Rayana and I were talking about this book and she said (giving her props) that this book seemed to be saying some new things. It really felt fresh. I agreed w/ her. Coming from Arab American Studies background, I was hard pressed to see anything that theoretically exciting happening, but it is bubbling up.
Nadine Naber and
Evelyn Alsultany at University of Michigan Ann Arbor's
American Culture program have some rigorous work that is going to challenge previous models of academic discursive practice. So do many other young Arab/Muslim academic mavericks like
Steven Salaita and
Khaled Mattawa as well as
Carol Bardenstein.
Sarah Gualtieri in ASE/History is doing important work on prerequisite cases and racial formation in early twentieth century Syrian and Lebanese immigrant groups/ diasporic communities.
This isn't about subject positions/or queering Arab/Muslim/South Asian writings. While Reading
Terrorist Assemblages, I am in the midst of reading
Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad,
Queer Diasporas, ed Patton and Sanchez-Eppler, and
Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures by Gayatri Gopinath. They are all very engaging texts but Assemblages stands as exemplary, for me anyway, because of the ways in which she takes the marginality and invisibility of Arab/Muslim/queer subjects (topics, intellectuals, engagement with this arena) and also exposes the liberal gay (white) agenda in ways that really create productive fissures. She does not reproduce or reinscribe the same paradigms. Desiring Arabs is really grounded in incredible research but does not engage the queers of color/internation in ways that seem fruitful. His chapters on literary desires and close textual readings offer and queering of those texts. His key target, the 'gay internation', seems to be represented , in the end, as this monolithic entity that gets maligned and dismissed. Those sections read like diatribe and polemic verses really rigorous engagement with cultural objects. Puar really is an exemplary text for the kind of work I would love to be doing in ASE. So far, books I wish I had written or wish I had the talent to write: Terrorist Assemblages, An Archive of feelings, and Woman, Native, Other and Fuss's book on strategic essentialism: Essentially speaking? I know those are old school but when i was in grad school before, those were big books/ideas for me.
you guys are posting fun/cheeky music and ideas and i am being so serious. Sometimes, it feels like life and death for me. Can we say dramatic? i can be and i can also be uptight, socially awkward, overly eager, "trying too hard?". My therapist said i need a book on emotional intelligence because i tend not to know a dangerous situation/or something fraught with potential explosive and violent potential. then i tend to read/misread things. call it paranoia which i think is protective and sometimes keeps us safe rather than labeling it 'off'. or I am OFF. i have never been cool/
we are getting away from assemblages. Puar's book is puuuuuuurfect. loooking forward to engaging all of you with her constructs.
wish i could be think of something campy, funny (I am capable of humor!), but these days despondency and numbness are my friends. trying to break from the brooding /annoying persona and get happy or just wake up out of my (intellectual, aesthetic, sexual) coma. two decades: hard to shake off.
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