Description
Book SynopsisFrom the late 1850s to the 1940s, multiple colonial projects, often in tension with each other, influenced the formation of local, transimperial, and transnational political identities of Arab Ottoman subjects in the eastern Mediterranean and the Western Hemisphere. Arab Ottoman men, women, and their descendants were generally accepted as whites in a racially stratified Brazilian society. Local anxieties about color and race among white Brazilians and European immigrants, however, soon challenged the white racial status the Brazilian state afforded to Arab Ottoman immigrants.
In
Transimperial Anxieties José D. Najar analyzes how overlapping transimperial processes of migration and return, community conflicts, and social adaption shaped the gendered, racial, and ethnic identity politics surrounding Arab Ottoman subjects and their descendants in Brazil. Upon arrival to the Brazilian Empire, Arab Ottoman subjects were referred to as
turcos, an all-encompas
Trade Review“
Transimperial Anxieties is an important contribution to the field of Middle East mobility studies. The imperial lens proposed to think through Brazil’s early reception of Ottoman subjects is a new and exciting frame for Middle Eastern mobilities in the region. The rich and diverse sources, skillfully set in conversation, highlight important transitions shaping mobile subjects’ horizons and identify novel and relevant intersections between their circulations and Brazilian imperial and republican economic and social formations. The author’s attention to the gendered dimensions of Brazilian and Syrian Lebanese citizenship in Brazil, to the erasure of women’s labor from family narratives of upward mobility, and to the deployment of gendered Islamophobia in repatriation requests are all novel and welcome.”—Camila Pastor, author of
The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French MandateTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Ottomans, Turks, and Syrians in the Brazilin Empire
2. Brazilian-Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy
3. Black Dangerousness and Cannibal Peddlers
4. From Subjects of The Sultan to White Brazilian Citizens
5. Citizenship and Negotiating Whiteness
6. Ottoman and Syrian-Lebanese Immigrant Women Who Paved The Way
7. Repatriating Brazilian Women and Children of Muslim Men: The Gendered Politics of Citizenship
8. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
