Public Culture in Arab Detroit’s English-Speaking Mainstream: Playing to a New Audience

ACCESS is a human services organization committed to the development of the Arab-American community in all aspects of its economic and cultural life.

Our staff and volunteers have joined forces to meet the needs of low income families, to help newly arrived immigrants adapt to life in America, and to foster among Americans a greater understanding of Arab culture as it exists both here and in the Arab world.

To achieve these goals, ACCESS provides a wide range of social, mental health, educational, artistic, employment, legal and medical services.

ACCESS is dedicated in all its efforts to empowering people to lead more informed, productive, and fulfilling lives.

Whereas public culture in Arabic-speaking Detroit is made beyond the reach of centralized, state-controlled agencies, its production in Arab Detroit’s English-speaking mainstream is increasingly dominated by a single, government-funded organization: ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, located in Dearborn. The Arab community’s successful entry into Detroit’s ethnic arts scene in the late 1980s was engineered and overseen by ACCESS staff. As the manifesto above suggests, the cultural politics underlying this move were framed by the assumption that Arabs are part of American society: they must adapt to it, and they must help Americans to understand Arab culture^[8] by explaining how that culture is shaped both “here” and “there.” The rhetoric is consistent with every trend in the popular shift toward multiculturalism, diversity, and pluralism. It is consistent because, unlike the jaliya-based nationalism of Detroit’s Arabic-speaking mainstream, ACCESS is part of the complex ideological machinery America’s business, political, and intellectual elites use to manage and incorporate the nation’s “special populations.”