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Pedagogy
Theses on the "Arab Spring"
![[Map from arabbay.com]](/content_images/3/sm_Screenshot2012-01-29at8.52.37PM.png "[Map from arabbay.com]")
The gigantic upheaval that is shaking the entire Arab world since its initial tremors started in Tunisia on 17 December 2010 was determined by a long and deep accumulation of explosive factors: the lack of economic growth, massive unemployment (the highest average rate of all world regions), widespread endemic corruption, huge social inequalities, despotic governments void of democratic legitimacy, citizens treated as servile subjects, etc. The mass of people who entered into action across the Arab region is a composite, encompassing a wide range of social layers and categories that are affected to various degrees by elements of this complex set of determining ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture
Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Ziad Fahmy: Growing up in Alexandria, Egypt, I experienced firsthand the marked difference between the modern standard Arabic (MSA) that I was taught in school and the colloquial Egyptian I spoke with my parents, relatives, and friends. In elementary school, I struggled with the complex grammar rules and regulations we had to learn, which had little relevance to the everyday language we spoke. Though I was obviously aware of the dissimilarity between fusha (classical Arabic) and ‘ammiyya ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation
Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989). New Edition. New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 2010 [When Ella Shohat’s book Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation was first published in 1989, Edward Said wrote: “Shohat's Israeli Cinema is a tour-de-force. Not only is it theoretically sophisticated, it is also deeply rooted in the changing politics and perceptions of the Israeli predicament as they bear upon Israeli films. With brilliant humanistic insight, Shohat describes the underlying ideological myths and allegorical structures and contributes significantly to a new, enlarged understanding of the dynamics ...
Keep Reading »The Foibles of Thomas Friedman
Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. London and New York: Verso, 2011. A researcher once carried out an informal study to try to find out whether or not people actually read the books on bestseller lists. To find out, he put envelopes in the reputedly high-selling books. In each envelope was a note saying that if those who found the envelopes were to send them to a designated address, the researcher would send them five dollars. According to the story, the response rate was zero. After reading The Imperial Messenger, Belén Fernández’s treatment of the life’s work of Thomas Friedman, one can only hope for the sake of American ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hakan Ozoglu, From Caliphate to Secular State
Hakan Özoğlu, From Caliphate to Secular State: Power Struggle in the Early Turkish Republic. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Hakan Özoğlu: Critical works on the early years of the Turkish Republic are quite rare, especially in Western scholarship. In the field of history, scholarly works on the Ottoman Empire overshadow the republican period. In Turkey, the transition period from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey has long been considered “sacred” for intellectual inquiry, and the majority of books rarely step away from the line of the official history. Yet the significance of this period, not only for Turkey but for ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915
Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [Co-winner of the 2011 Albert Hourani Book Award] Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Nile Green: It took me some time to realize the importance of Bombay to Muslims from all around the Indian Ocean, but after so many textual trails led me there, I realized I had to write a book about Bombay and its steam-spun web of connections. The documentation was abundant—in Muslim travelogues, vernacular poetry, printed hagiographies—though ironically I found as much of Bombay’s legacy in such cities as Tehran and Hyderabad as in ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair, Displaced at Home
Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair, editors, Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender among Palestinians in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair: The idea for the collection began at an informal gathering of five friends, all doctoral students or recent graduates and all Palestinians from “inside.” We had gathered for lunch during the 2005 Middle East Studies Association meeting to catch up on each other’s news. Our conversations about our research over that lunch were so interesting it seemed obvious to us that we should organize a panel together for the next MESA ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans
Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman: The book started off as something quite different than what I intended. I began my research in the summer of 2005 with the intention of examining how Palestinian and Israeli youth produce cultural and political change together as "equal" partners for "peace." Obviously, at the time I held a typically liberal, soft Zionist, and rather naive understanding of the situation. I was teaching at Al Quds University in Abu Dies and working with the ...
Keep Reading »NEWTON Authors Rochelle Davis and Alan Mikhail Receive 2011 MESA Book Awards
We are very happy to report that two authors whose books were recently featured in New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) were recipients of prestigious awards at the 2011 Middle East Studies Association convention. Rochelle Davis, whose book Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced was featured in NEWTON last week, was one of two winners awarded the 2011 Albert Hourani Book Award. Alan Mikhail, whose book Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History was featured in NEWTON in October, was awarded the 2011 Roger Owen Book Award. In addition, we are delighted that the second winner of the 2011 Albert Hourani Book Award, Nile Green, for his book ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced
Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. [Co-winner of the 2011 Albert Hourani Book Award] Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Rochelle Davis: Over the course of a decade, I collected 120 village books written by Palestinians about the more than four hundred villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war. By documenting and analyzing the work of these local historians and preservationists, and their knowledge of a disappeared landscape and way of life, I provide readers with a sense of the past and suggest how people today think of and write their own history. A study of these village ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco
Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Zakia Salime: In this critical time of sweeping revolts and political changes in the Middle East, it is very useful to revisit the spaces of contentions that have been opened by women’s rights groups. My book shows how two decades of struggles over broadening the spheres of expression and rights have led to dramatic changes in both Moroccan feminism and Moroccan Islamism. My interest in documenting these shifts began with my own involvement in the feminist movement during the 1990s. I wanted to ...
Keep Reading »Our University: On Police Violence at CUNY
![[Image via The GC Advocate]](/content_images/3/sm_img_1696.jpg "[Image via The GC Advocate]")
This past Monday, I was one of a handful of faculty and staff among a group of CUNY students standing in the lobby of a building at Baruch College in Manhattan. We had all entered with our CUNY i.d. cards in hand. Our intention was to attend a public hearing called by the CUNY Board of Trustees to discuss proposed tuition increases. Among us, it should be noted, were students who had signed up in advance to speak at this public hearing. I was surprised—although, given recent events involving police violence at the University of California and throughout New York City, I should not have been—to find myself facing a phalanx of campus security with their truncheons drawn, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Karima Khalil, Messages from Tahrir
Karima Khalil, editor, Messages from Tahrir. Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you put this book together? Karima Khalil: One of the first things I saw when I went to Tahrir for the first time on 29 January 2011 was a man standing quietly, holding a sign in Arabic saying: “I used to be afraid but I became Egyptian.” I thought this was an incredibly powerful statement, coming as we did from thirty years of repression with very little public ...
Keep Reading »Happy NEWTON Year: New Texts by Ella Shohat and Joseph Sassoon, the Egyptian Revolution, and More
New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) is gearing up for 2012, featuring an array of new and forthcoming texts that are sure to be of interest to Jadaliyya readers. This week, we are delighted to feature two important books: Joseph Sassoon’s Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime, which was just published by Cambridge University Press, and the new edition of Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, with a new postscript by the author, recently published by I. ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime
Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Joseph Sassoon: The Ba‘th Party documents provide a treasure trove that allows us to understand how authoritarian regimes function and how the Iraqi system was sustained for thirty-five years in spite of wars and sanctions. I was intrigued by the ability to delve into those primary sources to find out how the different organs ...
Keep Reading »The Nature of Oil: Reconsidering American Power in the Middle East
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York: Verso, 2011. Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Robert Vitalis, American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. For most of those who consider themselves politically liberal, oil—along with environmental degradation and foreign occupation—form a kind of political axis of evil on the ...
Keep Reading »Tunisian Film Festival in Hollywood, 10-12 January 2012
Today is the opening of the first Tunisian Film Festival in Hollywood. It is first and foremost a commemoration of the Tunisian revolution, which surprised and shook the world, ushering in insurrections and revolts whose reverberations were heard from Cairo to New York. Secondly, it is also an opportunity to bring together Tunisians in the United States and Tunisia around a common project of exchange and dialogue with American audiences in the mecca of the film industry, Hollywood. The festival opens on ...
Keep Reading »My Lonely and Beautiful Country: Recent Work on the Cinema of Turkey (Part Two)
Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Deniz Bayrakdar, Aslı Kotaman, and Ahu Samav Uğursoy, editors, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. [Part One of this review essay, which considers Gönül Dönmez-Colin's Turkish ...
Keep Reading »My Lonely and Beautiful Country: Recent Work on the Cinema of Turkey (Part One)
Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Deniz Bayrakdar, Aslı Kotaman, and Ahu Samav Uğursoy, editors, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Upon being awarded the Best Director honor at Cannes in 2008 for his film Üç ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, Between Nationalism and Women's Rights
Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, "Between Nationalism and Women's Rights: The Kurdish Women's Movement in Iraq," Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4.3 (2011): 337-353. Jadaliyya: What made you write this article? Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt: This article is part of a special issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication on contemporary Iraq, which seeks to go beyond the mainstream focus on security issues, elite politics, and oil to understand the political, ...
Keep Reading »Bombing the Neighborhood: Daniel Ellsberg and the Radical Critique of American Empire
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith. United States, 2010. “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.” – Daniel Ellsberg Two of the most chilling scenes in Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s extraordinary 2010 film, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, involve Richard Nixon. Nixon had just won the 1968 presidential election, a victory that he owed in part ...
Keep Reading »Quiet Crossings, Kinship, and Intimacy in Lebanon and Northeast Syria
George Awde, Solo Show at the Korn Gallery, Curated by Rebecca Soderholm, September 7 – October 14 George Awde’s first US solo exhibition offered an arresting and intimate look at the production of masculinity and kinship at the interstices between Syria and Lebanon. Awde, an American-born artist of Lebanese descent, is a photographer and educator who works in the US and Beirut. He received his BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 2004, and in 2009 he received his MFA from Yale ...
Keep Reading »Some Panels from the Upcoming Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) will be holding its 43rd Annual Meeting in Washington DC this weekend, 1-4 December. Over a span of four days, scholars and researchers from across North America, the Middle East, and beyond will present their work via an impressive and diverse array of thematic panels (see complete program here). In order to highlight some of the panels, below is a list of MESA 2011 Annual Meeting panels in which one or more Jadaliyya Co-Editor is involved in as an organizer, ...
Keep Reading »Adventures in Candyland
This week, walking through Columbia University's campus, I noticed a piece of paper stuck to the metal railings around me. It was a flyer advertising Israel week at Columbia University, a popular yearly event meant to discuss issues related to Israel and foster support on campus for that state. This year, one of the events in particular caught my eye. The event was titled Mapping Israel's Borders, and the blurb read: “Do you want to learn more about the history of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict? ...
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I must confess that I had hoped for a different winner – not a head of state or human rights campaigner, but an ordinary, 48-year-old woman, whose distinction was that she had lost her son this year at the tender age of 26.click | email | tweet
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