Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

Great Lakes Books Series

by Nabeel Abraham (Contributor), Alixa Naff (Contributor), Amira Saad (Contributor)

Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. The book goes behind the bulletproof glass in Iraqi Chaldean liquor stores. It explores the role of women in a Sunni mosque and the place of nationalist politics in a Coptic church. It follows the careers of wedding singers, Arabic calligraphers,restaurant owners, and pastry chefs. It examines the agendas of Shia Muslim activists and Washington-based lobbyists and looks at the intimate politics of marriage, family honor, and adolescent rebellion. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, while over fifty photographs provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected, images. In their efforts to represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and diaspora cultures.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

630 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2000

About the author

Nabeel Abraham (born 1950) is an American anthropologist and activist. His research focuses around Arab-Americans and how Arabs and Palestinians are represented in mainstream American media.

Reviews

[Grace Perreault · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read 5 chapters for a Community Analysis paper of Dearborn. I enjoying learning about community relations between different Arabic groups and how time spent in their homeland affects those relations. I worked at a liquor store owned by Iraqi immigrants for two years. This book discusses the strong value of entrepreneurship in Arab immigrants. This was extremely fascinating to learn about, especially working for someone with this value.

This book was published in 2000, therefore the literature was published before 9/11 and closer to when refugees came to the Detroit area. This perspective was valuable for my paper and personal reflection.

[Zohra Star · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book about Arab Americans and their history.