Review: Emily Regan Wills's Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans

Reviewed by Todd Fine

The defeat of Donald Trump promises the imminent end of the “Muslim ban” targeting people from several Arab countries, yet the challenges facing Muslim and Arab communities in the United States will surely continue. In the recent book Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans, University of Ottawa political scientist Emily Regan Wills seeks to depict how Arab communities in New York City, whose lives are greatly shaped by external politics, engage in politics themselves.

Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans
By Emily Regan Wills
New York University Press, 2019
224 pages

Arab-American activism in the two decades since September 11, 2001 is an important story that academics and historians must continue to interrogate and learn lessons from. Due to New York being the city with the largest Arabic-speaking population in the nation, the site of the September 11 attacks, a national and international media hub, and home to the uniquely powerful and aggressive NYPD, it is the most natural and dynamic location for closer study of local Arab-American communities and activism. Having done most of her ethnographic fieldwork in Brooklyn Arab-American political organizations between 2008 and 2010, Wills offers a valuable and essential historical snapshot of a community in rapid and continual change.

Even though her research was done before the Associated Press’s 2011 revelations of extensive NYPD surveillance of Arab and Muslim communities, Wills sometimes found it difficult to get people to talk. Certain organizations, like the Arab-American Family Support Center, a social service entity based in Downtown Brooklyn, didn’t want her around at all. Nevertheless, rooted at Bay Ridge’s Arab American Association of New York, Wills engaged in substantial participant ethnography in English classes and performed interviews with staff and students. She also followed the organizing activities of several Palestinian activist groups.

While most studies of political activity look at behaviors like voting, protesting, and lobbying, Wills observes how politics affect everyday activities in Arab communities — in the classroom, on dates, and at community festivals. New, soft political identities even emerge from daily interaction. Wills directly observes an operational Arab identity coalesce as recipients of social services share diverse Arab foods and find new commonalities with Arabic-speaking friends from different countries. 

Many people from Arabic-speaking countries deny identity as “Arabs,” and scholars have difficulty assessing the total number of Arab-Americans. Some believe that, with the decline of Arab nationalism, Arab identity is less salient across the board. Wills’s ethnography shows that, in the crucible of immigration, Arab identity may have less to do with the politics of nationalism and more to do with the practicalities of daily life. In turn, Wills suggests that the formation of Arab and Arab-American identities in spaces like the Arab American Association’s English classes then enables the organizational leadership to make political claims on this population’s behalf.

Wills also points out how the arrival date of cohorts of immigrants greatly shapes perceptions of the United States. Immigrants who experienced the post-September 11 backlash have different attitudes than the largely positive attitudes of those who came in the decade afterward, whom Wills largely studied. The attitudes of immigrants who arrived soon before or during the presidency of Donald Trump is a new topic scholars should examine.

Wills’s book offers insight into the common phenomenon of people outside Arab-American communities seeking to help or participate in some way, whether out of sympathy, solidarity, or curiosity. Wills suggests that her primary objective as a “non-Arab American” was to treat her ethnographic subjects as partners in political discussion, rather than as targets. Wills frequently references her own distinct identity as a married lesbian, as a mother, and as a vegetarian, and she describes how these identities sometimes touched her ethnographic fieldwork. Occasionally she felt compelled to avoid disclosing her own background to avoid judgement or uncomfortable discussions. 

However, her outsider status did make me question her theoretical assessments of social phenomena in these immigrant communities. In the chapter “The Panopticon of Bay Ridge,” informed by Foucault and feminist political theory, Wills concludes from interviews with young Arab-American women (especially political activists) that they live under the stress of an all-seeing panopticon to conform to traditional gender roles, subject to scrutiny from gossip and their families as much as by outsiders or the state. I would ask though if this “panopticon,” accepting it is the appropriate term, is as severe in New York as in their family’s countries, and also whether Wills’s organizational-grounded fieldwork granted sufficient understanding to theorize the full effects of gossip on the lives of these young women, whom Wills typically describes as autonomous and independent despite the pressures they face. Wills concedes that majority societies also have their own disciplinary attempts to regulate patriarchal norms, so I question whether isolating Bay Ridge as a “panopticon” was appropriate.

Wills might counter that she was faithfully echoing the voices of her interviewees, but after admitting her own cultural distance from these communities, adding such a weighty theoretical label, which could make Arab communities seem exceptionally disciplinary, intrusive, and severe, seems rather bold. In one section, Wills suggests that a white woman visitor to a public event on Palestine at City College misunderstood the purpose of gender segregation in seating (something Wills says is rare overall), which the visitor had labelled an injustice because of the existence of transgender individuals. Wills speculates, without interviewing the participants, that the young Arab women participating might have preferred gender segregation at this event because it freed them from immediate scrutiny and from “the panopticonic power of the community.” 

Wills doesn’t cite any other scholars who study Arab or Muslim communities who would affirm such theoretical terminology, nor does she interview the families of these young women or local religious leaders to present their perspectives. More ethnographic fieldwork in family, religious, and social spaces would have been appropriate if Wills sought to make such a broad assessment of the cultural dynamics of Bay Ridge and broader Arab communities in New York. I accept that leading Arab-American women activists — people like Linda Sarsour — have faced extraordinary pressures from all directions, but they have largely resisted the attempts by outsiders to critique and assess complex and evolving cultural practices in their communities. Ethnography requires some outsider assessment, but I believe that Wills could have addressed the issue of gossip and community pressure without introducing such a totalizing theoretical framework.

Just as Wills concludes with a recognition that the Arab Spring appeared to shift local political activism toward national identity (with Yemeni and Egyptian activist groups forming independently) and away from Arab identity, the end of the Trump administration may shake up Arab-American political activity once again. I have had the impression that New York City politicians have gone out of their way to engage Arab and Muslim communities in a desire to signal differences with Trump. With Wills emphasizing that Arab communities retain low levels of political mobilization along with a handful of weakly-staffed community organizations, it is conceivable that Trump’s exit may signal the return to New York City politics of NYPD surveillance and aggressive anti-BDS activity.

Wills’s key argument is that the overwhelming weight of politics on Arab-American lives directly relates to their lack of political power and mobilization. Thus, especially after the city loses a key figure like Arab American Association founder Dr. Ahmad Jaber, it is important that we have documents and histories like Arab New York, which can help us support the political effectiveness of communities that have faced such extreme challenges. This work will have persistent value as a multi-faceted ethnography of the political efforts of people under extraordinary pressure at an extraordinary time.

Todd Fine is the President of the Washington Street Advocacy Group, an organization that advocates for historic preservation of the "Little Syria" neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. He has worked with the City of New York and the "Percent for Art" program to develop a proper memorial for Arab-American literary heritage in the new Elizabeth Berger Plaza. He is PhD candidate in history at the CUNY-Graduate Center.