The Immigration History Research Center is hosting their inaugural Philip K. Hitti Memorial Fund lecture featuring Charlotte Karem Albrecht, author of Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, which was published open access with University of California Press in 2023. This event will take place in person and on Zoom.

The lecture is named for Philip Khuri Hitti (1886-1978) who was a Lebanese American scholar, college professor, and authority on the Near East who was instrumental in establishing the field of Near East Studies in the United States. A collection of his papers, including personal and professional correspondence, manuscripts, lectures, speeches, book reviews, personal memorabilia, photographs and a scrapbook, is available in the Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA).

Description of lecture: Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy through their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a “queer ecology” of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.

Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies and Director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies program at the University of Michigan. Dr. Karem Albrecht is a proud graduate of University of Minnesota’s Feminist Studies doctoral program.

This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of History, the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS), and the Immigration History Research Center Archives of the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Event details

What: Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling with Charlotte Karem Albrecht
When: Wed, Nov. 5, 5 – 7:30 p.m. | Reception 5-6 p.m., Lecture 6-7:30 p.m.
Where: Online OR Weisman Art Museum,  333 E. River Rd, Minneapolis, MN 55455  | Parking and directions