In his 1996 Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall proposes the use of the verb “articulate” to discuss identity. For him, this verb conveys two meanings that are essential for our understanding of how identities are forged and mobilized. As a verb, to articulate means “to utter”; as a noun, however, it defines a kind of joint that connects the front cab of a truck to a trailer via a pivoted bar. Hall writes, “An articulation is thus the form of connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?” (p. 141). This is the question that permeates the entirety of Kevin Funk’s book: Under what circumstances do Latin American elites of Arab descent connect their transnational Arab identity to their national (Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean) identities? The central argument developed by the author is clear: this connection is made when business profits are at stake.
Authors with a Marxist orientation—and Funk clearly is one of them—mostly tend to portray elites in the Global South as either victims or proxies of their Global North counterparts. Funk does not follow that trend, however. For him, Arab economic elites in Latin America have their own agenda, one that is strongly connected to their country of residence and citizenship. After more than a century of presence in Latin America, Arab immigrants have not only been fully integrated into Latin societies but have also assumed as theirs the identity of their countries of residence, strategically mobilizing some nuances of Arabness when seeking business with Arab countries. If the mobilization of this perceived cultural capital by Arab Latin elites for business profit is the thread that intertwines Funk’s work, the construction of global imaginaries at the business elites’ level and how identities are marshaled on the ground for the purpose of capitalist accumulation are the main material making up Rooted Globalism.
Funk’s main argument in the book is that global elites are not firmly marching toward a rootless globality but are grounded in their national spaces that they, in turn, use as platforms to launch their business enterprises around the world. The socioeconomic relations that Arab Latin business elites have been forging with the Arab world are, therefore, a broad case study about how elites from the Global South see themselves as globalizing agents and how globalization is enacted through their actions—separately from the Global North. From the perspective of the construction of global imaginaries at the business elites’ level in the Global South, which is Rooted Globalism’s main concern, the colonial experience is not to be neglected. Both Arabs and Latin Americans endured centuries of direct or indirect forms of European imperial control and currently face renewed forms of US neocolonialism hardly seen in other parts of the world. This has historically shaped the way Arabs and Latin Americans related to, a lens that is clearly central to the discourse of Funk’s interviewees.
It is fascinating to see how much of an Orientalist discourse is manifested in some of the comments of Latin American businessmen about Arabs and how much those Arab elites concurrently feel offended by what they perceive as prejudice against them for being Arab. The situation of Arabs in Latin America evokes Albert Memmi, Thomas Cassirer, and G. Michael Twomey’s now classic discussion of the “impossible life” of Frantz Fanon “existing” between France and Algeria: too Afro-Caribbean to be French, too culturally French Christian and Black to be Algerian (“The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” Massachusetts Review 14 [1], 1973). In the rich ethnographic interviews at the core of Rooted Globalism, we can see members of the Arab-descent Latin American elite class trying to affirm their Argentineness, Brazilianness, or Chileanness by downplaying their Arab past and at the same time proudly affirming their Arabness as absolutely compatible with their respective Latin American citizenship and identities.
It is noteworthy that these perceived congruous identities have deep historical roots. For roughly seven centuries, between 711 and 1492, both Spain and Portugal (the core of the Iberian Peninsula) were governed by Arab Muslim rulers. During that time, Arabic was the lingua franca of the peninsula and the Mediterranean. A civilization and history were erected around the possibility of communication and expression in Arabic. This means that, at some point, those we perceive today as Portuguese and Spanish people were, in fact, Arabs. As Emilio González Ferrín explains in Cuando Fuimos Árabes (2018), at that time to be Arab was to be part of the Arabic-speaking civilization and everything that was erected around it and because of it. It is also well known that the Arab Muslim presence in contemporary Latin America dates to the time of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the region. Moors—Muslims of Arab or Berber descent living in Spain or North Africa—explored the Americas with Spanish conquistadors in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Many ended up settling in areas of Latin America after fleeing from persecution, such as the Spanish Inquisition.
These historical-geographical insights, often invoked by Funk’s research, make Rooted Globalism a work that transcends the (arbitrary) lines of political science and puts it in direct dialogue with the disciplines of anthropology, history, and geography, as well as the new fields of critical diaspora studies, South–South relations, transnational identity politics, and scholarship related to the role of the Global South in the future of capitalism. Another major contribution of Funk’s work is the awareness he brings to the reproduction of the Orientalist discourse in Latin America and the implications it has not only for the elites under scrutiny in the book but also for the millions of citizens of Arab origin living in Latin America. Evoking Darcy Ribeiro’s famous quote that the Arabs achieved success in the New World due to their greedy devotion to nothing else but money and profit (The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil, 2000)—something that, said in a heavily Catholic environment, equates to saying that these people are evil—Funk demonstrates how these kinds of statements of truth about the Arab diaspora in Latin America have been resignified in unofficial but highly effective ways.
The centrality of this process is clearly illustrated by the discussion of Paulo Maluf’s election campaign catchphrase. While running for mayor of São Paulo (the richest city in Brazil), Maluf’s slogan was “rouba, mas faz” (he steals, but he gets things done). During his successful career as a Brazilian politician, the Lebanese-descended Maluf embodied the tenets of tropical Orientalism: being a smart, charming, corrupt, and greedy Other who is here to accumulate fortune at the expense of the impoverished, hardworking local population. After Maluf’s arrest in 2018 for corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, Brazilian politicians with Arabic connections started to downplay their Arab origins as much as possible—unless trade, business, and capital were at stake. Brazil’s current vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, is not an Arab; that is, until he is speaking to an Arab audience of investors and entrepreneurs and then a couple of badly pronounced words in Arabic are spoken and his Lebanese origins are used as credentials for the construction of business partnerships based on a common past that can lead to a common (profitable) future.
It would have been interesting to see a discussion about how global imaginaries are constructed at the non-elite level in Rooted Globalism. I can think of two questions that could have added even more nuance to this book’s insights: Are there strategic mobilizations of Arab identities in Latin America deployed by non-elites to develop stronger connections to social movements or political parties in the Arab Latin world? And, if so, how are these identities mobilized on the ground for the purpose of human emancipation?
