Becoming Arab in London : performativity and the undoing of identity / Ramy M.K. Aly.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-248) and index.

Print version record.

Everyday Arabness -- Tresspassing: the reach of performativity -- Re-reading sex and temperament -- Getting stuck between performance and performativity -- Performative race: the injunctions "to be" ethnic in Britain -- 1. Critical junctures in the making of Arab London -- Struggles of the homeland: students and activists 1924-73 -- London for sale: playboy princes and the Petrodollar Invasion -- The Stray Dogs in London: political purges 1977-89 -- War and the making of British Arabs -- Migration, ethnic counting and the racialisation of Arabness -- Making and unmaking Arab London.

2. Learning to be Arab: growing up in London -- The war at school -- Learning to be an Arab man -- Gendering narratives and Arabs in hiding -- (Re)citing masculine heroism -- Learning to be an Arab woman -- One performance, competing structures of subjection -- Contested recitations of identitarian authenticity -- 3. Going for Shisha: doing ethnicity, gender and class -- Shisha: the aromas of gender, ethnicity and morality -- The walk of shame -- Our kind of people, our kind of place -- 4. Dancing class: choreographing Arabness in London -- Emirs and emiras: partying with the stereotype of Arab wealth -- No sex please we're Arabs -- Assuming a position on dance -- Raqs: performance, comportment and sexuality -- The dancing men: gender parody or ambiguity? -- 5. Reclaiming the Orient through the diasporic gaze -- Orientalism in art: A1-Qanoon -- An Orient in my likeness -- The encrypted others of melancholia -- 6. Performativity and the undoing of identity -- A performative reading of becoming Arab in London.

Annotation Ramy M.K. Aly's ethnography uncovers narratives of growing up in London, the codes of sociability at Shisha cafes and the sexual politics and ethnic self-portraits which make British-Arab men and women.

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