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In this article, Thea Renda Abu El-Haj draws on qualitative research conducted with Palestinian American high school students to explore school as a key site for nation building. By focusing on their teachers' talk and practice, she examines how U.S. nationalism and national identities are produced through everyday racialized and gendered discourses and practices inside one school. She argues that this nation building is deeply entwined with the cultural logic that undergirds U.S. imperial ambitions in relation to the current "war on terror" and explores how productions of everyday nationalism and national belonging define an "American" identity in opposition to cultural and political traits and values assumed to characterize Islam. Ultimately, Abu El-Haj demonstrates how complex discourses about the United States engender a view of education as alternately a liberating and disciplining force for Arab American youth. She concludes with implications for educating teachers "to better address the complexities of teaching in contemporary contexts of global migration, transnationalism, and the war on terror."
On September 11, 2001, before the identities of the hijackers were known, a teacher walked into the principal's office at Regional High, a large urban public school in Pennsylvania.1 The teacher demanded that the principal "round up" all the Palestinian students in the school. The principal was shocked and recalled responding, "That's absolutely insane. Why don't you just put a target on their backs?" Although this teacher's demand was clearly egregious, it represented an extreme expression of a more commonly held idea that would haunt the Palestinian American youth at Regional High for years to come: despite their status as legal U.S. citizens, these youth were immediately constructed as potential enemy-aliens whose status as members of this national community was open to question. Moreover, this incident symbolized and anticipated the ways that, in the wake of 9/11, Regional High would be engaged in everyday processes of nation building that occur in relation to the United States' "war on terror."2
Drawing on qualitative research with Palestinian American youth and practitioners at Regional High, I explore school as a key site for nation building, the process through which nationalist ideals and the boundaries of national belonging are continually constructed and negotiated (Hall, 2004). Elsewhere (Abu El-Haj, 2007), I explore the ways that the...