SUSIH 2025: Previewing the “Arab American Intellectual History” Opening Plenary

Anthony D. Smith argues that to be a people is to be rooted in an ethnie—a historic community with shared memories, symbols, traditions, customs, norms, and territory that can evolve into a modern nation. An ethnie (or people) is a community united by shared ancestry, culture, language, historical memories, and a sense of solidarity often connected to a specific homeland.  This insight informs the Thursday evening plenary panel on “Arab American Intellectual History” at this year’s Society for U.S. Intellectual History conference to be held in Detroit, Michigan, from Nov. 6-8.

Organized by Hani Bawardi, a professor of history at the University of Michigan Dearborn and author of The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship (University of Texas Press, 2014), this first ever panel on Arab American intellectual history at S-USIH explores Arab American identity, the social history of intellectuals, the use of art and literature in crafting identity, and the ways in which art and culture can simultaneously inflict trauma and serve as forms of resistance.

Bawardi notes that a photograph of Ameen Farah (1888-1975), dressed in a white coat and standing in the grocery store he owned in Flint, Michigan, is sometimes displayed at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.  In the context of the museum, Farah represents the immigrant experience, where many started as peddlers, then owned general stores, before successfully entering professional and business life—an inspiring story of upward mobility.  There is another dimension to Farah’s life, however.  In 1915, he founded the Free Syria Society, a diasporic outgrowth of an Arab awakening and attachment to Geographic Syria, an area encompassing Historic Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Bawardi argues that scholars largely ignored this narrative, which was an essential step to the creation of an Arab American identity centered on advocacy.  The Free Syria Society was the first of a series of formal organizations that Farah helped found dedicated to the “Syria idea.”

While many associate Arab American identity and politics with the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), which originated after the Arab defeat by Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and came to include figures such as Edward Said, Michael Suleiman, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, and Elaine Hagopian, Bawardi has explored the deeper roots of Arab American identity in organizations like the New Syria Party, the Arab National League, and the Institute of Arab American Affairs founded in the 1920s, 1930s, and the 1940s respectively. Moreover, immigrants possessed personal libraries stocked with pre-Islamic and Islamic classic texts—and Syrian libraries contained the works of pioneering poets of the mahjar (diaspora), many of whom lived in the U.S.  The printed word nurtured an Arab American identity well before the emergence of major postcolonial theorists and the scholarship of the AAUG.

Dearborn is the first U.S. city to be majority Arab American, with 55% of residents of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.  The city of 110,000 boasts a rich array of Middle Eastern restaurants and bakeries, and the largest mosque in North America.  Since 2005, it has hosted the Arab American National Museum, “the first and only museum dedicated to telling the Arab American story,” as its website declares.  Matthew Stiffler, who worked at the museum for twelve years and helped found the Center for Arab Narratives, which he now directs, will be joining the panel to discuss the ways in which the museum has become a locus of Arab American identity, even as it adopts and changes in the face of an ongoing series of crises.

Salah Hassan, a professor in the Muslim Studies Program and in Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, addresses the post-1967 reality of Arab American identity, culture, and politics, so much of which is conditioned by wars in the Middle East.  The result is a cultural identity shaped by trauma lasting over generations.

The panel focuses attention on art and activism.  Local artist Amal Beydoun will display and briefly discuss examples of her art.  The artist Zeyy Fawaz addresses the various challenges Arab American artists confront both creatively due to misrepresentations, socially when facing public perceptions and expectations, and institutionally when confronting barriers to access.

Looking for the first Arab grocery store owner from the city of Nazareth in Flint, Hani Bawardi contacted Roy Farah, the son of Ameen Farah.  Roy Farah revealed boxes in his basement full of his father’s papers, which became a window into the early twentieth-century roots of Arab American identity and anti-Ottoman advocacy.  Arab American identity began to emerge in print and culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.  The “Arab American Intellectual History” plenary panel, which focuses on questions of advocacy, identity, and culture, much of it rooted in eastern Michigan, similarly opens a window on a story too few Americans – and historians – know and at a time when such knowledge is more relevant than ever.