Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream.

• Author: Menon, Sridevi
• Position: Book Reviews

Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, editors. Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 629 pages. Paper $17.46.

"Americans have trouble thinking of Arabs as a standard 'ethnic group,'" (p. 2) declare Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shyrock, in their introduction to Arab Detroit, an eclectic and compelling collection of essays, interviews, memoirs, and poems that document the Arab American/immigrant experience in Detroit. As the title signals, this is a book that claims and marks an "ethnic" space for Arab America in the city home to the American institution, the Ford Motor Company. The juxtaposition of two spaces, one "American" (the mainstream) and the other "ethnic" (the margin) provides the dialectic on which the material in the book is structured. Yet, these two sites are not discrete, and it is precisely in the ways in which these two worlds overlap, collide, and engage and confront each other that the editors, Abraham and Shyrock, perceive a movement from "margin to mainstream" as being perhaps inevitable. Arab Detroit, therefore, is that "in-between" place, one that necessarily inhabits both spaces simultaneously, whe re immigrants from vastly different worlds struggle to make new homes and meanings in the United States.

The book is arranged in 6 parts, with each section focusing on an aspect of Arab America. However, as the editors caution, the themes and issues raised in each section go beyond the labels imposed. With twenty-five contributors, the book offers a range of experiences and critical analyses that emphasize the diversity and vitality of Arab Detroit. Most refreshingly, the book offers glimpses of private worlds within Arab Detroit, where issues of race, identity, class, and ethnicity are negotiated within the home and family, and between home and community. Where most studies of Arab America have focused on the immigration of Syrians to the United States during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Arab Detroit reveals the ways in which this landscape has been dramatically transformed by the arrival of Yemeni, Palestinian, Chaldean, Iraqi Shi'i and other immigrants from West Asia. Not only the city's spatial arrangement--with the Ford Motor Company looming over Arab Detroit--but also Arab Detro it reflects the ghettoization of newer immigrants in specific sites within Arab Detroit, marking class and cultural distinctions and disparities between new and older immigrants. The book therefore explores not only the relationship between Arab America and "America," but also the nuances of inter-ethnic, religious, and parochial tensions now deployed in Arab...