Uncovering the role of sexuality in racializing Arab Americans, it challenges respectability politics-the drive to prove normativity to belong. ' Possible Histories brings an innovative queer analytic to the history of Arab Americans, inquiring into the intimate relationships among itinerant peddlers. I deeply appreciate Charlotte Karem Albrecht's insistence on intersectionality to underline acts of transitory entrepreneurship and the approach of 'historical-grounded imagining' that explores possibilities of queerness and anxiety, as well as pleasure.'-Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, coauthor of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress 'This highly enjoyable and important book is groundbreaking for its intellectual argument and methodological interventions. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a 'queer ecology' of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. 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.

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. 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. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.

Broken by Evelyn Alsultany