Exclusion, identity, and resilience
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Between Arab and White by Sarah Gualtieri explores the economic shift in the Ottoman Empire as one of the main forces behind Syrian migration. Political unrest and the demise of sectors like silk encouraged Syrians to look for better prospects outside. However, there was a lot of racialization in how they were received in North America. Even while Syrian women actively defied gender conventions through their migration and business endeavours, images of Syrians at events such as the Chicago World's Fair show how they were exoticized and commodified. Additionally, Gualtieri presents the idea of Syrian melancholia in the mahjar (diaspora), which reflects both adaptation and loss in other places.
The Canadian context is the main subject of Houda Asal's Identifying as Arab, which illuminates how Syrians dealt with their racialized identities. Syrians struggled in the early 20th century with census classifications and discriminatory laws that classified them as "Asiatics," preventing them from obtaining citizenship. Syrian Muslims and Christians responded by using identity practices that frequently highlighted their closeness to whiteness. Cases such as the US Dow ruling demonstrate how race—a concept derived from white supremacist ideology—influenced Syrians' social and legal integration.
The socioeconomic dynamics of Syrians living in the midwestern region are examined in further detail in Edward Curtis's book Muslims of the Heartland, which shows how their experiences were shaped by their class and faith. For example, racial animosity toward the Syrian community in Michigan City exacerbated internal conflicts. Curtis illustrates the tough decisions communities had to make in order to survive and avoid exclusion by demonstrating how Syrian Christians, under pressure from the larger racist system, occasionally separated from Syrian Muslims in order to identify as white.