Description
Oral histories are key pieces of Arab and Arab American culture. This section highlights works on Arab American oral histories, including books, articles, and recordings.
Titles
Authors & Works
Dr. Alixa Naff was born in Rashayya al-Wadi, a village in the Anti-Lebanon—the western mountain range of the former Ottoman province of Syria, in modern-day Lebanon. Her parents, Faris and Yamna Naff, immigrated with their two little girls to the United States in 1921. She is considered the mother of Arab American Studies. She believed that the Arab American immigrants’ experience was important to research. When Alixa found that primary materials were non-existent, she went out and collected and preserved oral histories and artifacts.
Oral History Works:
Malek was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1974. Her parents had immigrated to the United States from Syria. Malek graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. She then earned a J.D. degree at Georgetown University Law Center. She worked as a civil rights lawyer at the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and later went back to school to obtain a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Oral History Works:
Charlotte Karem Albrecht received her Ph.D. in 2013 in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests coalesce around issues of power and subjectivity for Arab Americans and how Arab American experiences, historical narratives, and cultural production have been formed in relation to other minoritized communities.
Oral History Works:
Igor Nunes Houwat
A Lebanese-Brazilian dual citizen having lived most of his life in Lebanon. Houwat moved to the United States to work on a Masters degree in saxophone performance at Michigan State University.
Oral History Work:
Maintaining a Musical Tradition in Arab-America: An Oral History of Abdel Karim Bader
More Oral Histories
- Arab American Oral HistoryA spreadsheet further detailing oral histories by Arab American authors.
- Oral History from 1962 by Dr. Alixa NaffOral history was a relatively new field in the early 1960s and, primarily, was used to document the life stories of famous people, predominantly men. Naff's proposed study of the everyday men and women who left their homes and traveled to the United States to make new lives combined oral history practices with the techniques of folklore fieldwork. The resulting interviews recorded the experiences of the immigrant generation in their own words.
- Oral Histories from the Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American CollectionThis online collection consists of 75 digital audio files and 30 PDF files of interview notes. To preserve the original order of the collection, the audio files are direct copies of the original reel-to-reel tapes. Many files contain more than one interview, and some interviews are spread across multiple tapes.