Open-Access Edition of Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule

FAIN: DR-290440-23

Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)
Gianna Mosser (Project Director: July 2022 to September 2023)

This project will result in the publishing of the electronic open-access version of the book Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule, authored by NEH Fellow John Tofik Karam (NEH grant number FT-248802-16). The open-access format will be published under a Creative Commons license, rendering it free for download and distribution. With the release of the eBook, John Tofik Karam will receive at least $500 in royalty payment.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule
Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780826501349
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Author: John Tofik Karam
Abstract: At the border where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet under the scrutiny of the US and Mercosur (the large South American trade bloc), Arabs have long fulfilled what author John Tofik Karam calls a "manifold destiny." Karam casts Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians at this American border as circumstantial protagonists of a hemispheric saga.br /br /For the more than six decades since they started settling at the trinational border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, Arabs have animated the hemisphere. Their transnational economic and social projects reveal a heretofore unacknowledged venue of exceptional rule in which the community accommodates and abides multiple states' varied suspensions of norms and laws. Arabs set up businesses and community centers at the border under authoritarian military governments between the 1950s and 1980s; thereafter, when denied full democratic enfranchisement, they instead underwent increasing surveillance from the 1990s to today. Karam reveals an unfinished history of exceptional rule that Arabs accommodate from an authoritarian past to a counterterrorist present.br /br /Karam's riveting account draws on anthropological and historical research from each side of this trinational South American border, as well as from the US-where government bureaucrats still suspect Arabs at the border of would-be-terrorist subversion. Offering a fresh understanding of the hemisphere, emManifold Destiny/em brings the transnational turn of Middle Eastern studies to bear upon the fields of American studies, Brazilian studies, and Latin American studies.
Primary URL: https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/resources/manifold-destiny-open-access/
Primary URL Description: Vanderbilt University Press
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1dv0w1j
Secondary URL Description: JSTOR
URL 3: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/167/oa_monograph/book/81970
URL 3 Description: Project Muse
Type: Single author monograph

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