The war on terror through Arab-American eyes: The Arab-American press as a rhetorical counterpublic

Abstract

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squires's categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from Arab American News, we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed.