Summary
Scholarly organization of academics of Arab descent in the United States, outlined at Rashid Bashshur’s home during the August 1967 International Congress of Orientalists and officially established in Chicago at the end of 1967, which Feldman treats in chapter 4 of A Shadow over Palestine as a nascent Arab American studies and a crucial counterpoint to Edward Said’s Orientalism (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 857-865, 907-909).
Details
- The outline drawn up at Bashshur’s home held that the AAUG would “operate as an educational and cultural association [whose] activities would and should have significant political implications and consequences”; its five goals were to contribute intellectual and professional skills to the transformation of the Arab world, to develop an alternative, “scientific and accurate,” scholarly literature about Arabs in the United States and the Arab world, to make Arabs in the United States less vulnerable to racist police and surveillance practices, to model a viable Pan-Arab nationalism, and to improve relations between the United States and the Arab world. Charter signatories included Bashshur, Adnan Aswad, Hassan Haddad, Abdeen Jabara, Hisham Sharabi and Michael Suleiman (A Shadow over Palestine, line 859).
- Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was a driving force in the organization and recruited Edward Said, who served as board vice president and then at-large member, lectured at its annual conferences, coedited the proceedings of its fourth convention, and with Abu-Lughod cofounded its journal Arab Studies Quarterly in 1979, the two serving as the journal’s first general editors (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 859, 869, 909).
- The AAUG’s first national convention (December 1968, Washington, D.C.) published seven papers as “Studies in Assimilation”; its inaugural president Fauzi Najjar said: “Never before have Americans of Arab background experienced the sense of alienation and bewilderment that they did in the summer of 1967” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 881).
- By 1970 conference attendance had grown to five hundred, with fifty presenters; the organization’s anticolonial Pan-Arab nationalism centred the Palestinian Revolutionary Movement and committed it to combat Zionism, imperialism, colonialism and racism “in whatever form it expresses itself and to wage a relentless war against reactionary, corrupt, and oppressive domestic systems,” and it endorsed “the current necessary recourse of the Palestinian People to a war of national liberation of their historic homeland” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 879, 893).
- The 1973 annual convention, on settler regimes in Africa and the Arab world, heard Daniel Berrigan’s keynote and Said’s “Arab and Jew,” delivered alongside Berrigan and Israel Shahak (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 771-775, 825).
- The AAUG produced a newsletter, information papers and monographs, two mid-1970s documentary films (Palestine Is the Issue and Palestinians: Holding On), and periodic New York Times advertisements, including a November 1969 advertisement demanding President Nixon support a single secular democratic state for the “five million Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Palestinians” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 867-871).
- A primary target of Operation Boulder, the AAUG ran a full-page New York Times advertisement after the program’s disclosure headlined “Is the Nixon Administration Playing Politics with Civil Liberties?”, and its members M. Cherif Bassiouni and Elaine Hagopian researched the program (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 895-899).
- In spring 1979 the AAUG approached Jack O’Dell of Jesse Jackson’s PUSH coalition; Samih Farsoun was its point person for the resulting “Black America Project” delegations to Palestine and Lebanon, and an outcome was the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, which in 1980 partnered with O’Dell to publish Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 901-903).
- Feldman notes the AAUG’s analyses were not uniform: some members feared that alignment with Palestinian resistance or Black freedom struggles would dilute the organization’s efforts or compromise scientific objectivity, a caution Bashshur restated in 2007 (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 863, 903).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Operation Boulder, Daniel Berrigan, Contrapuntalism, Black–Palestinian solidarity