her own family history as a way to inform an interdisciplinary and historicist methodological approach that is rooted in feminist and queer epistemologies. This project proposes an alternative understanding of Arab American history that centers on women and the role of sexuality in navigating U.S. racial systems.
FELLOWS
ALENA ANISKIEWICZ
faculty
Charlotte Karem Albrecht
Alena Aniskiewicz
CHARLOTTE KAREM ALBRECHT
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW, SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES “Cultural Remix: Polish Hip Hop and the Sampling of Heritage”
The Syrian American peddling economy and its cultural traces (1870-1955) is an unexpected site for parsing how American perceptions of Arabs have long been rooted in ideas of their sexual and gender difference. After leaving Ottoman Greater Syria, Syrians sold goods across the U.S. while navigating systems of racism that intertwined with gender-sexual norms. Peddling enabled Syrians’ survival and transformed their family structures. While Americans also associated transient labor with homosexuality and scrutinized the numerous Syrian women peddlers, peddling paradoxically came to symbolize Arab assimilability in the United States. This project examines both the history of Syrian peddling as it affected Syrians’ racial positioning and questions of historical knowledge-making about sexuality for Arabs. The apparent absence of sexuality in most archival sources pertaining to the Arab American community allows Karem Albrecht to foreground how power functions through the creation of historical narratives. As a queer Arab American descendant of this history, she also draws on
“Cultural Remix” analyzes Polish hip hop’s engagement with the texts and traditions of Polish Romantic poets of the Great Emigration. Deeming the Romantic bard Adam Mickiewicz “the original rapper,” the hip-hop musicians and communities Aniskiewicz considers draw on the legacy of nineteenth-century partition and statelessness to offer a nationally-specific performance of hip hop’s conventional critical, anti-establishment stance, unique here in the ways it affirms a traditional nationalist discourse. The formal aspects of rap—rooted in sampling, intertextuality, decontextualizing the familiar, and privileging poetic prowess—position the genre as one in which Polish artists can engage and critique the narratives of their nation’s past. Expanding on these elements of the music, this dissertation theorizes hip-hop sampling of archival audio and “shout outs” to canonical Polish poets as a means to understand the relationship between documentary citation and narrative association in shaping the ways contemporary audiences create meaning from the past. Sampling their heritage, Polish rappers revive the narratives of Poland as an oppressed subject and remix the poetic texts of the stateless nation into hip-hop texts of a contemporary Poland increasingly at odds with both the European Union and its neighbors to the east.
RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FACULTY FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, AMERICAN CULTURE AND WOMEN’S STUDIES “An Inconsistent History: Arab American Peddlers and the Making of Sexuality, Gender, and Race”
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