Writing Histories of Middle Eastern Immigration to the Puget Sound

Arbella Bet-Shlimon’s seminar (developed in partnership with Liora Halperin) will approach the history of Arab immigrant communities in the Puget Sound region through broader histories of Levantine, Iraqi, and North African migration to the Americas. In earlier waves of migration around the turn of the twentieth century, immigrants from these regions tended to describe themselves with terms specific to their areas of origin, such as "Syrian," and many were from indigenous non-Arabophone communities. Over the course of the twentieth century, these immigrants developed a largely shared diaspora identity of being Arab and, thus, Arab American. That identity was racially intertwined with whiteness in the United States, a status that the first wave of Syrian immigrants fought to obtain in a Jim Crow-influenced legal and social system. But the “Arab American” identity has declined as a site of political mobilization and humanitarian work in the Seattle area. Therefore, in this seminar, students will seek to understand—and produce original research on—what it means and has meant to be “Arab” in Seattle through the study of Middle Eastern migration to the Americas.