This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by examining how race becomes socialized in and through the production and presentation of Arab culture in two ethnographic case studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. Both these case studies center the “foreigner” subject as one who embodies proximity to white power and delimits the boundaries of such power. We argue that the category of foreigner is thus a racialized construct that not only complicates the Black–white binary of race relations but strategically evades explicit discourses and practices of racecraft that are violent, discriminatory, and exclusionary. By provincializing critical race theory through the particularities of Arab lived experience, we illustrate how local social categories are entangled with historic legacies of empire and contemporary global logics of racialized difference while remaining sensitive to how conceptions of difference exceed Euro-American categories of race. Our work therefore directs attention towards alternative enactments of racialization within the Global South.
Articles by Shayna Silverstein
Shayna Silverstein is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East, with a focus on Syria. Her recent and forthcoming publications include essays in Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Performance Matters, Music & Politics, Remapping Sound Studies (Duke Press), Punk Ethnography (Wesleyan Press), and an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image. Her current book project analyzes the ethos of movement (ḥarake in Syrian Arabic) and politics of performance, specifically how Syrian dabke, a popular dance music suffused with cultural memory and nationhood, has paradoxically contributed to isolation and fragmentation within Syrian society throughout the recent conflict. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and Buffett Institute at Northwestern University.