An Honest Living - by Steven Salaita

Book Synopsis

An exiled professor's journey from inside and beyond academe

In the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that, too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career for an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus--a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, pro-fessional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school--An Honest Living describes the author's decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.

Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs--Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut [AUB] --ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.

Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was expelled: an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author's decade of professional joys and travails.

Review Quotes

It's hard to imagine offering [Salaita] anything other than our humanity in return for reading this insightful memoir. . . It's a reminder of the precarity of labor and of living. . .-- "Mondoweiss"

In moments of immense honesty and searing personal remembrance Steven Salaita takes the reader through his academic life into the moments of being blacklisted from U.S. academe and what it has meant to find a new way of being and working in the world. An Honest Living is a book that causes us to interrogate the tropes, structures, and systems we engage on a daily basis and to always remember that on the other side of it all lies a human being.---Matthew Shenoda, author of The Way of the Earth

An Honest Living is a disabused view of the academic career as seen from the front of a school bus, the driver being a Palestinian-American ex-academic who came to the world of public transport after falling victim to modern McCarthyism. Who knew that someone with legendary grounds for bitterness against the university and the mainstream media would make such good small talk with kindergarteners or have the talents of a stand-up comedian? In an era of quit lit, Salaita tells a unique story with a unique sensibility. He comes across as a man of unflinching principle who has never stopped enjoying himself or entertaining those around him.---Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University and director of the documentary "Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists"

To my mind, whether as a scholar of Native American Studies and Palestinian struggles, a teaching professor, advocate of social justice and free speech, or school bus driver, Steven Salaita's career has always been about earning an honest living, financially and morally. An Honest Living is a profile in courage, filled with sharply-drawn and often tender depictions, as well as probing personal and universal revelations. A book I'm glad to have in my hands and that I will long celebrate, An Honest Living confirms that the path of decency, while full of hurdles, is the surest road to joy and emancipation.---Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas

With beauty and fierce intelligence, An Honest Living demonstrates Salaita's powers as a compelling storyteller with a highly original, bold, and always interesting mind, and unshakeable integrity. At times providing sharply satirical accounts of the corporate, settler colonial university, at other times, sharing intimate and moving meditations on fatherhood, exile, education, and freedom, this is a book with staying power, one that will continue to teach its readers how we might live honorably in the world.---Cynthia Franklin, author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea

About the Author

Steven Salaita is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He writes at stevesalaita.com.