Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 2 246 Hallet, Mark/ Christine Riding (2006). Hogarth. London: Tate Publishing. Hinz, Berthold/ Hartmut Krug et al. (1986). William Hogarth 1697-1764. Gießen: Anabas-Verlag. Paulson, Ronald (1989). Hogarth’s Graphic Works. 3. Auflage. London: The Print Room. Daniel Becker Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Deutschland Alfred Hornung and Martina Kohl (eds.), Arab American Literature and Culture. (American Studies. A Monograph Series 199). Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Martina Koegeler-Abdi Arab American literature has experienced a boom in the last decades, joining the ranks of other multi-ethnic US literatures. In the 1980s and 1990s Arab American cultural production struggled for visibility, which radically changed and turned into hypervisibility in the post 9/ 11 era (see Salaita 2011). Despite this recent popularity, both Arab American studies and various genres of Arab American cultural production remain in in a state of flux and formation. Salah D. Hassan and Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman (2006) summarize the most important areas in need of further research in this field in a special edition of the MELUS Journal dedicated to Arab American Literature: Generally, there is a significant lack of critical analysis and monographs about Arab American literary and cultural productions, especially with views to the impossibility of clear-cut ethnic and racial classifications of ‘Arab Americanness’ and the multiple factors involved in the production of Arab American identity. Further, the reactions of Arab American cultural production to US domestic and international politics, for example Arab American cultural self-representation within a climate of increased ethnic profiling, have so far remained understudied. The collection Arab American Literature and Culture addresses and alleviates the lack of research in many of these underexplored areas. The book analyses cultural achievements by Arab Americans and Muslims in the US and their national/ transnational perception, and strives to initiate interdisciplinary dialogues. The volume is part of the worldwide efforts by the American Studies Associations to counter hegemonic Rezensionen 247 discourses conflating Arabness, Islam, and threat in the post 9/ 11 era, which have sparked scholarly reactions within and beyond the United States. This volume collects reissued and new articles from national and regional American Studies conferences and initiatives in Germany on Arab American literature and culture. The selected articles were written between 2004 and Obama’s second run for presidency in 2012, and reflect joint efforts of the US Embassy Teacher Academy, the American Studies Division of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, and the Atlantic Academy in Rhineland- Palatinate to disseminate knowledge about Arab American communities and cultures. Even though the volume does not offer an explicit organization into subsections, the articles are loosely structured into three parts, clustering around three different approaches to the study of Arab American identity and culture, viz. legal studies, cultural studies and social sciences. These are further interspersed by pedagogical contributions on teaching Arab American culture in the German ESL classroom. The first articles by Ghada Quaisi Audi and Rolf Theis present legal and pedagogical perspectives on Arab American communities in the post 9/ 11 context respectively and function as an important introductory contextualization of the ethnic, social, and religious diversity subsumed under the terms ‘Arab(-)American’. At the same time, the articles refer to teach other and exemplify a research-practice transfer: Quaisi Audi calls on educators and American civil society to counter the ethnic profiling sanctioned by the US government in the wake of 9/ 11. Theis’ article heeds this call in the context of the German ESL classroom, thus contributing a transatlantic perspective. He presents a case study of a comparative and project-oriented class design focusing on the differences between Muslim American and Muslim German communities in a German high school. Such a group research project on selected topics allows students to test their own assumptions and to increase their intercultural competence. Mita Banerjee and Günther Sommerschuh contribute another article concerned with pedagogy in dialogue with Arab American cultural studies; their case study shows how applied intercultural pedagogy in ESL classrooms uses an analysis of the film The Wind and the Lion to discuss and deconstruct stereotypes. The cultural studies angle, which comprises most of the subsequent articles, represents the main part of the book and explores Arab American narrative literatures, film, theater, poetry and music. The main points cutting across most of these articles concern the complex relationship between mainstream Hollywood representations of Arabs, self-representations in Arab American cultural production, and questions of Arab American identity and resistance. This joint analytical focus on representations of stereotypical, hybrid, and/ or hyphenated Arab American identities, in primary sources ranging from Arab American literature and film to performance and pedagogy, provides a compelling panorama of the state of the art in Arab American cultural production and scholarship from a transnational perspective. Lisa Suhair Majaj’s article on the “Origins and Development of Arab American Literature” contextualizes the long history of Arab American cultural production in the US, and poses questions central to the understanding of the emerg- Rezensionen 248 ing field: In how far does the focus on ethnicity limit or enrich Arab American literature, and is Arab American identity, which is also based on connections to overseas politics, transnational rather than ‘hyphenated’ American? The subsequent articles address and answer these questions from various points of view. Zou Lanfang and Yu Yuping argue that El-Saadawi’s autobiography My Life exemplifies a fluid sense of self which also includes a transcultural dimension between Egypt and the US. Mita Banerjee then zooms out from the self to context and examines the correlation of ethnicity and stereotyping in Hollywood and Bollywood mass entertainment as a condition which Arab American cultural production has to address. For her, resistance to these stereotypes and a nuanced, multi-facetted representation of Arab American identity are defining characteristics of the emerging Arab American literary genres. Furthermore, in her analysis of Hosseini’s The Kite Runner she emphasizes that the presence or absence of privilege, which she calls ‘transparency’, is a more useful category of analysis for identity than ‘race’, because it is not as contingent on local/ arbitrary perceptions and equally present in Non- Western societies. In terms of literary analysis, Hosseini’s intercultural negotiations around transparency in the life of the protagonist Amir in Afghan and American societies shows the need for recognizing the transnational dimension in critical multiculturalism and in the definition of the meaning of ‘Arab American’. Heike Raphael-Hernandez further adds to this argument by offering an overview of stereotypes in recent Hollywood productions, e.g. Crash (2004) and Crossing Over (2009), and representations in films by Arab American directors, e.g. American East (2008), Amreeka (2009), Three Veils (2011). Generally, she notices a trend toward more nuanced and humanizing character portrayals in all post 9/ 11 movies going hand in hand with an increase in gender stereotyping in Hollywood productions. This trend reflects the public discourse of feeling sympathy and suspicion toward the Arab American community at the same time in an ambivalent reaction against ethnic profiling. Through this intensified gender stereotyping the association of Islam with ‘threat’ continues to serve narratives of Western/ Christian superiority, often bolstered by native informants, while independent Arab American film makers try to address this reductive perception of Arab Americanness by multiplying stories and characterizations in their representations. The next articles turn to questions about performance and subjectivity. Anneka Esch-van Kan analyzes a major contributor to the currently emerging genre of Arab American theatre, viz. Yussef El Guindi. Esch-van Kan argues that his post-structuralist aesthetics questions mainstream assumptions, but also simplistic notions of Arab American identity politics. His plays deconstruct American patriotism, concepts of self and identity as well as the role of language. Dissecting meaning creation and world building, he thus goes beyond the limited focus on ethnicity. Silke Schmidt’s article goes on to question processes of identity construction in contemporary Arab American women’s literature. She applies dance studies methodologies to an analysis of literary performances of subjectivity in the novels Crescent by Diana Abu Jaber and West of Jordan by Laila Halaby. This innovative approach avoids Rezensionen 249 the ethnic reductionism in literary analysis by introducing dance as a method and metaphor for multi-ethnic identity negotiations. She shows that the characters’ ‘movements’ in search of identity across ethnic borders can be conceptualized not as just text but as performance, which may bring the protagonists into an upward spiral moving toward a coherent multi-ethnic self or leave the protagonist lost oscillating between ethnic poles. Schmidt argues that conventional concepts of hybrid identities need to take into account that neither does hyphenation necessarily imply hybridity, nor is hyphenation between Arabness and Americanness a given in the self-identification process of members of the transnational Arab(-)American community. Birgit Bauridl adds a different perspective to this argument. In her analysis of the autobiographical works by the performance poet Suheir Hammad and the rower Mark Gerban she makes a case for inevitable hybridization of individuals with multiple consciousness. These multiple affiliations to Otherness consist of a sense of self as an unmarked human being, as part of a category of general humanity, and at the same time relate to more than one ethnic identity marked as Other. She analyses how Hammad’s multi-ethnic identity negotiation between Arab/ American and African American and Gerban’s affiliations to American/ Jewish and Palestine culture uses this multiplicity as a tool of resistance against reductive national/ ethnic categories and bipolar identifications. She concludes that such performances of multiple consciousness are also selective in their constructions, and both Schmidt and Bauridl thus point to the need for more research to achieve a deeper understanding of Othering and identifications cutting across cultural boundaries. Axel Lubin’s article provides a transnational perspective on these questions from an extra-literary angle. He traces cross-ethnic connections in manifestations of solidarity and artistic collaborations among Palestinians, Haitians, and African Americans outside the conventional hegemony of centerperiphery. His analysis reconfigures the world from the standpoint of the oppressed by highlighting the deliberate and strategic transnational links between oppressed groups, such as the support by Gaza for Haiti or by the Amari refugee camp in Ramallah for victims of Hurricane Katrina, to express a shared experience of displacement. These artistic collaborations and citations, for example, in ‘liberation hip-hop’, forge comparisons to understand connections in inequality by expressing a shared structure of feeling of marginality. The third and last part of the book contributes a social science perspective on the Arab diaspora in the Americas. Anton Escher traces how the migrant Hadeed family, stemming from Syria and living in Antigua, turned into a global family enterprise through diaspora networking based on relation, village and regional identity instead of defining affiliation through religion or nationality. Omar Khalidi’s chapter on Mosque architecture in the US serves as a conclusion, arguing that new generations of Muslim Americans may tip the scales and will favor innovative designs following the Islamic principle of adapting and living in harmony with natural and historical environment of any given place Muslims live in. Rezensionen 250 In sum, the book’s strength is that these multiple and interdisciplinary approaches illuminate different sides of common current issues faced by Arab American communities and cultural producers in the process of finding collective and individual identity locations in the multi-ethnic American landscape. While the focus on pedagogical, legal and social science aspects remain rather marginal in the book, they do demonstrate the multiplicity in possible affiliations and identifications among Arab Americans and serve at the same time as an introduction and as a conclusion. The majority of the articles addressing aspects of cultural production and reception represent the state of the art in Arab American studies and the volume contributes to tracing the cultural histories of Arab American communities. Taken together, the presented articles also point to areas in need of further research, e.g. the place of (post-)identity politics in Arab American cultural production. The joint focus of most contributions on representations of Arab American identity provides a thorough foundation to better understand and explore the complexities of ethnicity and processes of ethnicity-based identity formation. This work takes on special importance in a transnational age where suspicion about ‘Islam’ and ‘Arabness’ has become one common denominator in Western hegemonic discourses. Within this context Arab American cultural production is at the same time in demand and yet frequently misrepresented. Nevertheless, literature and other cultural productions are a platform for Arab American artists to fight the reductive uses of ethnicity and to lay claim to multiple identity affiliations, and this volume successfully documents the post 9/ 11 scholarly discourses analyzing the Arab American cultural productions and its interaction with US American and German reception environments. References Hassan, Salah D./ Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman (2006). “Introduction.” MELUS 31/ 4. 3-13. Salaita, Steven (2011). Modern Arab American Fiction. A Reader’s Guide . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Martina Koegeler-Abdi American Studies Department Graz University, Austria