Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
“When we go deep enough or high enough, we meet. It is only on the surface that we differ and sometimes clash. True, we do not always find our way to the depth or the height, or we do not take the trouble to do so.”
– Ameen Rihani
April is Arab American Heritage Month. The theme for 2025 is Arab American Heritage: Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future. See below for select VSCS Libraries that celebrate the Arab American community’s rich heritage and numerous contributions to society.
A sampling of books by Arab American authors or highlighting the Arab American experience. All electronic titles are available to read online and our physical titles may be requested for pick-up at a VSCS library or sent to your home.
Unlike the majority of introductions to Islam, which all too often elide essential theological and legal debates in favor of presenting a homogenized Middle East-centric view of what Islam represents to all Muslims, this book provides a balanced perspective on Sunni, Shia, and Sufi Islam at the geographic, social, political, embodied, reproductive, and doctrinal margins. Its objective is to develop an inclusive vision of the religion and its many interrelated communities. By paying attention to the values, stories, and practices that characterize Muslim life across sectarian division we are able to render a nuanced portrait that transcends debates about orthodoxy and normativity and gives us more encompassing and accurate views of the forms that Islam takes and how Muslims think and act socially, culturally, theologically, and politically.
As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she's forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.
Arab American women have played an essential role in shaping their homes, their communities, and their country for centuries. Their contributions, often marginalized academically and culturally, are receiving long-overdue attention with the emerging interdisciplinary field of Arab American women's studies. The collected essays in this volume capture the history and significance of Arab American women, addressing issues of migration, transformation, and reformation as these women invented occupations, politics, philosophies, scholarship, literature, arts, and, ultimately, themselves.
This book examines the implications of discrimination in Arab American youth with a focus on K-12 school systems.
Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration, in particular, to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California.
Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements.
Black-Arab political and cultural solidarity has had a long and rich history in the United States. That alliance is once again exerting a powerful influence on American society as Black American and Arab American activists and cultural workers are joining forces in formations like the Movement for Black Lives and Black for Palestine to address social justice issues
One of Donald Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order to limit Muslim immigration to the United States, a step toward the "complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" he had campaigned on. This extraordinary act of Islamophobia provoked unprecedented opposition: Hollywood movies and mainstream television shows began to feature more Muslim characters in contexts other than terrorism; universities and private businesses included Muslims in their diversity initiatives; and the criminal justice system took hate crimes against Muslims more seriously. Yet Broken argues that, even amid this challenge to institutionalized Islamophobia, diversity initiatives fail on their promise by only focusing on crisis moments.
A short story collection about the inhabitants of a Palestinian West Bank village, Tel al-Hilou, spans generations and continents to explore ideas of memory, belonging, connection, and, ultimately, the deepest and richest meaning of home.
What is political poetry and linguistic activism? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? When language proves insufficient, how do we find and articulate a pathway forward? Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. interrogates, subverts, and expands these questions through poems that are formally and lyrically complex, dynamic, and innovative. With rich intertextuality and an unwavering eye, Noor Hindi explores and interrogates colonialism, religion, patriarchy, and the complex intersections of her identity.
In her coming-of-age memoir, refugee advocate Luma Mufleh writes of her tumultuous journey to reconcile her identity as a gay Muslim woman and a proud Arab-turned-American refugee.
Ground Zero Narratives: Islam and Muslims in Post-9/11 American Narratives and Arab American Counter-Narratives presents a dissection of American narratives to understand how 9/11 stories reflect both geopolitical relations and conflicts of our collective present regarding terrorism and counter-terrorism.
A memoir about restoring the health of our people, and our democracy, from a physician and “one of the brightest young stars” of the progressive movement (Sen. Bernie Sanders).
History of Arab Graphic Design traces the people and events that were integral to the shaping of a field of graphic design in the Arab world.
In this laugh-out-loud funny sequel to the graphic novel Huda F Are You?, the Fahmys are off to Disney World, but self-conscious Huda worries her family will stand out too much.
In Imperfect Strangers, Salim Yaqub argues that the 1970s were a pivotal decade for U.S.-Arab relations, whether at the upper levels of diplomacy, in street-level interactions, or in the realm of the imagination.
Textiles and clothing are interwoven with Islamic culture. In Islamicate Textiles, readers are taken on a journey from Central Asia to Tanzania to uncover the central roles that textiles play within Muslim-majority communities.
This book is published for readers to gain exposure and knowledge related to entrepreneurship according to Islamic perspectives.
A visionary leader's powerful personal story and a blueprint for change that will inspire schools and communities across America.
This distinctive anthology imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation.
Mass Communication in the Modern Arab World: Ongoing Agents of Change following the Arab Spring introduces, explains, and explores how unceasing growth of media and communication technologies has acted as an ongoing agent of change in the modern Arab world.
Mainstream superheroes are becoming more and more diverse, with new identities for Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. Though the Marvel-verse is becoming much more racially, ethnically, and gender diverse, many of these comics remain shy about religion. The new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, is a notable exception, not only because she is written and conceived by two women, Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson, but also because both of these women bring their own experiences as Muslim Americans to her character.
he American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them.
Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying - from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina's own duets, in which English and Arabic echo and contradict each other - O explores the limits of language, notions of home and exile, and stirring visions of motherhood, memory, and faith.
A timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.
The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa stands as an authoritative and up-to-date resource on the critical debates, research methods and ongoing reflections on how gender and communication intersect with the economic, social, political, and cultural fabrics of the countries in the MENA region.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race.
With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq--from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba'th coup and support of Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation.
Music has the universal power to move individuals, peoples and societies. Music is one of the most important signifiers of cultural change. It is also most significant for youth movements and youth cultures. While Islam has a historically and traditionally rich culture of music, religious controversy on the topic of music is still ongoing. However, young Muslims in today's globalised world seek pop cultural tools such as music, and particularly hip hop music, as way of exploring and expressing their manifold identities, whilst challenging Islamophobia, stigma and racism on the one hand and traditional and religious challenges on the other hand.
This handbook provides the first comprehensive reference book in English about the development of mass and social media in all Arab countries. Capturing the historical as well as current developments in the media scene, this collection maps the role of media in social and political movements.
Both a summative description of the field and an exploration of new directions, this multidisciplinary reader addresses issues central to the fields of Arab American, US Muslim, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) American studies. Taking a broad conception of the Americas, this collection simultaneously registers and critically reflects upon major themes in the field, including diaspora, migration, empire, race and racialization, securitization, and global South solidarity.
In a beautifully written, science-packed, and inspirational memoir, Egyptian-American astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance shares how she boldly carved out a place in the field of astrophysics, grounding herself in a lifelong love of the stars to face life's inevitable challenges and embrace the unknown.
The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author's older son when he was 21, a horror that was compounded by her younger son's drug use, the country's slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. Weight is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. Weight is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.
We'll Play till We Die dives into the revolutionary music cultures of the Middle East and larger Muslim world before, during, and beyond the waves of resistance that shook the region from Morocco to Pakistan.
The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents'lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity
By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser's incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser's polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures.
Tells the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community.
An exploration of gender, the Arab Spring, and women's experiences of revolution, including firsthand accounts. In Women of the Midan, Sherine Hafez demonstrates how women were a central part of revolutionary process of the Arab Spring. Women not only protested in the streets of Cairo, they demanded democracy, social justice, and renegotiation of a variety of sociocultural structures.
A selection of films from the library streaming video databases by Arab-American directors or that highlight the Arab American experience
Includes titles from Kanopy and Films on Demand. If you haven't accessed Kanopy before, learn how to set up your account in this FAQ.
2012 1hr 20min
In this 80-minute documentary, three 10-year-old children leave their native countries to participate in one of the Islamic world’s most famous competitions, a test of memory and recitation known as The International Holy Koran Competition.
2013 1hr 39min
May Brennan has it all - intelligence, looks, rave reviews for her recently published book and a loving fiancé. But immediately upon returning to her hometown of Amman, Jordan for the wedding, the cracks in her seemingly perfect life begin to show.
2014 27 min.
Moving to a new country was challenging for Faiza Almontaser, a 17-year-old from New York City, who immigrated with her family to the US from Yemen when she was in middle school. Mentored by the legendary pioneer of direct cinema, Albert Maysles, Faiza’s film documents her courageous and inspiring journey from victim to activist.
2015 1hr 19min
For a gay filmmaker, filming in Saudi Arabia presents two serious challenges: filming is forbidden in the country and homosexuality is punishable by death. For filmmaker Parvez Sharma, however, these were risks he had to assume as he embarked on his Hajj pilgrimage, a journey considered the greatest accomplishment and aspiration within Islam, his religion.
2015 1hr 18min
The Speed Sisters are the first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East. Grabbing headlines and turning heads at improvised tracks across the West Bank, these five women have sped their way into the heart of the gritty, male-dominated Palestinian street car-racing scene.
2013 1 hr 45min
The people demand the downfall of the regime! The Square is an in-depth firsthand look at the Egyptian Revolution, chronicling the fall of two presidents in a row.
2023 three 1 hr episodes
When a devastating hate crime reduces the local mosque to ashes, the community of
Victoria, Texas, faces the daunting task of bridging longstanding political, racial, and economic rifts in order to discover a unified path towards healing and progress.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
