A deceptively innocuous intellectual division of labor undergirds Middle East studies today. Imperial legacies, colonial missions, and nationalist as well as other liberationist projects are the subject matter for scholars who work in the conventionally defined “area” of the Middle East. Race is the purview of those who study Middle Eastern migrants “elsewhere” (i.e., the Americas, Australia, or Europe). In Between Arab and White, Sarah Gualtieri makes a landmark contribution by showing how these distinct phenomena are historically linked and that in order to gain a more complete picture of the former, one must engage with the latter as well. For example, at a time when the United States was ruled by Jim Crow laws and anti-Asian immigration policies, the question that pre World War II Syrian migrants had to learn to ask themselves was, “To what race do we belong?”—and their response claiming whiteness—carried implications for homeland politics, foreign interventions, and the disassociation of the “Middle East” from Asia.
With an introduction, five body chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue, the book's main idea is that pre World War II Syrian ethnicity took shape in the United States through racial and nationalist ideologies that were in transnational circulation. Chapter 1 takes a refreshing look at the “premigratory context” of Bilad al-Sham, the land of geographical Syria now made up of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine. The author places in the same frame of analysis the “internal migration within and between provinces of the [Ottoman] empire” during the 19th century and the international mobility of persons that began in its final decades (p. 23). Underlying earlier intraimperial migratory movements from “the countryside to the city,” writes Gualtieri (p. 29), was a “deeper transformation in the economy of Lebanon that would ultimately link what had been an internal migration system to an international one: the incorporation of Lebanon into a capitalist world economy.” With a “high degree of flexibility” (p. 45), Syrian households in this land under economic transformation broke with earlier patterns of internal migration by sending one or more of their members abroad, mostly to the Americas.
As peddlers, seamstresses, or textile manufacturers, many late 19th- and early 20th-century Syrian migrants sought U.S. citizenship and struggled to comply with the racial restrictions of U.S. naturalization laws. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways that Syrianness was constructed in a U.S. racial order. The author shows that Syrians mobilized to stake their inclusion within the “white race” and thus fortify their U.S. citizenship applications. Early on, many used their Christianness to allege affinity with Europe, and later, they adopted racist attitudes toward African Americans and Asians to affirm their whiteness. Especially after the passage of U.S. xenophobic laws that prohibited or limited migration from a vague “Asiatic zone,” Syrians “successfully” distinguished their homeland from “Asia.” Gualtieri observes, “The exclusion of Syria from the Asiatic barred zone helped to consolidate” Syrians' claims to be part of the “white race.” As a result, the U.S. “legal construction of Syrian whiteness became part of a larger story of their disassociation from Asia and of the creation of a new category, the ‘Middle East’ (which is, in fact, West Asia)” (p. 77). That is, early Syrians' ethnic engagement with an anti-Asian U.S. racial order helped naturalize the very notion of the Middle East.
Other boundaries around that same “area” in southwestern Asia were concurrently drawn by emergent nationalist movements. Chapter 3 looks at how Syrian migrants in the United States helped to shape—and were shaped by—debates on a broad array of Arab national sentiments. Before the end of World War I, Syrians' struggles with U.S. naturalization had opened a wider dialogue about citizenship in relation to an Arab nation and the Ottoman state, Arabism, and Ottomanism. Syrian émigré leaders in the United States expressed divergent views in migrant-press circles and also at the first Arab Congress, convened in Paris in 1913 and attended by many from the Americas. Though in the minority among Arabists and Ottomanists, Naoum Mokarzel (founder of the New York-based al-Hoda) “became an outspoken advocate of French intervention in Syria” and was “pleased by what he called ‘Faysal's total failure’” in 1919 (pp. 102–103). As a key supporter of Syrians' claims to whiteness in legal actions explored in the earlier chapter, Mokarzel implicitly drew on similar racial logics for his Maronite Christian Lebanese national aspirations as well.
By asking themselves to what race they were part and to what nation they belonged, pre World War II Syrians participated in debates that were never fully resolved. These indeterminacies mark the book's last two body chapters. In Chapter 4, Gualtieri provides a somber, multidimensional view of the lynching—never before examined by a scholar—of a Syrian immigrant, Nola Romey, and the killing of his wife, Fannie, in Florida in 1929. The Romeys had migrated from Zahle to the U.S. South nearly a quarter century before. Their lynching and killing was evidence of Syrian racial “inbetweenness, or the inconclusiveness of . . . [their] white identity” (p. 120). Chapter 5 looks at how the ambiguous racial and national status of Syrians was played out along gendered lines in terms of a popular U.S. theater piece that promoted the “effacement” of Syrianness in favor of white Americanness (p. 143), as well as in relation to an Arab feminist intervention that urged women and men alike to become “modern Syrians” (pp. 148–50). These page-turning topics culminate in the book's epilogue that brilliantly synthesizes Arab identity and political mobilizations in a changing U.S. racial order from 1945 to post-9/11 times.
Gualtieri's conceptual vigor is matched by methodological rigor. She worked in a dozen archives in Syria, Lebanon, France, and the U.S. Arabic-language sources predominate, such as Beiruti, Cairene, and Damascene media (al-Mashriq, al-Hilal, and al-Muqtabas) as well as more than ten famous and lesser-known New York City-based Arabic newspapers. They enable a nuanced account of how Syrian editors and readers across the United States debated the ways they were racially constructed as well as their own shifting views of the “homeland” and its relations to imperial powers and liberationist hopes. French-language sources play an important role too. In the early 1920s, when the newly mandated French rule over Syria tried to govern subjects who had migrated to the Americas, French diplomatic officials complained that the mahjari press was “anti-French” while they also took note of the racial violence that befell their Syrian subjects in the U.S. South. English-language sources occupy an important place as well, evident in the author's use of U.S. court records and news reportage as well as literature and theater depictions of Arabs near and far. With this impressive range of sources, Gualtieri delivers the rich empirical details necessary to support her groundbreaking arguments.
It is not enough to say that this is the most important book ever published in Arab diaspora studies and a novel combination of American and Middle Eastern studies. With theoretical originality and methodological meticulousness, Between Arab and White will transform the boundaries of Middle East studies by showing the relevance of the idea of race to its canonical themes. Many scholars and scholarly associations of the “Middle East”—often imagined to lie solely “over there” in southwestern Asia—have not attended to how the region's intellectual and political elites wrote and thought about the notion of race as they engaged with the related—and well-researched—concepts of nation and modernity. Sarah Gualtieri demonstrates that the idea of race can no longer be ignored or limited to the study of Middle Eastern migrants “elsewhere” but rather lies at the very heart of a critical intellectual agenda for Middle East studies.
