ABOUT THIS BOOK

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

REVIEWS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0001
[Palestinian American youth, citizenship, belonging, transnationalism, nationalism, immigration, citizenship education, history of Palestine, war on terror, Muslims]
This chapter introduces the countervailing politics of belonging and citizenship with which this book is centrally concerned. On one hand, young Palestinian Americans navigated and constructed belonging and citizenship across transnational social fields. At the same time, they encountered an exclusionary politics of belonging emerging out of the routine practices of everyday U.S. nationalism inside their schools—a politics of belonging that was in place well before September 11, 2001 and that remains steadfast to this day. Taking an anthropological perspective on citizenship as lived experience through which people negotiate social, cultural, and political membership, this book analyzes a fundamental schism between the ways the Palestinian American youth experienced and constructed transnational citizenship and belonging, and the ways they were positioned as “impossible subjects” of the nation, despite their juridical status as citizens. School was the central site at which this disjuncture unfolded, for it is the primary state institution through which young people from immigrant communities encounter normative discourses of citizenship and belonging. The chapter offers an overview of the research project, and a brief introduction to the recent history of Palestine. (pages 1 - 36)
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Part 1. Belonging and Citizenship

1. “Trying to Have an Identity without a Place in the World” - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0002
[Palestinian American youth, transnationalism, belonging, community, cultural authenticity, transnational social fields, nationalism, Palestine, West Bank, occupation]
Young people’s sense of being Palestinian and belonging to a national community was produced through everyday practices that unfolded across transnational social fields, constituting an informal citizenship education. These identifications were bound up with an independence movement, co-constructing a sense of self, a notion of a people, and a relationship with an imagined national community. This chapter illustrates the range of practices through which this sense of belonging was produced. For example, after the Oslo Accords, many mothers moved back to Palestine in order to afford the children a cultural, linguistic, religious, and national education. In the U.S., most families lived in a tight-knit Palestinian community, routinely spoke Arabic and socialized together, worked to send remittances to family members in the Middle East, watched Arabic media, and participated in political advocacy for justice and peace in Palestine. Through these communal practices, Palestinian American youth developed a sense of belonging to a Palestinian national imaginary. The meaning and parameters of this imagined community were constructed in relation to three themes: connection to a particular land experienced as an intimate, moral space; a (contested) notion of cultural authenticity; and a sense of Palestinian identity as inextricably linked with suffering and sacrifice. (pages 39 - 73)
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2. “We Are Stateless, but We Still Have Rights” - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0003
[Palestinian American youth, Muslims, citizenship, transnationalism, rights, democratic, citizenship, occupation]
Chapter 2 explores young Palestinian Americans’ lived experience of citizenship forged within transnational fields. These youth spoke of their identification with the U.S. in terms of citizenship and its attendant rights. Their understanding of citizenship was developed in transnational fields and anchored by their knowledge of, and experiences with, the denial of rights that they and their families had experienced, most often, at the hands of other states, particularly the state of Israel. This intersection of the lived experience of democratic citizenship rights and encounters with states’ power to deny these rights strengthened both their sense of belonging to the Palestinian national community, and their political commitments to ideals promised by democratic citizenship—ideals they believed should be upheld in the U.S. and elsewhere. For the Palestinian American youth the lived experience of citizenship was dynamic, multi-directional, and transnational. US citizenship rights offered young people a comparative lens for critiquing the abrogation of rights and equality by other countries, and also by the US. (pages 74 - 100)
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Part 2. “I Know How the Men in Your Country Treat You”: Everyday Nationalism and the Politics of Exclusion

3. “The Best Country in the World”: Imagining America in an Age of Empire - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0004
[liberal, multicultural nationalism, democracy, diversity, tolerance, imperialism, radical innocence, cultural politics, colonial amnesia, curriculum]
Chapter 3 analyzes the dominant public discourses of American liberal multicultural nationalism as they were re-articulated in the post 9-11 era—discourses that link America and Americans to a set of liberal values for which the nation stands. This dominant discourse of liberal multicultural nationalism implicitly and explicitly co-constructs self and “Other”, belonging and not belonging, civilization and barbarism. This dominant national imaginary is deeply interwoven with the United States’s imperial ambitions, mitigating its economic, political, and military interests in the Middle East and South Asia. At this historic moment, the normative articulations of what it means to be American—and the values and beliefs that this nation is imagined to embody—have been drawn in relation to a particular discursive construction of Islam and the “Muslim world.” Drawing on a decade of scholarship on the cultural politics of the “war on terror” this chapter illustrates the connection between these broad political discourses of nationalism, and the everyday nationalism that, as the following two chapters show, Palestinian American youth encountered in their schools and communities. It illustrates how these nationalist discourses unfold in curriculum, and a student newspaper. (pages 109 - 137)
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4. “The Beauty of America Is It’s a Salad Bowl”: Everyday Nationalism at Regional High - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0005
[Palestinian American youth, Muslims, everyday nationalism, liberal multiculturalism, freedom, diversity, tolerance, national imaginary, racialization, war on terror]
Chapter 4 examines the stories educators told about America and American education that were expressions of everyday nationalism--the ways in which broader discourses of nationalism circulate in everyday life through talk and action. Teachers implicitly drew upon the discourses of liberal, multicultural nationalism, fashioning Regional High as a space ruled by the fundamental and interwoven ‘American’ values of individual freedom, diversity, and tolerance. Educators viewed public education as the forum for inculcating those values in the nation’s newest subjects, assimilating immigrant youth to the norms of American society. These stories educators narrated also structured their assumptions about, and interactions with, the Palestinian American youth. They often positioned Palestinians and Muslims as illiberal subjects of Other places in need of liberation from or discipline for these illiberal tendencies. The invocation of national boundaries that excluded Palestinian American Muslim youth was not only manifest in moments of conflict and tension. In fact, exclusion from the national imaginary was often signaled through more benign interactions. Both banal and hostile interactions emerge from and reproduce liberal multicultural nationalism in ways that make certain kinds of Palestinian and Muslim identifications impossible to include in the American national imaginary. (pages 138 - 169)
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5. “Are You or Are You Not an American?”: The Politics of Belonging in Everyday Life - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0006
[Palestinian American youth, Muslims, politics of belonging, pledge of allegiance, citizenship, transnationalism, everyday nationalism, racialization, national imaginary, war on terror]
Chapter 5 focuses on the politics of belonging as they unfolded on the ground in everyday life at Regional High--political projects that through which the boundaries of national communities are established and contested. Looking at particular sites of conflict that emerged between Palestinian American youth on the one hand, and their teachers and peers on the other, the chapter examines the Palestinian American youths’ everyday bids for citizenship: the ways in which these young people made claims for belonging, and work for equality, justice, and inclusion. Unfortunately, these bids for citizenship gained little traction and were often met with practices of silencing and discipline at Regional High. This chapter illustrates how Palestinian American youths’ bids for citizenship—demands for full participation, membership, and equality in school and society—were constrained by the practices of everyday nationalism that constructed them as outsiders to this national imaginary. (pages 170 - 203)
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Conclusion - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289632.003.0007
[everyday nationalism, colonial amnesia, imperialism, citizenship, education, transnationalism, Palestinian American youth, Muslims, justice]
This chapter makes two arguments. First, as multicultural states become more and more the norm, practitioners and researchers who care about justice and inclusion cannot afford to become complacent about everyday nationalism inside our schools, and must challenge the exclusionary discourses and practices that everyday nationalism engenders. Second, the chapter argues for new models of citizenship education that purposefully orients to both local and global contexts of inequality. Citizenship education that supports young people, like the Palestinian Americans, to develop a powerful sense of belonging and inclusion to the multiple communities with which they affiliate must support them to challenge local and global inequality and injustice. It must encourage the development of activist citizenship practices that truly embrace transnational modes of belonging. However, it is not only Palestinian American—or other youth from transnational communities—who need a radically reconfigured citizenship education. Global inequalities and conflicts spill across all borders and affect all nations. Developing models of citizenship education that support all young people to actively engage in citizenship practices that fight inequality and oppression both within and across the artificial borders of nation-states must be central goal for any justice-oriented citizenship education. (pages 204 - 224)
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Acknowledgments

References

Index