[Jadaliyya will be posting excerpts from the Arab Studies Journal`s Twentieth Anniversary issue. What follows is the Editor`s Note and Table of Contents from that issue.]
Editor’s Note
We can scarcely believe that two decades have passed since the publication of the first issue of the Arab Studies Journal. We are proud and humbled to have published groundbreaking work by scholars at the onset of their careers as well as at the pinnacle. During the last twenty years, the Journal has taken part in extraordinary changes in the field of Middle Eastern studies: paradigm shifts (and, on occasion, returns), the growth of once-nascent fields (like gender and sexuality studies), and the emergence of exciting new subfields. The Journal’s contributions have included a series of special issues devoted to such cutting-edge themes as: The Body; Dynamics of Space; Visual Arts and Art Practices; Language and Culture; and Middle East Exceptionalism. Throughout, we have tailored our issues to reflect shifts in knowledge production as well as respond to profound political, social, and cultural changes.
As part of that effort, last year we joined forces with our sister online organization, Jadaliyya ezine, established in 2010 under the auspices of the Arab Studies Institute (www.ArabStudiesInstitute.org). This partnership has already yielded substantive results, as both publications draw on large pools of talent. It has also bridged the gap between the relatively narrow confines of academia and a more expansive readership.
This volume, our twentieth anniversary issue, offers a spectrum of the work we have been dedicated to publishing—critical, progressive, comparative, and multidisciplinary. In that spirit, we present articles and book reviews that range in geographic coverage, topic, and discipline (history, anthropology, political science, sociology, and comparative literature) as well as a special section entitled “Arab Migrations and Diasporas,” drawn from presentations at the 2011 symposium on “Arab World Migrations and Diasporas” at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
Joel Beinin makes a critical historiographical intervention by attending to the urban element of the history of pre-aliyah Jewish communities, pre-state Zionist settlers, and pre-1967 settlements in the territories. Unearthing this urban element, he argues, allows us to excavate histories of urban Arab-Jewish coexistence. Moreover, it reveals that the “trajectory of the Zionist settlement project encompasses a transition from urban coexistence and rural violence toward increasing urban violence as the frontier shifted from the countryside to the cities.” Beinin simultaneously writes a narrative of this coexistence-cum-dispossession and points to strengths and weaknesses in the historiography.
Khaled Furani offers another reading of Israel/Palestine with his exploration of the poetry festivals that took place in the Galilee during Israeli military rule (1948-66). These festivals, he shows, took on the aura of village weddings, representing moments of elation, inclusivity, and a break from the overarching sense of despair. They were also spaces in which Palestinian poets could both recover and shape a language of nation, belonging, and, above all, home. Furani sensitively evokes a particular historic moment in which “aesthetic agency coalesced with political agency” to articulate a distinct and enduring politics of dissent.
Moving from literary to historical anthropology, Zainab Saleh deconstructs the first Iraqi Nationality Law of 1924 and traces its application under Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s to justify the expulsion of the “Iraqis of Iranian origin.” Reading through the lens of nation building, Saleh deftly reveals how this law institutionalized difference among Iraqi citizens by assigning legal status based on nationality held under the Ottomans. This differential inclusion became a means of exclusion decades later, further illustrating the persistence of the colonial legacy in postcolonial Iraq following the fall of the monarchy in 1958.
Cortney Hughes Rinker takes us to Morocco with her work on women’s use of contraception in working-class health clinics in Rabat. Hughes Rinker argues that the use of contraceptive methods serves as a means for women to express their uncertainty and fear about Morocco’s future. By analyzing popular culture, government reports, and ethnographic data, she suggests that the reconstruction of citizenship in Morocco has produced anxiety on fertility and motherhood. For these women, contraception is less about becoming autonomous and self-sustaining citizens, as framed within neoliberal development discourses, and more about surviving and managing national obligations and working-class realities.
This issue also features a special section on migration and diaspora, a particularly timely topic in this moment of heightened deportations, exile, refugees, and socioeconomic emigration. Louise Cainkar provides a theoretically dynamic and quantitative overview of the English-language field of Arab world migrations and diasporas, within which scholars can situate their work. Starting from the insight that the blanket term “migrant” reveals a profound bias in scholarship that then translates into policy, Cainkar’s article is a critical intervention in a field that seldom engages in cross-disciplinary or cross-regional, much less comparative, conversations. She lays the groundwork for new approaches to Arab world migrations and diasporas.
The last two articles are situated within different historical eras and disciplines, yet both revolve around Lebanon. This is perhaps unsurprising given, as Cainkar notes, that one in thirteen Lebanese resides in diaspora. Simon Jackson examines the political dynamics of the global Syro-Lebanese diaspora during the period of French mandatory rule. He focuses on the formation of auxiliary troops of the Syrian Legion during World War I, showing how these diaspora communities played a crucial and previously neglected role in the political economy of French Mandate Syria-Lebanon. Jackson traces this diaspora’s critique of the Mandate’s economic policies and its connection to the League of Nations in Geneva to reveal a rich repertoire of narratives and debates.
Wendy Pearlman in turn examines how the Lebanese diaspora continues to play a significant role in internal Lebanese politics in the contemporary, post-civil war era. She uses Lebanon as a case study to identify emigration as a major yet overlooked factor that allows regime leaders to maintain power and thwart opposition movements. She shows how emigration can serve as a safety valve alleviating socioeconomic discontent and pressure for reform; offer a political exit and reduce the imperative of action for change; lead to a depletion in the ranks of those best positioned to bring new ideas and skills into public life; and invite an infusion of capital that helps to sustain partisan or clientelist networks.
This anniversary issue of ASJ also includes a robust review section, covering notable new works across a range of disciplines and subjects. These works include Noha Radwan’s study of Egyptian colloquial poetry, Abigail Jacobson’s history of Jerusalem during World War I and its immediate aftermath, Eve M. Troutt Powell’s examination of slavery in the modern Middle East, and Fida J. Adely’s ethnographically informed analysis of nationalism, faith, and gender in contemporary Jordan. In addition, reviews of two new works on Egyptian history—Samera Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity and Nancy Y. Reynolds’s A City Consumed—invite readers to reflect on the legacy of colonialism in Egypt as well as on broader questions about the formation of political subjectivities.
We are also very pleased to include a review of the new edition of Ella Shohat’s groundbreaking Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Over twenty years after its original publication, this boundary-crossing work, whose second edition features a substantial new postscript, remains “an indispensable study of Zionism and the moving image.” Another highlight is Picturing Algeria, a new edited volume of Pierre Bourdieu’s photographs of Algeria featured alongside previously untranslated writings.
Additional reviews address books of interest to those wishing to understand our political present, including Trita Parsi’s assessment of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran, John Collins’s study of Israel’s increasingly globalized forms of militarized securitization, and Eyal Weizman’s analysis of how humanitarianism becomes intertwined with state violence. This issue’s review section concludes with two essays: one on contemporary Salafism and “the local, national, and global scales within and across which Salafis operate,” and the other on “rebels, rulers, and the right to the city” in Dubai and beyond.
Editorial Review Board:
Lila Abu-Lughod, As‘ad AbuKhalil, Nadje al-Ali, Sinan Antoon, Walter Armbrust, Rochelle Davis, Ellen Fleischmann, William Granara, Lisa Hajjar, Rema Hammami, Michael Hudson, Wilson Chacko Jacob, Toby Jones, Zachary Lockman, Timothy Mitchell, Kirsten Scheid, Judith Tucker, Robert Vitalis
Editorial Staff
Founding Editor
Bassam Haddad
Co-Editors
Sherene Seikaly
Nadya Sbaiti
Senior Editors
Allison Brown
Dina Ramadan
Managing Editor
Lizette Baghdadi
Associate Editors
Chris Toensing
Steve Gertz
Assistant Editor
Owain Lawson
Book Review Managing Editor
Allison Brown
Book Review Editors
Charles Anderson
Naira Antoun
Ryvka Barnard
Samuel Dolbee
Anjali Kamat
Amir Moosavi
Ahmad Shokr
Elizabeth Williams
Business Manager
Chris Scott
Circulation Manager
Zack Cuyler
Research and Development Manager
Samantha Brotman
Researchers
Andrew Armstrong
Kevin Davis
Robert Rouphail
Website Editor
Ziad Abu-Rish
Webmaster
Bien Concepcion
Graphic Design
Future Anecdotes Istanbul
Idil AteÎli
Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XXI, No. 1
Spring 2013
Twentieth Anniversary Issue
Articles
14
Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine
Joel Beinin
48
On Iraqi Nationality: Law, Citizenship, and Exclusion
Zainab Saleh
79
Palestinian Poetry Festivals During Israel’s First Military Rule
Khaled Furani
101
Responsible Mothers, Anxious Women: Contraception and Neoliberalism in Morocco
Cortney Hughes Rinker
Special Section: Arab Migrations and Diasporas
126
Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas
Louise Cainkar
166
Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations
Simon Jackson
191
Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon
Wendy Pearlman
Reviews
216
Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History
by Samera Esmeir
Reviewed by Ilana Feldman
221
Picturing Algeria
by Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli
Reviewed by Muriam Haleh Davis
226
A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran
by Trita Parsi
Reviewed by Bitta Mostofi
231
A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt
by Nancy Y. Reynolds
Reviewed by Sarah El-Kazaz
236
Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern Arabic Canon: New Readings of Shi‘r al-‘Amiyya
by Noha M. Radwan
Reviewed by Christopher Stone
241
Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire
by Eve M. Troutt Powell
Reviewed by Soha El Achi
245
From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule
by Abigail Jacobson
Reviewed by Mustafa Aksakal
249
Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, New Edition
by Ella Shohat
Reviewed by Nick Denes
254
Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress
by Fida J. Adely
Reviewed by Bruce Burnside
259
Global Palestine
by John Collins
Reviewed by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
263
The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
by Eyal Weizman
Reviewed by Lisa Hajjar
Review Essays
270
Situating Salafism: Between the Local, the National, and the Global
by Michael Farquhar
Global Sala!sm: Islam’s New Religious Movement
edited by Roel Meijer
Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious Identity
by Laurent Bonnefoy
Localising Sala!sm: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia
by Terje Østebø
279
Street Life: Rebels, Rulers, and the Right to the City
by Deen Sharp
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Dubai: The City as Corporation
by Ahmed Kanna