How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
A reportage that uses the lives of young Arab and Muslim Americans to explore fear and hope in post-9/11 America.
Work Information
It follows young people trying to build ordinary lives amid prejudice.
Through seven young Arab and Muslim Americans in Brooklyn, the book looks at surveillance, prejudice, family, love, and ambition. It brings Du Bois’s question into the present.
Review Summaries
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Readers value how it builds the reality of discrimination from the details of individual lives rather than from abstraction.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Press HC, The
- Published
- 2008-08-14
- Pages
- 304 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.9 x 3.02 x 23.67 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781594201769
- ISBN-10
- 1594201765
- Price
- 10893 JPY
A study of the Arab- and Muslim-American experience as reflected by the lives of seven young men and women in Brooklyn evaluates their daily encounters with such factors as prejudice, the Christian faith, and their relationships with friends and family members in the Middle East. 30,000 first printing.
Moustafa Bayoumi was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and raised in Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He is coeditor of The Edward Said Reader , and his essays have appeared in The Best Music Writing 2006, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Village Voice , and other publications.
Reviews
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Das Buch kam sehr schnell an und ich fand es einfach nur super!!! Ich habe es regelrecht verschlungen, da es soo spannend war, die einzelnen Lebensgeschichten zu lesen.
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Libro perfettamente integro, qualche sbavatura di inchiostro ma è colpa della casa editrice
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An interesting book to read!
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seven twenty-somethings: all arab american, all brooklynites, each one struggling it out in a post 9-11 world. there is so much heart to these stories...so much gumption and grace. how to live from a place of dignity, trust, when you are under constant surveillance? under suspicion? subjected to discrimination at work, school, while riding the bus up brooklyn's fifth avenue, to get taco bell for your three sisters? stories connect us to each other, writes dr. bayoumi. "in the ways that polemics and polls cannot, they reveal our conflicts within ourselves and our vulnerabilities to each other." in these stories we learn of a young arab american marine who enlists, and is deployed to iraq where he eventually begins questioning the war & his involvement in it. "am i out here for somebody's personal gain?" he asks. "none of these people making decisions have anybody there. they're playing with house money. they're playing with the youth of this country." then there's rasha, a young woman who is detained post 9-11, with her entire family and without reason...there's yasmin a force, a firebrand, who takes on the administration of her school, calling them out on their discrimination...there are stories of hurt and betrayal and love here. of humanity. "how does it feel to be a problem?" w.e.b. dubois asked over a century ago. and now, dr. bayoumi asks anew, asks at a time when muslim communities around the nation continue to "feel under the blunt hammer of suspicion." i loved this book, an essential, powerful read. five stars are not enough.
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I was expecting the stories of these young people to be told in their own words from the book description. Instead of fresh young voices, this is a work crafted by an academic with a strong agenda. Thus the book does not live up to its promise. Despite this misrepresentation, this book is still worth reading. It provides insight into the perception of discrimination that middle class Muslims face in the U.S. it would be stronger if the afterword spent more effort on comparing this with the perceptions of blacks, Irish Catholics, Jews and other minorities who have emigrated to the states in blocks.