Week 15 Reading Response

In Nadine Naber’s chapter entitled “Decolonizing Culture,” she examines the ways in which “Arab culture”—particularly as it pertains to the dominant middle-class Arab Americans—is imagined and reinforced. By doing so, she simultaneously interrogates the perpetuated dichotomy between “Arabness” and “Americanness.”Naber begins by recounting personal stories of how Arab “culture” was constantly used as a tool to assert control over her and her siblings, which essentially translated as being the opposite of “American” in order to truly “be Arab”; that is to say, she notices that it became a common understanding that being American is to immerse oneself in sexual promiscuity and weak family structures, while being Arab was its antithesis. By noticing this reinforced dichotomy, Naber illustrates how gender and sexuality, and their attached ideologies, are among the biggest indicators of this imagined difference between American and Arab cultures. For example, in one of the interviews she conducted within Arab communities, a participant discloses that “[t]here was pressure to marry an Arab woman because the idea was that ‘She will stand by her family, she will cook and clean, and have no career…She will do anything for her husband” whereas “‘American women leave their families’” (83). The ideals of femininity and heterosexuality and the corresponding imagined “good Arab girl,” then, become the primary symbols of maintaining Arab “culture” and rejecting “Americanness.” Arabness is painted as morally superior. Naber further discusses this idea of Arab “culture” that actively works to be in opposition of American “culture” as “an immigrant survival strategy for replacing U.S. Colonialist and Orientalist discourses about Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East with seemingly positive or empowering concepts of culture identity” (85). Ironically, she notes, homophobia and patriarchy that seem essential to Arab “culture” are actually sustained within middle-class Arab communities in order to meet the “demands of white middle class acceptability” (86). This is to say: though it seems Arab Americans work to maintain their learned culture from their nation of origin, compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy have emerged not just because of cultural matters, but because of their subconscious assimilation—not because of their desire to be un-American (read as not sexually promiscuous and not having broken families). Naber asserts that it is crucial for Arab communities to talk about things such as this compulsory heterosexuality because it enables steps forward for dismantling divisions between Orientalism and anti-Orientalism, American “culture” and Arab “culture,” and “the communal” and “the political.”