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New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

[Cover of Betty S. Anderson,

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as ...

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New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent

[Cover of

Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, editors, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent. Special issue of SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE (December 2011). [SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE is a publication of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University, an advanced study center that promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in global dynamics of power and inequality.] Jadaliyya (J): What made you organize the workshop that led to this special issue? Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao (LA-L and AR): The workshop grew out of a project called “Who’s Afraid of Sharia?” that we ...

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A Changing American Context? Reflections on Two Books on Egyptian History from Cairo

[Covers of Raouf `Abbas Hamid’s and `Asim el-Dessouky,

Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Raouf `Abbas Hamid and `Asim el-Dessouky, The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837-1952. Translated from the Arabic by Amer Mohsen with Mona Zikri. Edited by Peter Gran. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. The publication of Nelly Hanna’s Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800) and Raouf `Abbas Hamid’s and `Asim el-Dessouky’s The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837-1952 marks something of a departure from the norm for the field of modern Egypt in the United States, ...

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Remapping Palestine and the Politics of Injury

[Still image from Till Roeskens'

Till Roeskens, Videomappings: Aida, Palestine. Palestine/France, 2009. The struggle over Palestine Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Keep Reading »

New Texts Out Now: Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy

[Cover of Ben White,

Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. London: Pluto Press and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ben White (BW): I wanted to write something that would accessibly describe the policies of segregation and discrimination that Palestinian citizens in Israel have experienced since 1948. Many people—even those who are engaged with Palestine/Israel to some extent—are unaware of the ways in which the Palestinian minority has been systematically marginalized in ways that go far beyond the “complaints of inequality” that surface in mainstream media on occasion. This is more than popular ...

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Imagine Africa

[Cover of

Imagine Africa. Published by the Pirogue Collective. Brooklyn, NY and Dakar, Senegal: Island Position, 2011. If you do a Google search for the phrase “Imagine Africa,” the results are not encouraging. Among the most popular results, you will find a company operating under that name offering “luxury safaris and beach holidays” in Africa. You will also encounter a project originating out of the University of Michigan under the name “IMAGINE Africa,” which in this case stands for “IMplementing A Global Internet Network in Africa,” a project intended “to bring Internet access to the rural population of Africa.” Another popular result is for an exhibition called “Imagine ...

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New Texts Out Now: Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture

[Cover of Ziad Fahmy,

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 ...

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Morbid Symptoms: The Omar Yussef Mystery Series

[Cover of

The Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 264 pp, 2006, ISBN 978 1 84354 603 0 The Saladin Murders by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 340 pp, 2008, ISBN 978 1 84354 648 1 The Samaritan’s Secret by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 324 pp, 2009, ISBN 978 1 84354 650 4 The Fourth Assassin by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 264 pp, 2010, ISBN 978 1 84887 203 5   Frequently written off as an inferior literary form by traditional academic literary critics, for whom it is often seen as no more than popular “entertainment,” to use Graham Greene’s haughty self-­putdown, detective fiction is often dismissed as a depthless and fleeting tale of imaginary adventure. ...

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New Texts Out Now: Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation

[Cover of Ella Shohat,

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 ...

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The Foibles of Thomas Friedman

[Cover of Belen Fernandez,

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 ...

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Struggles That Fueled a Revolution

Bulaq: Among the Ruins of an Unfinished Revolution. Directed by Davide Morandini and Fabio Lucchini. UK/Italy/Egypt, 2011. “Bread, freedom, and social justice” has been one of the most memorable chants from Egypt’s year of mass protests. Although world and Egyptian media have been fixated on the symbolic Tahrir Square, little attention has been directed towards places where many Egyptians converging on the square actually live. Bulaq, only a few hundred meters north of Tahrir Square, is one such ...

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New Texts Out Now: Pascale Ghazaleh, Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World

Pascale Ghazaleh, editor, Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World. Cairo and New York: American University of Cairo Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book? Pascale Ghazaleh (PG): This book brings together articles written by scholars from different countries, working on different aspects of waqf during different periods. These articles were originally papers submitted to the annual seminar organized by Dr. Nelly Hanna of the American University in Cairo's Arab and ...

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New Texts Out Now: Joshua Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria

Joshua Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012.  Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Joshua Stacher: The central reason for writing this book was to understand the differences in how executive power operates in autocratic political systems. I had been living in Cairo for about four years and, while I had traveled to other Arab countries and noticed differences, I had grown accustomed to the Mubarak regime's variant of ...

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Prophetic Politics: Charting a Healthy Role for Religion in Public Life

Walter Brueggemann, The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipatory Word. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. Does God take sides in the elections? Is there a voters’ guide hiding in our holy books? Should we pray for electoral inspiration? Secular people tend to answer an emphatic “NO” to those questions, as do most progressive religious folk. Because religious fundamentalists so often present an easy-to-caricature version of faith-based politics—even to the point of implying that God ...

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New Texts Out Now: Magid Shihade, Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict Among Palestinians in Israel

Magid Shihade, Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict Among Palestinians in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Magid Shihade (MS): One reason was personal. The book begins with a case study of a soccer game between two Palestinian villages: Kafr Yassif, with a dominantly Christian population, and Julis, which is a Druze village. The game ended with a fight between the fans of the two teams and resulted in the killing of two people, ...

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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 ...

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Murdoch's Homeland

Terrorists have backstories, and American politicians play dirty in the “war on terror”. These revelations are what propel the Showtime’s hit series, Homeland, seemingly setting it apart from other pop culture representations of post-9/11 America. “How do you tell a thriller in the post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib, and post-Guantanamo world?” asks Howard Gordon, one of the show’s creators. “Homeland will challenge people’s notions of what a hero and a villain are. The show lives in that complexity and lives in ...

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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. ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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