John Tofik Karam
Biographic Data
| ID | 134014 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Tofik Karam |
| GIVEN NAMES | John Tofik |
| FAMILY NAME | Karam |
| SIGNATURE | KARAM J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | DePaul University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7897-6981 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Edward Said’s Interlocutors in Portuguese and Spanish: Frontiers of a Futura Palestina
This article asks how Milton Hatoum in Brazil and Lina Meruane from Chile each borrowed from Edward Said (1935–2003) as well as crossed over into the United States where their intellectual and political synergies drew less interest than the provenance of migrant forebears. Each writer catalyzed and carried on Said’s critique of orientalism and commitment to present-day Palestine, though Hatoum’s father departed French-mandate Lebanon for Brazil, …
Tornando-se árabe e branco no Brasil de Oracy Nogueira
Este ensaio indaga sobre como os imigrantes do Oriente Médio se tornaram árabes e brancos no Brasil, de acordo com o que Oracy Nogueira chamou de preconceito de marca ou cor. Nogueira (2007 [1954]) faz algumas observações sobre os imigrantes e descendentes médio-orientais que, por sua parte, escreveram sobre Itapetininga, a cidade onde o autor fez sua pesquisa mais notável. Em particular, Hehil Abuázar, um descendente de libaneses, publicou Um ad…
O lobby árabe, a bancada BBB e o governo Bolsonaro na 'máquina anti-política
Meu artigo indaga sobre o papel do "lobby árabe" na "máquina anti-política" que moi não apenas a esquerda mas também a direita no Sul Global. Composta por diplomatas, empresários e outros brasileiros de origem árabe, a "Câmara de Comércio Árabe-Brasileira," conhecida pela sigla CCAB, ajudou a impedir uma das promessas mais polêmicas do Bolsonaro: a transferência da embaixada brasileira para Jerusalém. Aqui argumenta-se que, esse lobby árabe exerc…
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean, by Aliyah Khan
Michel-Rolph Trouillot once characterized the Caribbean as a kind of epistemic "open frontier," a meeting point where knowledge production about the past permeates and presses up against political stakes in the present and future.In her study of the Anglophone Muslim Caribbean, Aliyah Khan establishes new signposts at this border.With a compass and clock, she maps out spatial and temporal pathways that reinvigorate not only Caribbean studies and …
I, Too, Am the Americas: Arabs in the Redrawing of Area and Ethnic Studies
Research Article| April 01 2018 I, Too, Am the Americas: Arabs in the Redrawing of Area and Ethnic Studies John Tofik Karam John Tofik Karam John Tofik Karam is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Associate Director of the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press,…
As várias faces da opressão
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Os frescos morangos de Caio F
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa e Literatura Afro-Brasileira
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Arte, literatura e subversão em tempos de ditadura
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Faces da poesia brasileira
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino USA
Chapter 2 African Rebellion and Refuge on the Edge of Empire
New Muslim Cool, 2009. A film by Jennifer MaytorenaTaylor. 83 min. Color. Distributed by Seventh Art Releasing, 6579 Pickwick Street, Los Angeles, CA 90042; phone (323) 259–8259, fax (323) 474–6371, h…
The Gulf and Latin America: An Assessment of Expectations and Challenges
The Gulf and Latin America: An Assessment of Expectations and Challenges." Journal of Arabian Studies, 4(2), pp. 285–286
The Construction of Muslim Identities in Contemporary Brazil: By Cristina Maria de Castro (trans. Rodrigo Braga Freston) (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. 182 pages.)
This sociological study on the plural and often contested construction of Muslimidentities in Brazil contributes to a growing scholarship on Islam and thepolitics of religious difference across the Atlantic. Focusing on two institutionsin São Paulo state – the Islamic Center of Campinas (Centro Islâmico de Campinas)and the Islamic Charity Youth League of Brazil (Liga da Juventude IslâmicaBeneficente do Brasil), located in the Brás neighborhood of…
Philip Hitti, Brazil, and the Diasporic Histories of Area Studies
This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrow…
On Forgotten Shores: Migration in Middle East Studies and the Middle East in Migration Studies
For all their apparent differences, the colonial and nationalist discourses of the twentieth century shared a vision of the world as an aggregate of discrete bundles of land and people, hermetic units sealed off from one another and defined by their particularities. Whether they spoke in terms of nations or empires, regions or civilizations, they worked to produce the reality they described – one of bounded territories and populations, each one n…
The Lebanese Diaspora at the Tri-Border and the Redrawing of South American Geopolitics, 1950-1992
Economic and political dynamics of diaspora are relevant to understanding not only the homeland but also the making of a regional order farther afield. Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, Lebanese at the urban tri-border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina imported and exported merchandise as well as publicized liberationist ideals from the Arab and Islamic worlds. This article shows that their economic and political networks helped to dra…
On the Trail and Trial of a Palestinian Diaspora: Mapping South America in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967-1972
Centred around a May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a chain of actions and reactions that began with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and ended after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding two Palestinians. Situated among Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees and Syrian-Lebanese elites, authoritarian Paraguay was not only encompassed by but also accommodated the post-1967 Ara…
Crossing the Americas: The U.s. War on Terror and Arab Cross-Border Mobilizations in a South American Frontier Region
George W. Bush hardly finished his declaration of war on terror when the U.S. government turned its attention toward a trinational region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, called the triple frontera (Triple Border, in Spanish) and the tríplice fronteira (in Portuguese). My article traces how border residents of Muslim Lebanese origins responded to this post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorist encompassment. I suggest that Arabs publicly mobilize…
Anti-Semitism from the Standpoint of its Arab Victims in a South American Border Zone
This article excavates three violent moments that culminate in the collective victimization of Arabs in the so-called 'tri-border area' between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina: a 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción; a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires; and, finally, the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a major Jewish community center…
Belly Dancing and the (En)Gendering of Ethnic Sexuality in the “Mixed” Brazilian Nation
This article asks how Syrian-Lebanese men and non-Middle Eastern Brazilian women have enacted their relationship to belly dancingin São Paulo. While men and women of Arab origins have usually framed the dance as an essential link to their ethnic heritage, non-Arab female enthusiasts have generally treated it as a universal dance for women. I examine the interplay between these claims through performances in Syrian-Lebanese country clubs, a Brazil…
A Cultural Politics of Entrepreneurship in Nation‐Making: Phoenicians, Turks, and the Arab Commercial Essence in Brazil
Mapeando os fluxos de ideologias e imigrantes que partiram do oriente médio para o Brasil, este artigo pretende explorar como a ideia de fenícia nos nacionalismos sírio e libanês foi reformulada pelos sírio‐libaneses no Brasil. Argumenta‐se que eles alegaram possuir origens fenícias para poder bancar a posição de empreendedores na nação brasileira. Meu objetivo é traçar como se deu essa estratégia em duas épocas do Brasil no século XX: primeiro, …
A Cultural Politics of Entrepreneurship in Nation-Making: Phoenicians, Turks, and the Arab Commercial Essence in Brazil
Intensified Eth(n)ics: Arab Brazilians and the "Imagined State" in Neoliberal São Paulo
On Forgotten Shores: Migration in Middle East Studies and the Middle East in Migration Studies
For all their apparent differences, the colonial and nationalist discourses of the twentieth century shared a vision of the world as an aggregate of discrete bundles of land and people, hermetic units sealed off from one another and defined by their particularities. Whether they spoke in terms of nations or empires, regions or civilizations, they worked to produce the reality they described – one of bounded territories and populations, each one n…
The Lebanese Diaspora at the Tri-Border and the Redrawing of South American Geopolitics, 1950-1992
Economic and political dynamics of diaspora are relevant to understanding not only the homeland but also the making of a regional order farther afield. Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, Lebanese at the urban tri-border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina imported and exported merchandise as well as publicized liberationist ideals from the Arab and Islamic worlds. This article shows that their economic and political networks helped to dra…
Anti-Semitism from the Standpoint of its Arab Victims in a South American Border Zone
This article excavates three violent moments that culminate in the collective victimization of Arabs in the so-called 'tri-border area' between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina: a 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción; a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires; and, finally, the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a major Jewish community center…
Intensified Eth(n)ics: Arab Brazilians and the "Imagined State" in Neoliberal São Paulo
I, Too, Am the Americas: Arabs in the Redrawing of Area and Ethnic Studies
Research Article| April 01 2018 I, Too, Am the Americas: Arabs in the Redrawing of Area and Ethnic Studies John Tofik Karam John Tofik Karam John Tofik Karam is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Associate Director of the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press,…
Philip Hitti, Brazil, and the Diasporic Histories of Area Studies
This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrow…
On the Trail and Trial of a Palestinian Diaspora: Mapping South America in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967-1972
Centred around a May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a chain of actions and reactions that began with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and ended after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding two Palestinians. Situated among Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees and Syrian-Lebanese elites, authoritarian Paraguay was not only encompassed by but also accommodated the post-1967 Ara…
Belly Dancing and the (En)Gendering of Ethnic Sexuality in the “Mixed” Brazilian Nation
This article asks how Syrian-Lebanese men and non-Middle Eastern Brazilian women have enacted their relationship to belly dancingin São Paulo. While men and women of Arab origins have usually framed the dance as an essential link to their ethnic heritage, non-Arab female enthusiasts have generally treated it as a universal dance for women. I examine the interplay between these claims through performances in Syrian-Lebanese country clubs, a Brazil…
Intensified Eth(n)ics: Arab Brazilians and the "Imagined State" in Neoliberal São Paulo
A Cultural Politics of Entrepreneurship in Nation‐Making: Phoenicians, Turks, and the Arab Commercial Essence in Brazil
Mapeando os fluxos de ideologias e imigrantes que partiram do oriente médio para o Brasil, este artigo pretende explorar como a ideia de fenícia nos nacionalismos sírio e libanês foi reformulada pelos sírio‐libaneses no Brasil. Argumenta‐se que eles alegaram possuir origens fenícias para poder bancar a posição de empreendedores na nação brasileira. Meu objetivo é traçar como se deu essa estratégia em duas épocas do Brasil no século XX: primeiro, …
A Cultural Politics of Entrepreneurship in Nation-Making: Phoenicians, Turks, and the Arab Commercial Essence in Brazil
Belly Dancing and the (En)Gendering of Ethnic Sexuality in the “Mixed” Brazilian Nation
This article asks how Syrian-Lebanese men and non-Middle Eastern Brazilian women have enacted their relationship to belly dancingin São Paulo. While men and women of Arab origins have usually framed the dance as an essential link to their ethnic heritage, non-Arab female enthusiasts have generally treated it as a universal dance for women. I examine the interplay between these claims through performances in Syrian-Lebanese country clubs, a Brazil…
Crossing the Americas: The U.s. War on Terror and Arab Cross-Border Mobilizations in a South American Frontier Region
George W. Bush hardly finished his declaration of war on terror when the U.S. government turned its attention toward a trinational region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, called the triple frontera (Triple Border, in Spanish) and the tríplice fronteira (in Portuguese). My article traces how border residents of Muslim Lebanese origins responded to this post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorist encompassment. I suggest that Arabs publicly mobilize…
Anti-Semitism from the Standpoint of its Arab Victims in a South American Border Zone
This article excavates three violent moments that culminate in the collective victimization of Arabs in the so-called 'tri-border area' between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina: a 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción; a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires; and, finally, the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a major Jewish community center…
On Forgotten Shores: Migration in Middle East Studies and the Middle East in Migration Studies
For all their apparent differences, the colonial and nationalist discourses of the twentieth century shared a vision of the world as an aggregate of discrete bundles of land and people, hermetic units sealed off from one another and defined by their particularities. Whether they spoke in terms of nations or empires, regions or civilizations, they worked to produce the reality they described – one of bounded territories and populations, each one n…
The Lebanese Diaspora at the Tri-Border and the Redrawing of South American Geopolitics, 1950-1992
Economic and political dynamics of diaspora are relevant to understanding not only the homeland but also the making of a regional order farther afield. Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, Lebanese at the urban tri-border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina imported and exported merchandise as well as publicized liberationist ideals from the Arab and Islamic worlds. This article shows that their economic and political networks helped to dra…
On the Trail and Trial of a Palestinian Diaspora: Mapping South America in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967-1972
Centred around a May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a chain of actions and reactions that began with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and ended after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding two Palestinians. Situated among Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees and Syrian-Lebanese elites, authoritarian Paraguay was not only encompassed by but also accommodated the post-1967 Ara…
New Muslim Cool, 2009. A film by Jennifer MaytorenaTaylor. 83 min. Color. Distributed by Seventh Art Releasing, 6579 Pickwick Street, Los Angeles, CA 90042; phone (323) 259–8259, fax (323) 474–6371, h…
The Gulf and Latin America: An Assessment of Expectations and Challenges
The Gulf and Latin America: An Assessment of Expectations and Challenges." Journal of Arabian Studies, 4(2), pp. 285–286
The Construction of Muslim Identities in Contemporary Brazil: By Cristina Maria de Castro (trans. Rodrigo Braga Freston) (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. 182 pages.)
This sociological study on the plural and often contested construction of Muslimidentities in Brazil contributes to a growing scholarship on Islam and thepolitics of religious difference across the Atlantic. Focusing on two institutionsin São Paulo state – the Islamic Center of Campinas (Centro Islâmico de Campinas)and the Islamic Charity Youth League of Brazil (Liga da Juventude IslâmicaBeneficente do Brasil), located in the Brás neighborhood of…
Philip Hitti, Brazil, and the Diasporic Histories of Area Studies
This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrow…
Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino USA
Chapter 2 African Rebellion and Refuge on the Edge of Empire
I, Too, Am the Americas: Arabs in the Redrawing of Area and Ethnic Studies
Research Article| April 01 2018 I, Too, Am the Americas: Arabs in the Redrawing of Area and Ethnic Studies John Tofik Karam John Tofik Karam John Tofik Karam is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Associate Director of the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press,…
As várias faces da opressão
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Os frescos morangos de Caio F
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa e Literatura Afro-Brasileira
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Arte, literatura e subversão em tempos de ditadura
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Faces da poesia brasileira
Editorial: não apresenta resumo
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean, by Aliyah Khan
Michel-Rolph Trouillot once characterized the Caribbean as a kind of epistemic "open frontier," a meeting point where knowledge production about the past permeates and presses up against political stakes in the present and future.In her study of the Anglophone Muslim Caribbean, Aliyah Khan establishes new signposts at this border.With a compass and clock, she maps out spatial and temporal pathways that reinvigorate not only Caribbean studies and …
O lobby árabe, a bancada BBB e o governo Bolsonaro na 'máquina anti-política
Meu artigo indaga sobre o papel do "lobby árabe" na "máquina anti-política" que moi não apenas a esquerda mas também a direita no Sul Global. Composta por diplomatas, empresários e outros brasileiros de origem árabe, a "Câmara de Comércio Árabe-Brasileira," conhecida pela sigla CCAB, ajudou a impedir uma das promessas mais polêmicas do Bolsonaro: a transferência da embaixada brasileira para Jerusalém. Aqui argumenta-se que, esse lobby árabe exerc…
Tornando-se árabe e branco no Brasil de Oracy Nogueira
Este ensaio indaga sobre como os imigrantes do Oriente Médio se tornaram árabes e brancos no Brasil, de acordo com o que Oracy Nogueira chamou de preconceito de marca ou cor. Nogueira (2007 [1954]) faz algumas observações sobre os imigrantes e descendentes médio-orientais que, por sua parte, escreveram sobre Itapetininga, a cidade onde o autor fez sua pesquisa mais notável. Em particular, Hehil Abuázar, um descendente de libaneses, publicou Um ad…
Edward Said’s Interlocutors in Portuguese and Spanish: Frontiers of a Futura Palestina
This article asks how Milton Hatoum in Brazil and Lina Meruane from Chile each borrowed from Edward Said (1935–2003) as well as crossed over into the United States where their intellectual and political synergies drew less interest than the provenance of migrant forebears. Each writer catalyzed and carried on Said’s critique of orientalism and commitment to present-day Palestine, though Hatoum’s father departed French-mandate Lebanon for Brazil, …
Political science (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Humanities (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (8 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Anthropology (6 works)