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Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
Price: $34.95
Pages: 204
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: American Crossroads
Publication Date:
07 February 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520391727
Format: Paperback
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Terms and Translations
Introduction
1. Traveler, Peddler, Stranger, Syrian: Queer Provocations and Sexual Threats
2. “A Woman without Limits”: Syrian Women in the Peddling Economy
3. Wandering in Diaspora: The Syrian American Elite and Sexual Normativity
4. The Possibilities of Peddling: Imagining Homosocial and Homoerotic Pleasure in Arab America
Conclusion: Alixa Naff and the Parenthetical Syrian American Lesbian
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Terms and Translations
Introduction
1. Traveler, Peddler, Stranger, Syrian: Queer Provocations and Sexual Threats
2. “A Woman without Limits”: Syrian Women in the Peddling Economy
3. Wandering in Diaspora: The Syrian American Elite and Sexual Normativity
4. The Possibilities of Peddling: Imagining Homosocial and Homoerotic Pleasure in Arab America
Conclusion: Alixa Naff and the Parenthetical Syrian American Lesbian
Notes
Bibliography
Index