Charlotte Karem Albrecht, "Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling" (U California Press, 2023)
Aug 11, 2023
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Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores the peddling economy of Arab Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing how ideas about sexuality are intertwined with racial histories. The book proposes a new understanding of Arab American history that centers on sexuality and gender. The podcast also discusses the intersections of queer Arab American history, the labor of peddling, the role of archives in shaping Arab American narratives, and the limitations of historical records. It explores the challenges faced by Arab Americans and queer communities in accessing normativity and belonging.
Gossip serves as a historical method of self-policing gender and sexuality in Arab American communities, revealing disciplinary implications.
Peddling in Arab American communities exposes the interconnectedness of labor, class, race, and non-normative sexuality.
Arab American racial citizenship is situational, influenced by societal attitudes, assimilation expectations, and regional politics, shaping their access to whiteness.
Deep dives
Gossip as a Historical Method
Gossip serves as a significant historical method in understanding the disciplinary nature of community self-policing related to gender and sexuality in Arab American communities. It is a powerful mechanism that communicates what is permissible in terms of gender and sexuality. Gossip is seen in various archival records such as case records of Syrian American social workers and Arab American periodicals, where concerns about dishonorable behavior and sex work among Syrian women peddlers were raised. Although the content of gossip may not always be factual, its lessons and disciplinary implications hold historical significance.
The Queer Ecology of Peddling
Peddling, as a queer ecology, sheds light on the interconnected labor structure, class dynamics, and racialization of Arab Americans in the United States. It encompasses both the transient and intimate social worlds, as well as the gendered, sexual, and racial systems that shaped the peddler figure. The encounters between Syrian peddlers and non-Arab Americans unveiled racial differences and Orientalist fantasies while revealing the range of experiences Syrians had with race in the United States. The labor of peddling, characterized by mobility and transience, also exposed the connections between mobility, transience, and non-normative sexuality.
Arab American Histories and Racial Citizenship
Arab American histories complicate the notion of racial citizenship by revealing the instability of Arab American racialization and its dependence on regional context, religious dynamics, and geopolitical factors. Arab Americans' racial citizenship was situational, changing based on various contexts and situations. The book explores how societal attitudes, assimilation expectations, and racial prerequisites affected Arab Americans' access to whiteness and their complex engagements with whiteness's heteronormative politics. Moreover, the queer ecology of peddling highlights how gender, sexuality, class, and regional politics shaped racial citizenship among Arab Americans.
Archival Politics and Suppression
The book explores the archival politics of Arab American history and the suppression of gender and sexual non-normativity in historical records. Archival collections are shaped by what people donate, often omitting gender and sexual non-normativity in an attempt to appear respectable. State-produced records are also limited by heteronormativity and white supremacy, resulting in a narrow historical perspective. However, the book challenges these limitations by engaging in speculative historical grounded imaginaries, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the limitations of archival collections and embracing the possibility of gender and sexual diversity.
Contemporary Resonances and Challenges
The book's historicization of Arab American race and sexuality provides context for understanding and navigating contemporary challenges, such as the mobilization of Arab and Muslim communities alongside right-wing white Christians against LGBTQ affirming policies. It emphasizes the rootedness of these politics within white Christian nationalism and highlights the interconnectedness of race and sexuality. The book calls for an understanding that the disciplining of race and sexuality affects the entire community beyond just queer and trans individuals, and challenges the notion that it is solely their concern. By exploring these complexities, the book aims to complicate contemporary discourses and provide a nuanced understanding of Arab American histories.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks.
In Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (U California Press, 2023), Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also a core faculty member for the Arab and Muslim American Studies program. You can find her on Twitter: @ckaremalbrecht
Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University.
