Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit - Paperback

by Yasmeen Hanoosh (Editor), Sally Howell (Editor), Andrew Shryock (Editor)

Back Jacket

Detroit's Arab and Chaldean communities are now over a century old. Their neighborhoods, businesses, and cultural influence continue to grow. Whether Muslim or Christian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Palestinian, or Lebanese, these Detroiters are building new lives and worlds in distinctive spaces that are not simply immigrant or refugee, religious or ethnoracial. In Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit, nineteen contributors consider how these worlds are connected to other times and places, what new identities are emerging in them, and how they are changing the political, economic, and demographic profile of the city. The contributors warn that, despite its deep local roots, Arab Detroit is at risk. They investigate racism and Islamophobia, threats to civil liberties, tense interactions between newcomers and the well established, and the community's struggle for change on its own terms.

Author Biography

Yasmeen Hanoosh is a fiction writer, literary translator, and professor of Arabic at Portland State University. She is the author of The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora and Ardh al-Khayrat al-Mal'unah (The Land of Cursed Riches), a collection of short stories in Arabic. Sally Howell is professor of history at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She has written and edited numerous books including Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade and Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging (both Wayne State University Press); the latter named a Michigan Notable Book and recipient of an Arab American Book Award. Howell is also a curator of public history projects, including the Halal Metropolis exhibition series. Andrew Shryock is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has authored and edited many books including Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream, Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade (both Wayne State University Press), and Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend.