Description
Book SynopsisA free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histor
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Terms and Translations
Introduction
1. Traveler, Peddler, Stranger, Syrian: Queer Provocations and Sexual Threats
2. “A Woman without Limits”: Syrian Women in the Peddling Economy
3. Wandering in Diaspora: The Syrian American Elite and Sexual Normativity
4. The Possibilities of Peddling: Imagining Homosocial and Homoerotic Pleasure in Arab America
Conclusion: Alixa Naff and the Parenthetical Syrian American Lesbian
Notes
Bibliography
Index
