“For Thee America! For Thee Syria?”: Alexander Maloof, Orientalist Music, and the Politics of the Syrian Mahjar

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-418
Author(s):  
BEAU BOTHWELL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Language Discourse ◽  
History Of

AbstractIn 1894 Syrian émigré Alexander Maloof arrived in the United States to join the thriving community in New York's “Syrian Quarter.” Working first as a music instructor and pianist, Maloof found success as a bandleader, composer, arranger, and publisher, integrating Arabic and US popular music and light classical styles. He wrote and edited Arabic-language piano songbooks for the Arabophone communities in the United States, and ran the Maloof Records label, the “Oriental” division of the Gennett Company's “race records” enterprise. Drawing on Arabic-language discourse from around the Syrian mahjar (diaspora), this article uses Maloof's output to demonstrate music's role in the vibrant and contested political conversations taking place in Arabic around the world, from the homelands around Beirut and Damascus, to the initial Syrian settlements in Cairo and Paris, to the American colonies in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York. Concluding with a discussion of the 1919 “American Maid” (composed under a pseudonym), I argue that a thorough understanding of the history of Orientalist popular music in the Americas requires a decentering of European American audiences in order to examine those questions animating the New York mahjar, most centrally the political fate of greater Syria.

New Syrians Abroad

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-111
Author(s):  
Stacy D. Fahrenthold
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
The United States ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
Legal Fiction ◽  
French Mandate ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on Syrian migrant activists who lobbied for American intervention and a US Mandate in Syria after the 1918 armistice. Calling themselves the “New Syrian” parties, activists in New York City, Boston, Buenos Aires, and Cairo petitioned for the United States to take guardianship of Syria as a bulwark against French colonialism in the region. The New Syrians were rejected by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which led them to promote their ideas through petitioning and mass meetings held in the mahjar. Examining a history of the Wilsonian moment from beyond the Paris petitions, the chapter argues that the conference engaged in the construction of a legal fiction: that the Syrian mahjar favored the French Mandate. Far from partners in empire, the diaspora Syrians and Lebanese presented the French with the difficult task of pacifying an extraterritorial subject population that could not be controlled through blunt military suppression.

The Black Legend of Texas

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Foundational Work

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Food History ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Migration History ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of

The Introduction defines migrant marketplaces, the book’s theoretical framework, as urban spaces characterized by material and imagined transnational linkages between mobile people and goods. As one of the most mobile ethnic groups during the age of mass migration, Italians in the United States and Argentina illuminate the historical formation of migrant marketplaces. It situates the book within the fields of transnational and comparative migration history, gender and food history, and the history of globalization. The introduction contends that Italian-language commercial newspapers, including La Patria degli Italiani in Buenos Aires, Il Progresso Italo-Americano in New York and publications of Italian Chambers of Commerce in these two cities, make an examination of migrant marketplaces possible because they ground global migratory and commercial flows in specific cities.

Financing a Second Era of Internal Improvements

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-651
Author(s):  
R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Political History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Big Business ◽  
History Of

The year was 1915, and Edwin R. A. Seligman had a problem.He was not preoccupied with the battle for woman suffrage, which women would win in his state of New York just two years later. Nor was he immediately concerned with the war in Europe, which would soon involve the United States. Nor yet was he worried about hordes of immigrants, the labor question, or the regulation of big business. Those larger issues in the political history of the Progressive Era concerned him, but his immediate problem was both far more mundane and far more fundamental: How could the State of New York keep paying its bills?

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