Description:

MENA welcomes Dr. Loren Lybarger, of Ohio University, who will discuss his book, Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile.  Lunch will be served at this event.

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, this lecture will discuss the diverse ways in which Palestinians living in Chicago have articulated their sense of identity since the 1990s. Key themes in these diverging articulations include the revitalization of religious spaces; the attenuation of secularist ones; and the dynamics of selective assimilation across the hierarches of race and class that have defined Chicago and its suburbs for more than a century. The narratives that emerge move along varying generational, gender, and spatial trajectories. As they do so, they reveal a multiplicity of new, contingent, and contrapuntal identity articulations that span lines of difference both in Palestine and in America.