Being Young in Arab Detroit: Media and Identity in Post-9/11 America.

Abstract

More than ten years after the events of 9/11, the Arab American community of the Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan area continues to feel the effects of the nation’s intense scrutiny of their lives and identities. As formal government and informal communal surveillance, threats of violence and deportation, and general anxieties escalated, the Arab Detroit community has been at the center of various efforts to understand Arab and Muslim Americans. Through an engagement with post-9/11 national news media discourses, participant-observation work at the Arab American National Museum (founded in 2005 and located in Dearborn, MI), interviews and focus groups with Arab American youth, and digital ethnography of Arab American youths’ online cultural productions, this dissertation examines what it means to be young and Arab American in Dearborn. Moving beyond well-worn distinctions between mainstream and grassroots media, this dissertation examines news discourse and television programming in relation to various media produced and circulated by Arab American youth. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to scholarship in a number of related areas including media representations of race and ethnicity, geography and identity, the increasingly vexed relationship between race and religion, and youth culture.