Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
Tadween Publishing Blog is here! Check it out
Jadaliyya's first book is now available! Click here.
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
New Texts Out Now: Louise Cainkar, Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas
Louise Cainkar, “Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Louise Cainkar (LC): This article was developed from a keynote speech I delivered at the Conference on Arab World Migrations and Diasporas, organized by Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. When contemplating the keynote, I considered deeply what my particular contribution would be to a room full of multi-disciplinary scholars of Arab migrations and diasporas. I decided to focus on constructing a global context within which all of us—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, scholars ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Maya Mikdashi, What is Settler Colonialism? and Sherene Seikaly, Return to the Present
![[The Wall. Image by Sherene Seikaly]](/content_images/3/sm_noname.jpeg.jpg "[The Wall. Image by Sherene Seikaly]")
Maya Mikdashi, “What Is Settler Colonialism?” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37:2 (2013) Sherene Seikaly, “Return to the Present,” Elisabeth Weber, editor, Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write these pieces? Maya Mikdashi (MM): I had visited my mother's family in Michigan and gone to the reservation for a holiday. Prior to this trip and to reading through my deceased grandfather's piles and piles of papers documenting his family's history, I felt very uneasy with my own interest in settler colonialism in the United States ...
Keep Reading »The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso, 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 that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some conflicted torture opponents, affirmed the consensus view that torture is unequivocally bad. But, they opined, if torture was necessary to elicit vital information to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Wendy Pearlman, Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon
Wendy Pearlman, “Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Wendy Pearlman (WP): Five years ago I began to read widely about Lebanon in preparation for a trip there. While there are so many fascinating things about the country, I was most intrigued by its one hundred and fifty-year history with international emigration. There is hardly a corner of the globe in which Lebanese have not settled, and the worldwide diaspora of Lebanese origin outnumbers those living within Lebanon’s borders. Today, an estimated ten to twenty-five percent of Lebanese nationals ...
Keep Reading »Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History
Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. [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.] Today human rights provides a dominant framework for thinking about humanity—one in which humanity often appears as both a universal and an ahistorical category. In this view, the history of humanity is one of the discovery of otherwise hidden or ignored truths about its nature. One can easily understand the apparent political and moral utility in this position, which seeks to put the claims of fundamental equality ...
Keep Reading »From “Islamic Art” to “Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia”: Reliving the Distortions of History
![[Gallery 453: Iran and Central Asia (9th-13th centuries) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Galleries of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]](/content_images/3/sm_IranandCentralAsia.jpg "[Gallery 453: Iran and Central Asia (9th-13th centuries) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Galleries of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]")
This is the exceptional collection in all America, and it is being neglected. I urge you to make the reinstallation of Islam your highest priority. If you were to create an Islamic wing, you’d find that our holdings – splendid bronzes, excellent silver, majestic tiles, gorgeous carpets, intricate woodcarving, masterful pottery, and glorious miniatures – would become as popular as the European paintings. You laugh? [1] These words were recollected by the influential former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) Thomas Hoving in his memoir Making the Mummies Dance, remembering an exchange with Maurice Sven Dimand, curator at the Met, in 1967. This was no ...
Keep Reading »First as Shadow, Then as Farce: An Evening with Medieval Puppeteer Ibn Daniyal at CUNY in New York
The thirteenth-century occulist Muhammad Ibn Daniyal, said to have occasionally blinded his patients, is remembered both for his tragic optometry and for his comedic shadow puppet plays. A refugee from Mosul, Ibn Daniyal once entertained Sultans and urchins alike in the streets and salons of medieval Cairo. Perhaps he was better at summoning the shadows than the light. His Tayf al-Khayāl trilogy (“The Shadow Spirit”) is known as the only work of Arabic drama to have survived from the pre-modern period in its entirety. On April 8, Ibn Daniyal’s notoriously scatological cast of libertines and lay-abouts, Sheikh Who-evers and whores, snake-charmers, a hunchback, and at ...
Keep Reading »Derrida and the Crisis of French Zionism
The life’s work of Jacques Derrida, often referred to by the name “deconstruction,” advanced a new way of reading. Emphasizing the deferral of meaning and the production of irreducible differences within the major concepts of European thought, Derrida’s thought was enormously controversial, particularly for its political implications. The complexity of deconstruction resists biographical interpretation, while Derrida’s life experiences undoubtedly affected its insights. He occasionally spoke of his unusual youth as a Jewish boy in French colonial Algeria, and linked this outsider status to the concern with difference, uncovered as essential to apparent identity, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad, Mediating the Arab Uprisings
Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad, editors, Mediating the Arab Uprisings. Washington, DC: Tadween Publishing, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad (AI & BH): The idea for this book grew out of the splendid contributions to Jadaliyya from a number of authors who offered interventions on the role of media in the uprisings. With a dearth of critical examinations about the media and the representation of these movements, it became increasingly urgent to challenge some of the prevalent assertions circulating widely. Unlike our authors, our work as editors was considerably straightforward. We identified essays that ...
Keep Reading »Showtime's Homeland and the US Media
I took advantage of a recent promotion by my cable company to power-watch both seasons of Showtime’s Homeland. Before taking this plunge, I had purposely stayed away from Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, which have Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) heroes pitted against Muslim enemies. I never tuned into any of the seasons of 24, a show that shares the same producers with Homeland, who have teamed up with the Israeli crew who created Homeland’s precursor, Hatufim (“Hostages”). I did watch Covert Affairs while it remained a silly look at a CIA operative’s activities around the world. I had to stop when the main character successfully convinced a Yemeni official to be a ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Esam Al-Amin, The Arab Awakening Unveiled
Esam Al-Amin, The Arab Awakening Unveiled: Understanding Transformations and Revolutions in the Middle East. Washington, DC: American Educational Trust, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book, and how would you describe it? Esam Al-Amin (EA): The Arab Awakening Unveiled: Understanding Transformations and Revolutions in the Middle East is a collection of essays about the Arab uprisings and awakening movement, arguably the most important phenomenon that has taken place in the Middle East in the past century. I hope that the book provides thoughtful analysis and a keen understanding of this historical moment, as well as important aspects of US policy ...
Keep Reading »Melancholia and the Possibility of a Geopolitics of Mourning
Nouri Gana, Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011. In the preface to his recent book, Signifying Loss, Nouri Gana argues that “[i]n a world marked by the swift and sanitized infliction of loss and suffering, especially as a result of the insidious banalization of global warfare and everyday violence,” “signifying loss is crucial to adjusting to a persistently mutating and alienating reality and, simultaneously, to carrying out sociopolitical changes.” Indeed, the opening claim implicitly yet clearly announces that the following pages will demonstrate how contemporary understandings of loss and suffering ...
Keep Reading »Picturing Algeria
Pierre Bourdieu, Picturing Algeria. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. [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 a poignant interview included in Picturing Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu notes that “Yvette Delsaut wrote a text about me in which she very rightly says that Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.” Indeed, in ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Joel Beinin, Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine
Joel Beinin, “Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Joel Beinin (JB): It grew out of a conference on late Ottoman Palestine at the University of Lausanne. I was invited to make a link between the democratic possibilities opened by the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the state of affairs one hundred years later. We tend to think we have made a lot of ...
Keep Reading »The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
Vijay Prashad. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Forward by Boutros Boutros-Ghali. London and New York: Verso, 2012. Correct ideas are never sufficient; they are not believed or enacted simply because they are right. They become the ideas of the time only when they are wielded by those who have a united belief in their own power, using it in ideological and institutional struggles that, in turn, consolidate their social authority. - Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations On 15 ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Simon Jackson, Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations
Simon Jackson, “Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Simon Jackson (SJ): The article draws on my current book project, provisionally titled Mandatory Development: The Global Politics of Economic Development in the Colonial Middle East. The book is about the socioeconomic development regime in French Mandate Syria-Lebanon between the world wars, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East
Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Charles Tripp (CT): The origins of the book lay initially in my feeling that a great deal of space had been devoted to the analysis of elites, the resilience of regimes, and the dominance of the state in the Middle East. This is perfectly understandable and has produced some outstanding studies. However, there did ...
Keep Reading »The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Dream Takes Flight
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige The Lebanese Rocket Society--A Tribute to Dreamers (Parts II, III, IV, and V) CRG Gallery, Manhattan February 28 -- April 20, 2013 In April 1961, students from Halgazian University along with instructor Manoug Manougian launched a rocket over Ain Saadeh, northeast of Beirut, Lebanon. They formed the school’s first rocket society and by 1967, they had designed, built, and launched more than ten space rockets and gained both local and international ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam
Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Questions by Brahim El Guabli Brahim El Guabli (BEG): Why Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam? Chouki El Hamel (CEH): Written history about Morocco is generally silent regarding slavery and racial attitudes, discrimination, and marginalization, and paints a picture of Morocco as free from such social problems. Such problems are usually associated more with ...
Keep Reading »Algeria: The Revolution to Come?
Hocine Belalloufi, Democracy in Algeria, Reform or Revolution. Coédition Lazhari Labter éditions / Editions Apic Alger, 2012. On the shelves of bookstores in Algiers, a book appeared a few months ago whose cover immediately stood out. Under the image of a large classic-looking compass, in large and bold letters, is the question that Hocine Belalloufi tries to answer in roughly five hundred pages: Democracy in Algeria, Reform or Revolution[1]? Since 2008, this former editor-in-chief of ...
Keep Reading »From High to Low and Back Again: A Fish Above Sea Level
Samak fawqa satah al-bahr [A Fish above Sea Level]. Directed by Hazim Bitar. Jordan, 2012. Recently I had the opportunity to view the independent film Samak fawqa satah al-bahr (A Fish above Sea Level) at the University of Jordan. This is the first feature-length film by Hazim Bitar, who both wrote and directed it. He is a prominent presence in the Jordanian film community, having produced more than six shorts, both narrative-driven and documentary, in addition to founding the (now suspended) Amman ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: David McMurray and Amanda Ufheil-Somers, The Arab Revolts
David McMurray and Amanda Ufheil-Somers, editors, The Arab Revolts: Dispatches on Militant Democracy in the Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Published in association with Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume? David McMurray & Amanda Ufheil-Somers (DM & AU): MERIP recently published an edited volume with Verso on just the events in Egypt, examining the initial eighteen days of the uprising as well as ...
Keep Reading »NEWTON in Focus: Thinking Through Gender and Sex
This week we highlight various NEWTON texts relevant to the study of gender and sexuality. The authors of these texts write from a wide range of perspectives, approaching questions relevant to the MENA region from a variety of cultural and political contexts and (inter)disciplinary approaches. We encourage you to integrate these texts into your curricula in the coming semesters. If you wish to recommend a book or peer-reviewed article for a feature in NEWTON—on any topic relevant to the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East
Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Rashid Khalidi (RK): I had long wanted to use the large number of documents—position papers, minutes of meetings, internal memos, official proposals, and so forth—that I had collected as an advisor to the Madrid and Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations from 1991-1993, but I never found the right opportunity to do so. The research of one ...
Keep Reading »Hot on Facebook
About Reviews
Jadaliyya Reviews offers a place for commentary, debates, and exchanges on books, fims, videos, art, theater, music, new media, conferences, protests, and events. Visit our Call for Reviews page for more information about submitting posts/reviews online! Send your reviews to: reviews@jadaliyya.com
“Conspicuously absent from both maps is the Palestinian experience of public transportation within the West Bank, where hundreds of checkpoints and other obstacles subject Palestinians to delays, detours and arbitrary closures.”click | email | tweet
.jpg){kind=small}
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
Jadaliyya Features
.jpg)
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- Women's Rights in the Egyptian Constitution: (Neo)Liberalism's Family Values
- مسخ الذاكرة
- New Texts Out Now: Louise Cainkar, Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas
- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (May 21)
- إعادة الحساب الدائمة: إساءة فهم سوريا بعد سنتين
- From al-Araqib to Susiya: Forced Displacement of Palestinians on Both Sides of the Green Line
- إعجام
- كارل ماركس واليسار في لبنان
- Picturing Algeria
- Egypt Media Roundup (May 20)
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (May 13-19)
- Jadaliyya's Occupation, Intervention, and Law Page Resonates
- Al Jazeera Management Orders Joseph Massad Article Pulled in an Act of Pro-Israel Censorship
- سعادت حسن منتو: قصة قصيرة
- Reports Roundup (May 18)
- Injuries, Arrests and House Raids: The Case of a Bahraini Family
- الليبرالية الفلسطينية أمام القضاء الإسرائيلي
- ما هي النكبة؟
- Academic Freedom and the Middle East: A Handbook for Teaching and Research
- Syria's Inglorious Basterd
Pages/Sections
Archive
©2010-2013 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design