. I also have been interested in linking different points in history as well. So in that sense while I have dealt with historical issues, I am not a historian and my method would not be regarded as a proper historical method. In some ways I think there is room for a different type of work because the historian, the geographer, the anthropologist, the political scientist, would shed different light. But as a cultural studies scholar, who is interested in bringing history and diverse points and diverse places and geographies into conversation, we do a different kind of work. I do not think by the way that it is a coincidence. And in 2008, Mervat Hatem, who was back then the president of MESA had a plenary session on the thirtieth anniversary of Orientalism, and she invited me and I was one of the speakers on the panel. I addressed not so much the conservative attacks on Edward Said’s book, I actually addressed the writers, and intellectuals, and scholars who were very sympathetic to his political and ideological project of critiquing the orientalization of the Middle East. However, they still had a very hard time with the book. The historians, the anthropologists—they saw it as a very problematic work because it wanders from different regions, different historical moments. From their point of view, it might be true. However, my point in defending the method was actually not against the politically “Bernard Lewis” of the world, but rather against those who shared the political critique, ideological perspective, and yet had a hard time with the method. And in that way, for people who do discursive, or discourse analysis, or cultural studies work, I place the work within a cultural studies tradition of interdisciplinary work interested in textual and discourse analysis that brings and sheds light on different aspects. We have as a methodology, to link different moments in history and different places according to shared themes, shared issues, and shared ideological perspectives. So it is just a different method and I was defending the method. 

That really was another issue where I have probably disagreed in my work with Edward Said, and that has to do with the question of “beginning.” Where do we locate the beginning of Orientalism? And to a great degree Edward Said located it in the post-Enlightenment era and also with colonialism. And of course I agree with that, but I have located it also slightly differently, having to do partially with seeing 1492 as a crucial moment. In my work about the two 1492s, some of it was co-authored also with Robert Stam, I have looked into the two quincinteneries—the time 1492—the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, the Edict of Expulsion, but also what happened a few months later, and that is the so-called discovery of the Americas. Normally those two issues are treated very differently. In 1992 I had a fellowship at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University where I co-organized a conference—although it largely focused on indigenous perspectives on 1492, I also brought up and had some presentations dealing with the other 1492. And critiquing the two quincinteneries for refusing to see both the historical links, but more importantly for me, the ideological and the discursive link about the otherization of the Jew and the Muslim in Iberia, and that otherization that took place in the Americas. And that work was another kind of “taboo” memory that in my book Taboo Memories, I deal with. The links between those two 1492s. But it is more than that. The fact that historically The Inquisition actually continued in the Americas, but also what is less talked about, the conversos and moriscos, that is, converted Jews and Muslims, who may have practiced in secrecy their religious identities or rituals, have come to the Americas. And it is therefore impossible to think about the Americas without the links to Iberia and what has happened in Iberia, both positively and negatively. Negatively in terms of not only the actual persecution, but the ideological apparatus of diabolizing the Jew, the Muslim, the indigenous American, the African, right?

Sepulveda (Juan Gines de Sepulveda) and de las Casas (Bartolomé de las Casas) actually had an argument whether the indigenous people of the Americas had a soul. That was a controversy. Whether they had a soul or not. So this kind of diabolization of the Jew and the Muslim in Iberia, already prepared the ground for what was going on in the Americas. Now in the recent work—some of which appeared in a book I co-edited--Between the Middle East and the Americas, I look into the way that 1492 became kind of a foundational narrative for the emerging national identities of Latin America, even before they gained independence. The reaction to the Sephartic Moorish identity that is historically part of Latin America, and I would say of North America—remember New Mexico and all of that area that was taken from Mexico actually had conversos - Catholics who were practicing Judaism, and the same thing in Latin America. So looking into the work of Jobeit Al-frerey [unclear (00:40:00)] an important Brazilian anthropologist who wrote about slavery and African identity in Brazil, but also if you read close enough you will see that he is also writing about the reaction to the Sepharti and the Moor that is part - and he sees it kind of almost a blood discourse—that is in the veins of Latin America. And so some were romanticizing the Moor and the Sepharti as part of the Brazilian identity, and others were responding against it and saying that the underdevelopment of Latin America had to do with the Spanish Moorish blood of Latin America, and almost buying into that verbarian, North versus South, Protestant versus Catholic. But what could be argued is that actually that Southern Catholic identity is viewed - whether positively or negatively—as always already Iberian and therefore Sephartic Moorish. So the cleansing of the blood of the Sepharti and of the Moor in the case of Latin American identity came to allegorize both the romantic idea of Latin America national identity, including the positive sense of self vis-a-vis the north, vis-a-vis the Protestant, saying, “We are not like those Anglo-Saxons because our slavery was not as bad.” Or, we are inferior to the Anglo-Saxons because we carry that Iberian Moorish blood. And in the book that Robert Stam and I wrote, Race in Translation—focusing on the culture wars, the contemporary debates, but generally in the Atlantic -  we trace those debates about race in the current Americas, actually going back to those Anglo-Saxon versus Latin identities. But would we actually refuse this terminology? Whether negatively or positively, we say that it is an ideological construct on both ends. We really should speak about Anglo-Saxonism and Latinism as ideological constructs that both the North and the South have internalized, whether as a superior model or inferior model from Hegel and Weber and that actually the debates over race and the Latin South and the Anglo-Saxon North are completely misguided. First of all because the same kind of cross-border movement has happened from the very beginning in the Americas and that is why I am interested in the transatlantic and transnational. And we are looking in the book into this whole question of, from the very beginning of the Americas, it was a transatlantic, transnational endeavor. The Africans came from very different places in Africa, the Europeans came from different places, and of course the indigenous of the Americas had multiple cultures, multiple identities, and multiple languages. And then of course when we speak about all of the diverse immigrations, and some of it is shared, the Arabs, the so-called Turcos, they are called Turcos in Latin America - the same Arab, largely Christian and Jews who came from the Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine)—and went to North America in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, also went to Latin America. In Lebanon, they argue that there are more Lebanese there, than in Lebanon. Lebanese Arab cuisine came to be part of Brazilian national dishes--kibbe for example. There is a fast food chain there called Habib, which is largely Lebanese food. And there is “Little Syria” in what is downtown Manhattan, which was part of American identity. It is a forgotten history that only those of us scholars who deal with Arab-American history know about. But, my argument was that we cannot only locate the beginning of Arab Middle East Muslim identities only going back to the actual immigration. We have to think in a different way about it. That is, from the very beginning. So my point here, going back to Edward Said and Orientalism, is that Orientalism as an ideology, as a discursive practice, is embedded and constitutive of the Americas. In other words, from the very beginning of the concept of the America, there is the concept of Orientalism. Because if we think of 1492 as a mode of Orientalization of the Jew and of the Muslim—if we think that that ideological apparatus of 1492 and the expulsions came and traveled to the Americas, then we have to think of Orientalism as foundational to understanding that concept called the America. And when I say the America, I do not just mean North America, but the America as a whole. With Columbus, with Amerigo Vespucci, comes European notions about the “other” and the immediate “other” was always the Muslim, and the East. And European identity—especially post-Enlightenment, is always already embedded with the idea of the diabolic “other,” the Muslim, the immediate neighbor. The Arab. The Arab who managed to conquer Europe as well. So the anxiety about the Arab and the Muslim that is embedded to European self-identity travelled to the Americas and therefore even before the immigrants to the Americas came, even before European colonialism—Bonaparte colonization of Egypt, French invasion of Algeria - there is an Orientalism that travels to the Americas early on. And therefore in that way, I would begin the notion of Orientalism not simply with colonialism toward the Arab world by Europe, or with the immigration of Arab minorities to the Americas.  

BH: What this does is expand our horizons. Especially those of us who are very much in line or supportive of the critique of Orientalism. This actually expands our horizons. Not just our horizons of the people that we are trying to influence, by compelling them to look at Orientalism--as the study the Orient--as being problematic from this standpoint. We have a number of other questions for you.

ES: Let me first respond to that. In the book I co-edited with Evelyn Sultany, Between the Middle East and the Americas, actually this is the framework that we tried to establish for the diverse contributors. One of the anonymous reader reports was, “How could they connect North America and South America?” We can speak about the West, right? We can speak about the West, Orientalization of the Muslim East, and so some found it very difficult to have as a project. And actually we are very happy with it, because what the diverse authors have done—people wrote about Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, and of course the US, and also in relation to Western Europe - what we showed is that Orientalism is in circulation in diverse places. That in fact, the Americas are on a continuum, so the very same problem that we have in say, American Studies and Latin American Studies, is segregated area studies. Whether you discuss African American, you forget that the same slavery that was established here and has generated African identity, generated Afro-Latin American identities, be it in Puerto Rico, be it in Brazil, etc. So the same problem that we see in area studies in relation to diverse other issues of race, came about in relation to Arab America. So we can discuss Arab America only in relation to the US, but that question is presumable. But even in terms of the history of immigration, as I was trying to suggest, this is bogus because the same boats that arrived in New York, arrived in Rio De Janeiro. Hence the terms Turcos because they came during the Ottoman Empire so they were called Turks, even though they were not Turks. For the most part, they were Lebanese, Palestinians, or Syrians. Because that was their kind of identity, due to their documentation. And so it is still a term that is being used—the Turko.