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Pedagogy
"We Didn't Know It Was Impossible, So We Did It": The Quebec Student Strike Celebrates Its 100th Day
![[Student strikers in Quebec. Image via Occupy Theory.]](/content_images/3/sm_quebec.jpg "[Student strikers in Quebec. Image via Occupy Theory.]")
Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”) Students in Quebec are marking their hundredth day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, 22 May, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movement of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada's Arab Spring. Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by seventy-five percent over five years (amended to eighty-two percent over seven years by the government at the end of April). Before the general ...
Keep Reading »The Andalus Test: Reflections on the Attempt to Publish Arabic Literature in Hebrew
Should a visitor from another planet happen to arrive here and look around at the reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea without the usual lenses of distortion, she would see that in Israel/Palestine—the land stretching from the river to the sea which has been under one rule for over forty years—almost half the population is Palestinian Arab and Arabic is their mother tongue, as well as that of nearly half of the Israeli Jewish population. Should our guest distinguish—as does the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, as well as the Israeli academy and media—between Israeli citizens and occupied Palestinian subjects, she would find that within the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an interpretation of the novel that seemed to conceal some of the complexities of how this could be read in the Persian. Although the preoccupation with that particular word ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb
![[Cover of Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012)]](/content_images/3/sm_asj.jpg "[Cover of Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012)]")
Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What led you to write this article? Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman (MS and RF): The post-revolutionary political scene in Egypt, with at least fourteen Islamist parties vying for power, is a timely historical moment to take a close look at the dynamics of religious authority versus the so-called secular. As the Egyptian people succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak’s dictatorship, the importance of popular discourses asserts itself strongly. Our article came about partly through a desire to show how popular, non-institutional ...
Keep Reading »Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] What if capitalists in a particular country could draw on a reserve army of semi-skilled labor that includes hundreds of millions of noncitizens whom they could import, hire, fire and expel at will, without worrying about laws, regulations, and collective action? What if they could perfect labor market segmentation to a degree whereby only one social class—capital—reproduces itself, but another—labor—never does? What ...
Keep Reading »Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature
Mara Naaman, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] In January and February of 2011, Egyptians descended upon public squares throughout the country to bring an end to the thirty-year regime of Husni Mubarak. For those eighteen days—and on many other occasions throughout the following year—the people of Egypt wrested control of public space from the physical and discursive grip of Mubarak’s police state and reconfigured the material and symbolic ...
Keep Reading »ArteEast Presents Two Literary Events Featuring Poets from Gaza (New York, 24 & 25 April 2012)
![[Image from http://arteeast.org/]](/content_images/3/sm_Gaza2.jpg "[Image from http://arteeast.org/]")
April 24 at 7pm: Gazan Writers Salon 1: Fractured Web, Gazan Writing Online at Columbia Center for Palestine Studies, Knox Hall Room 509, Columbia University, 606 West 122 Street, New York, NY 10027. Free and open to the public. April 25 at 7pm: Gazan Writers Salon 2: From Memoir to Reportage and Back Again, a literary reading at Nuyorican Poets Cafe 236 E. 3rd St., New York, NY 10009. Advance tickets $10 (click here to order), $15 at the door. Sponsored by ArteEast. ArteEast is pleased to present a two-part series of literary readings and discussion, the Gazan Writers Salons, to academic and literary audiences in New York as a special program in ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Farzaneh Milani (FM): In a way, Words, not Swords is a rebuttal to my first book, Veils and Words. The central argument of Veils and Words revolved around Iranian women's literary output. I claimed that the veil had covered not only Iranian women's bodies, but also their literary voices. Women's self-expression, either bodily or verbal, I surmised, was covered by the material veil and its verbal counterpart—silence. I explored ways in which women poets and prose writers escaped the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Junaid Rana (JR): My book was borne out of ethnographic research I completed on the role of labor migration in the global economy. I started with some basic questions: why do people become labor migrants, how does labor migration become transnational and global, what are the conditions that lead to labor migration, and how are labor migrants treated abroad? Each of these questions led to complex answers driven by fieldwork I conducted with Pakistanis before and after 11 September 2001, in Lahore, Dubai, and New ...
Keep Reading »Sonia M'Barek: A Musical Innovator Rooted in Tradition
![[Sonia M'Barek performing in New York. Photo by Fouad Salloum.]](/content_images/3/sm_sonia.jpg "[Sonia M'Barek performing in New York. Photo by Fouad Salloum.]")
Sonia M’Barek, Proshansky Auditorium, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, 23 March 2012. In traditional Arabic music, a vocalist is not just referred to as a singer, but is instead spoken of as a mutrib/mutribah. Literally translated, they are the people who bring tarab, or musical ecstasy. As such, the craft of a traditional Arabic vocalist is a demanding one. The singer must possess a pleasing voice, have clear diction, and sing impeccably in tune, all while comfortably navigating the Arabic maqam (mode) scales, whose intervals are smaller than the ones in Western music and therefore require particular precision. Additionally, a good singer is ...
Keep Reading »The Melancholia of a Generation
Mohammed Achaari, al-Qaws wa-al-farashah. al-Dar al-Bayda’: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-ʻArabi, 2010. Mohammed Achaari is not new to Morocco’s literary scene; though The Arch and the Butterfly (al-Qaws wa-al-farashah) is only his second novel, he is the author of nine collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and has served as both Minister of Culture and president of the Moroccan Writer’s Union. The brief synopses that accompanied the announcement of his selection as one of two recipients of ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine
Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, editors. Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine. Special Issue of settler colonial studies 2.1 (2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this special issue? Editors (E): This open-access (and therefore freely accessible) special issue emerges out of a conference we organized in early March 2011, convened by the SOAS Palestine Society. The impetus for the conference came from two main directions. First, we all work on ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life
Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Roger Owen (RO): I was intrigued by news reports from Algeria in the spring of 2009 stating that President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika of Algeria was going to amend the constitutional term limits in order to allow him become, in effect, president life, as Ben Ali and other Arab republican presidents had done before him. This led me on to consider the whole ...
Keep Reading »Degrees of Incarceration
When I started shooting for what would become Degrees of Incarceration in 2003, I had no idea that it would entail anything more than a day’s work. I showed up with a camera because a dear friend and colleague asked if I had a day to document a youth play about prisons. I ended up spending the night (leaving Bethlehem by public transportation after 4pm was impractical, my new friends told me) and then regularly returning to the youth center that organized the play. As I got to know the activists who ...
Keep Reading »The Free University of New York City (1 May 2012)
Free University in Solidarity with May 1 General Strike New York, NY (27 April 2012): This May Day, a coalition of students and faculty from Brooklyn College, Columbia University, the CUNY Graduate Center, Eugene Lang College, Hunter College, New School for Social Research, New York University, the Occupy University, and Princeton University are collaborating to produce a “collective educational experiment” to be held on Tuesday, 1 May from 10am to 3pm. The action is in solidarity with Occupy ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Gilbert Achcar, Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt
Gilbert Achcar, “Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Gilbert Achcar (GA): The story of this article resembles that of my book The Arabs and the Holocaust, of which it can be seen as a sequel. In both cases, the initial impulse of writing was not the evolution of my ongoing research, but a fortuitous circumstance. The prelude to the book was a request made to me a few years ago to ...
Keep Reading »Outside Looking In
City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982. The Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY, 22 February – 5 May 2012. City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982 is an exhibit of design work produced by world-famous architects and firms for the booming Iraqi capital during the mid-twentieth century. Beginning from the year that the Iraq Development Board was established to channel seventy percent of state oil revenues into modernizing schemes for national development, the exhibit traces a thirty-year ...
Keep Reading »Something of Palestine Emerges
2012 London Palestine Film Festival. 20 April – 3 May 2012. For more information and a complete schedule of films, click here. Each year, for the two weeks of the London Palestine Film Festival, there are a bunch of people whose social life for that fortnight becomes the festival. Others dip in and out, while still others see a Palestinian film or a film about Palestine perhaps for the first time. Each year the program is rich and eclectic, ranging from animations to documentaries to features, from ...
Keep Reading »Art and Subversion: An Interview with Omar Kholeif
Subversion. Featuring work by Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Khaled Hafez, Larissa Sansour, Marwa Arsanios, Sharif Waked, Sherif El-Azma, Tarzan and Arab, and Wafaa Bilal. Curated by Omar Kholeif. Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, UK. 14 April - 5 June 2012, preview/symposium 13 April 2012. [Omar Kholeif is Curator of Subversion, a large-scale exhibition and public program, which runs until 5 June 2012 at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. More about Omar Kholeif here; follow ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800)
Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book, and what particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? Nelly Hanna (NH): The book is part of a large body of literature that deals with the artisans and guilds of the Ottoman Empire. Scholars have written about artisans in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, and Jerusalem (including Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Haim ...
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View All Entries »- "We Didn't Know It Was Impossible, So We Did It": The Quebec Student Strike Celebrates Its 100th Day
- Post-January 25 Iranian-Egyptian Relations: A New Dawn?
- Egypt's Working Class and the Question of Organization
- لماذا سأقاطع الانتخابات الرئاسية؟
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- Without Principle, There is Nothing: On the Undignified Politics of the American Task Force on Palestine
- The Melancholia of a Generation
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- Iran Will Require Assurances: An Interview with Hossein Mousavian
- Arab Uprisings Symposium: Critically Assessing the Changing Landscape of Power and Players (Beirut, 31 May - 1 June 2012)
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