Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit

Detroit's Arab and Chaldean communities in the balance between cultural vitality and precarity.

Detroit's Arab and Chaldean communities are now over a century old. Their neighborhoods, business districts, and cultural influence continue to grow. Whether Muslim or Christian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Palestinian, or Lebanese, these Detroiters are building new lives and new worlds in distinctive spaces that cannot be described simply as immigrant or refugee, religious or ethnoracial. In Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit, a multidisciplinary team of nineteen contributors considers how these worlds are connected to other times and places and what new identities are emerging in them. They explore US census counts, local politics, activism, refugee resettlement, patterns of racism and Islamophobia, and tense interactions between new immigrants and the well established. The contributors warn that, despite its deep roots and dynamism, Arab Detroit is at risk. As its residents struggle for change on their own terms, they no longer perceive greater Detroit as a sanctuary or temporary home, but as a place were Arabs and Chaldeans can live permanently as citizens.