UC Santa Barbara

Contemporary Arab American theater makers have to contend with unreliably supportive institutions and biased narratives that are conditioned by xenophobic, especially anti-Arab and Islamophobic, socio-political contexts within the United States. These conditions of production have been understudied in academia, where scholarship has predominantly focused on the discursive response of Arab American theater to post-9/11 hostilities, cultural alienation, stereotyping, and transnational politics. However, this project seeks to expand the field by exploring the production processes behind these responses and to illuminate how the conditions of the public sphere instill systemic challenges to Arab American theater practice. It combines ethnographic and archival research with literary and material analysis to study three examples of theater making: play development and publication; stage production; and festival organization. Case studies include the works and experiences of playwright Yussef El Guindi; the practices of Golden Thread Productions, the leading American theater company dedicated to Middle Eastern plays; and the grassroots organization and stand-up comedy interventions of the New York Arab American Comedy Festival. Through these cases, this project reveals the complex, tensile relationships between Arab American theater makers and their biased conditions of production. It shows how these relations manifest in and through practical challenges to theater making. I use these findings to posit and support the correlation dilemma theory, which argues that the interdependence of multiple actors and conditioning factors creates systemic issues that inhibit sustainable Arab American cultural production on its own terms. In the process of mapping out this theory onto the various case studies, this project also reveals the strategies and practices used by contemporary theater makers to build discursive and institutional networks that support the unrestricted development of Arab American art, identity, and publics. These combined findings help Arab American artists and similarly marginalized theater makers navigate their complex relations to the US public sphere and its theater industry.