Abstract

Arab New York illuminates the political possibilities and complexities of constructing a collective Arab American identity. Emily Regan Wills dives into the lives of people involved in organizations in New York to gain leverage on questions about identity formation, transnationalism, and everyday politics. She taught English classes, manned festival booths, and coordinated and participated in protest and educational events with social service and political organizations targeting Arabs in New York. She supplemented her participant observation, conducted from 2008 to 2010, with ethnographic analysis of online material for the time period around and after the Arab Spring movements of 2011. Her critical self-reflection on potential limitations and problems associated with her methods, such as differential access to groups and the impact of her own positionality as a white, female, gay scholar, are admirable and a model for students of politics. She takes these limitations and turns them into fruitful avenues of inquiry by working through a variety of critical theoretical material such as intersectional theory, Foucault, and the meaning of ethnography. Through this work, the book aims to show “how everyday spaces and practices are deeply political in their own practice, not merely as shaping ground for future participation—and that our understanding of politics, particularly Arab American communities, is inescapably too thin if we ignore this” ( p. 174). Our current understanding of Arab American communities is indeed thin in many ways. Scholars of immigration and ethnic or race politics often leave out the Arab American experience. This scholarly blind spot The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, 5 (2020), 412–425. © The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2019 0022-4634/19