The War on Terror through Arab-American Eyes: The Arab-American Press as a Rhetorical Counterpublic

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.