Arab Americana: Redrawing “Hemispheric Partitions”: REDRAWING “HEMISPHERIC PARTITIONS”

The migration of persons, images, and things between the Middle East and the Americas has led to a novel transregional formation, an Arab Americana. Not to be grasped in solely geographical terms, this Arab Americana expands to the south and north of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande or the Estrecho de la Florida/Florida Strait. This Arab Americana also straddles the east and west of the Line of Tordesilhas/Tordesillas. I ask how árabes (Arabs) within these Luso-Hispanic confines have understood themselves, and how others have understood them, in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Over 150 years of migration and mobility, Arabs have been perceived by others, and identified themselves, as wealthy, sufficiently white, patriarchal, and macho. They have been also construed as shifty, indelibly turco, perverse, and in need of surveillance. The mapping of this Arab Americana reveals the multidirectional plurality of Latin American migration, pushing the ideas of “Latin America and the Caribbean” across, and potentially beyond, what Walter Mignolo has called “hemispheric partitions.”