| Abstrakt: |
ABSTRACT:How does the Arab American National Museum, the United States’s only museum dedicated to Arab American experiences, face up to the challenges of negotiating and resisting white supremacy culture? Based on a year-long ethnographic study of the museum, this essay contends that the Arab American National Museum is a multilayered site that plays with and subverts white supremacy culture, specifically through performing a politics of oppositionality in contrast to the now-removed statue of Orville Hubbard: Dearborn, Michigan’s racist, longest-serving, former mayor. In so doing, the museum embodies the position of the trickster relative to the still-existing plinth and the now-phantom statue, encountering and playing with what the statue gestured toward: fulfillment of Hubbard’s racist, white supremacist, segregationist promises to and for the city of Dearborn. In playing with this historical encounter in the present, the museum gestures toward an alternate future, performing a progressive politics of the possible. |
