Important studies on Arab American identity and anti-Arab sentiment have proliferated since 9/11. The trend has invited many scholars in the field of Arab American studies to locate the roots of Arab American experience in US Orientalist yearnings that render them as the racialized, gendered, and sexualized “other.” This conceptualization of Arab Americans relies on a sociocultural framework that positions them as a minority wrestling with assimilation, acculturation, alienation, and exclusion. It is predicated on a theoretical understanding imposed by using the “national” as the primary category of analysis. What happens when this category is unsettled?
The second decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of what could be considered the transnational turn in the field of Arab American studies. Works such as Nadine Naber’s Arab America (2012), Jacob Berman’s American Arabesque (2012), Hani Bawardi’s The Making of Arab Americans (2014), Salim Yaqub’s Imperfect Strangers (2016), and Pamela...
