Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses two ethnographic contexts -- the experiences of Arab American Muslim youth in a U.S. high school and mainstream American college students studying abroad -- to consider the ways that the construction of what it means to be “American.”

Paper long abstract:

This paper illustrates how a view of America as "value protector of the world" (Gregory, 2002) shapes both the ways that Arab youth are constructed as "other" and not American, and the ways that mainstream U.S. college students are able to view their international study in terms that are apolitical, ahistorical, and disconnected from the United States' ongoing role as a colonial power. Contemporary normative discourses of citizenship position "Americans" as global citizens whose dispositions (liberal, multicultural, tolerant) are held up as models for people everywhere (Brown, 2006' Melamed, 2006). The term "global citizenship" is often discussed in glowing and vague terms that highlight primarily benevolent and consumerist participation by Americans in the global economy (Zemach-Bersin, 2007).

In this paper, we look at two very different ethnographic studies -- one focusing on the experiences of Arab American Muslim youth in a U.S. high school and the other on mainstream American college students studying abroad, to consider the ways that the construction of what it means to be "American" depends on the workings of "colonial amnesia" (Gregory, 2002). This amnesia--an erasure of the United States's neocolonial role in leveraging economic, political, and military power in its own interest--is fundamental to the production of Americans as the liberal subjects of a benevolent, multicultural democracy. The paper addresses the authentic kinds of transnational belonging available to some Arab American youth as well as the limitations of an uncritical form global citizenship for American college students who study abroad.