Our special issue captures the interplay of media, politics, religion, and culture in shaping Arabs’ search for more stable governing models at a crossroads of global, regional, and national challenges through systematic and integrated analyses of evolving and contested Arab visual and performing arts in revolutionary and unstable public spheres. The issue presents a unique attempt to investigate these forms of cultural production as new modes of knowledge that shed light on the nature of social movements with the aim of expanding the critical reach of the disciplinary methods of political discourse and social theory. Contributors articulate the ways in which the Arab scene can contribute to the understanding of the rise of new social movements worldwide by exploring the methodological gaps in dominant Western discourses and theories.

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It seems barely an exaggeration to say that Arab and Muslim Americans are constantly talked about but almost never heard from. The problem is not that they lack representations but that they have too many. And these are all abstractions. Arabs and Muslims have become a foreign-policy issue, an argument on the domestic agenda, a law-enforcement priority, and a point of well-meaning concern. They appear as shadowy characters on terror television shows, have become objects of sociological inquiry, and get paraded around as puppets for public diplomacy…They are floating everywhere in the virtual landscape of the national imagination, as either villains of Islam or victims of Arab culture.-Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does it Feel to be a Problem 1 36 Waleed F. Mahdi investigation of the historical trajectory of Hollywood's engagement with the Arab American cultural identity.

Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, Lisa Saltzman (2015) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 232 pp., 48 b/w illustrations, ISBN: 9780226242170, e/bk, £29.40, ISBN: 9780226242033, h/bk, £26.50 Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative, Maria D. Wagenknecht (2015) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 217 pp., ISBN: 9781137479617, h/bk, $95 Never Alone, Kisima Ingitchuna (2014) Upper One Games, Anchorage, Alaska, and E-Line Media, New York, £3.99 Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics, Ben Hickman (2015) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 208 pp., ISBN-13: 9780748682850, h/bk, £70.00 African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow, Gary Totten (2015) Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 172 pp., ISBN: 9781625341617, p/bk, $26.95 Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman, Harriet Pollack (2016) Athens: University of Georgia Press, 284 pp., 62 images, ISBN: 9780820348704, h/bk, $49.95 Time, Tense, and American Literature: When Is Now?, Cindy Weinstein (2015) New York: Cambridge University Press, 194 pp., ISBN: 9781107099876, h/bk, £72 Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, Jack Hamilton (2016) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 340 pp., ISBN: 9780674416598, h/bk, $29.95, £23.95, 27.00 The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, Brian D. Goldstein (2017) Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 383 pp., ISBN-13: 9780674971509, h/bk, $39.95