Arab American Studies Association: Revolutionizing Knowledge: SWANA Studies and American Studies

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable examines how SWANA Studies, with its longstanding engagement with Palestinian liberation and its broader implications for academic freedom, provides essential resources for understanding and responding to the present conjuncture of late-stage empire, ongoing catastrophe, and accelerating devolution. By interrogating the violent eruptions that characterize this stage of imperial transformation—such as environmental collapse, displacement, racialized violence, and the erasure of subaltern histories—SWANA Studies offers an indispensable framework for reimagining American Studies in global and transnational terms. Central to this framework is the interrogation of how the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation challenges imperialist narratives and illuminates the intersections of colonialism, state violence, and resistance. By situating the roundtable as in conversation with Puerto Rican Studies — our conference locale with its history of colonialism and resistance—the discussion aims to deepen the comparative analysis of decolonization and solidarity across contexts. This setting enriches the discourse by providing a tangible backdrop that embodies the complexities and enduring impacts of colonial rule, as well as the resilience and agency of its people in Puerto Rico and in diaspora.

Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies, the discussion will highlight how SWANA Studies intersects with fields such as Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Queer and Disability Studies to articulate new modes of knowledge production, sociality, and solidarity. By positioning SWANA Studies as a foundational framework, this session emphasizes its potential to transform interdisciplinary research, teaching, and praxis, while foregrounding the global urgency of struggles like that for Palestinian liberation.

Participants will consider how SWANA Studies reframes global crises such as climate change, forced migration, and systemic inequalities. They will explore the contributions of SWANA literature, art, and film in reimagining identity and fostering solidarity within a global context. Additionally, the discussion will examine how the field engages with colonial and imperial histories to challenge contemporary systems of oppression, with a particular focus on the “Palestinian exception” in academia and politics. Finally, panelists will highlight the unique methodologies and frameworks SWANA Studies brings to interdisciplinary conversations, particularly in dialogue with Puerto Rican Studies, demonstrating its transformative potential across multiple fields, and fostering pathways for envisioning just futures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Danielle Haque

• Sara C. Awartani, University of Michigan

Panelists

• Therí A. Pickens, Bates College

• Carol W.N. Fadda, Syracuse University

Comment

• Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University

Biographical Information

Therí Alyce Pickens creates powerful, ground-breaking, award-winning scholarship in the fields of Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. She wrote Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press 2019), a theoretical tour-de-force which fundamentally shapes Black Disability Studies. Her editorial work ushered in new conversations about Black Disability Studies in two major journals: African American Review (2017) and College Language Association Journal (2021). Her first monograph, New Body Politics: Narrating Black and Arab Identity in the United States (Routledge 2014) brought together Arab and Black American literary and cultural production through the lenses of Black feminism and Disability Studies. In another editorial project, Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge 2018), she curates a discussion about what makes artistic production uniquely Arab American. Prof. Pickens's public writing refuses to diminish or pre-masticate the complexities of our world for a wider public. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Black Girl Nerds, The Counter, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Magazine. She is a sought-after podcast guest who brings wit, excitement, and humor to podcasts including Busy Being Black, Contemporary Black Canvas, New Books Network, The Cipher, and the MoMA Podcast. Alongside her scholarship, Prof. Pickens is a poet, whose first collection, What Had Happened Was, will debut in 2025 from Duke University Press. She is a proud alum of Margaret Porter Troupe Arts (2006), Community of Writers (2017, 2020), Kenyon Writers' Retreat (2018), Colgate Writers Workshop (2019), Bread loaf - Sicily (2019), Hurston/Wright (2023), VONA (2023), and Rutgers' University Poets and Scholars Retreat (2023). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Diode, Black Renaissance Noire, Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Langston Hughes Review, The Madison Review, and Cane: A New Critical Edition. In addition to Prof. Pickens's research, she coaches with the National Council for Faculty Development and Diversity. She also runs her own developmental editing and sensitivity reading business: Inquiry Editing, LLC.

Sara Awartani is an Assistant Professor of American Culture and Latina/o Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining Michigan, she was a Global American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a Lecturer on Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights. An interdisciplinary historian, her research explores twentieth-century U.S. social movements, interracial solidarities, policing, and American global power, with special attention to Latinx and Arab American histories. Her first book project, Solidarities of Liberation, Visions of Empire: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and American Global Power (under advance contract) chronicles a globally expansive story of Palestine liberation, Puerto Rican radicalism, and the United States' efforts to weaponize and police those freedom dreams. Awartani has published in a variety of peer-reviewed and public-facing forums, including Radical History Review, Kalfou: A Comparative Ethnic Studies Journal, Society & Space, Middle East Report, and Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader. Her research has also received support across subfields, including the Puerto Rican Studies Association and the Arab American National Museum, with additional recognition by the Ford Foundation and the Latin American Studies Association. Dr. Awartani received her Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in 2020, and she is the recipient of the 2022 Virginia Sánchez Korrol Dissertation Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association. She is a proud alumna of the University of Florida, where she graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in History.

Carol W.N. Fadda grew up in Beirut, Lebanon where she earned her B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut. She graduated from Purdue University in 2006 with a Ph.D. in contemporary American Literature. Her research interests in Arab and Muslim American Studies, American Studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and transnational studies interrogate structures, logics, and manifestations of US empire, militarization, and exceptionalism that determine the lives of racialized communities in the US and abroad. Her first book Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (NYU Press, 2014) engages an array of Arab American literary and visual texts from the 1990s onwards that contest negative representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US. In it, Fadda emphasizes feminist, anti-assimilationist, and transnational modes of Arab American and Muslim American belonging that contest the conceived boundaries of the US nation-state and transform hegemonic forms of national membership and citizenship. Her current book-length project, Carceral States and Dissident Citizenships: Narratives of Resistance in an Age of “Terror” highlights US global carceral practices by focusing on Arab and Muslim narratives and testimonials of incarceration and confinement coming out of the “War on Terror.” Her study extends to legal and historical documents, literary texts, visual documentation, and political discourse emerging from secret and extra-legal incarceration sites including the Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons. She is the recipient of an NEH summer grant, a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship, and a Syracuse University Humanities Center Fellowship. Her essays on gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma, cross-racial solidarities, and transnational belonging have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. She serves as the editor of the Critical Arab American Studies book series at Syracuse University Press.

Danielle Haque is a scholar of Arab American Studies, Muslim American Studies, and the Environmental Humanities, whose research examines the intersections of race, religion, and empire in literature and culture. She is the author of Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2019), which explores how Arab American and transnational SWANA cultural producers challenge secularist assumptions in U.S. and European discourse. Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including American Literature, MELUS, American Quarterly Studies, Mashriq & Mahjar, and Research in Diversity and Youth Literature. Haque has contributed numerous chapters to edited collections, including Sajjilu SWANA: A Reader in Arab American Studies, Buffalo Bill Centennial Anthology, A Companion to the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and Near East to Far West: Fantasies of French and American Colonialism. She has chapters forthcoming in the Handbook of Research on Diversity in Children's and Young Adult Literature, The Companion to Arab American Literature, Constructing the Other: Empathy and the Ethics of Imagining Difference in Literature, and Mapping a Transnational Toni Morrison: Perspectives from the Arab World. Beyond her research, Haque serves as the President-Elect of the Arab American Studies Association and is an active leader in faculty governance as Vice President of the MNSU Faculty Association.

Amira Jarmakani works on questions of race, gender, ethnicity and representation in U.S. popular culture. Her most recent book, An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (NYU Press, 2015), demonstrates how desire animates contemporary U.S. imperialism. Investigating the increased popularity of desert romances concurrent with the war on terror, the book demonstrates love to be a salient lens through which to understand how the war on terror works and how it perseveres. Her first book, Imagining Arab Womanhood, analyzes orientalist representations of Arab and Muslim womanhood in varied contexts, such as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, early twentieth century tobacco advertisements, contemporary advertisements and photographs, and the contemporary “American belly dance” movement. Looking at photographic albums and advertisements featuring belly dancers, veiled women, and harem imagery in comparative historical contexts, the book argues that they offer a shorthand for communicating social anxieties about expansionism, modernity, and the loss of the frontier at the turn of the 20th century, and about national security and the “new” (oil) frontier in the contemporary context. She is a co-editor of Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (Syracuse U press, 2022). In conversation with feminist and abolitionist data justice scholars, her current project – “Weapons of Mass Dissemination” – traces how viral memes, images, and stories about Muslims as a dangerous threat to the US perpetuate gendered, anti-Muslim racism.