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From the Editors
Jadaliyya launches its new Syria page . . . Click here.
The Culture Page Returns . . . . click here
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The Jadaliyya Egypt Elections Watch page archives! Click here for comprehensive coverage.
Egypt Election Results: Of 427 seats settled, MB got 193, Nour 108, Wafd 38, Bloc 30, RDP 11, Rev. Cont. 10, Wasat 8 (Click Here)
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The Pedagogy Section
Latest Pedagogy Posts
New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
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 ...
Keep Reading »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 neighborhood. The residents of Bulaq represent the essence of why Egyptians erupted in mass ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
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 ...
Keep Reading »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 Islamic Civilizations Department. In 2005, I helped set up the seminar, and the theme we ...
Keep Reading »Syria Media Roundup (February 16)
Recent articles and analysis on Syria, representing diverse positions: Virtual and on-the-ground changes to Syria’s streets and squares Chatham House on Syria (1) Chatham House on Syria (2) Some tribal history for Syria Syria, Spin and Propaganda on Al-Jazeera’s The Listening Post The real Syrian opposition...? on Syria Comment Nir Rosen on ‘The Battle for Homs’ BBC : US Government positions on Syria, Aleppo bombings BBC’s on-the-ground reporting from Homs Debate and comment on options for Syria Palestinian int
Keep Reading »A Changing American Context? Reflections on Two Books on Egyptian History from Cairo
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 ...
Keep Reading »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 autocracy. After living and researching in Damascus for about three weeks, I started to ...
Keep Reading »Remapping Palestine and the Politics of Injury
Till Roeskens, Videomappings: Aida, Palestine. Palestine/France, 2009.
The struggle over Palestine
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New Texts Out Now: Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy
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 ...
Keep Reading »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, one from each village. This took place while the Israeli police, who were present at the ...
Keep Reading »Imagine Africa
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 ...
Keep Reading »Knowledge and Power in Algeria: An Interview with Daho Djerbal on the Twentieth Anniversary of NAQD
It is still very possible to work on Algeria without ever passing through the Contrôle Passeport in Algiers. For a host of reasons—archival, bureaucratic, historical and, perhaps, psychological—Algeria remains on the margins of its own historiography. Arriving in September, I expected to get many questions from scholars who have worked here in the past, pertaining to the current conditions of research, the upcoming legislative elections, and the finally-completed metro (thirty years in the making). Instead, the one question I was most consistently asked by friends and colleagues was: Do you ...
Keep Reading »Theses on the "Arab Spring"
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 ...
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 anti-regime protest. I looked around me and saw how many different people—of all ages and ...
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 ...
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. B. Tauris. Next week, to mark the first anniversary of the 25 January Revolution, we will ...
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 ...
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 of the regime operated. For example, among the collection, there are almost two thousand ...
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 ...
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 American political landscape. Despite the talk of democracy promotion in Iraq and a ...
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 ...
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 10 January with a performance by the San Francisco-based Tunisian artist, MC Rai, best ...
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 ...
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 Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging, can be found here.] Asuman Suner’s New ...
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 ...
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 Maymun [Three Monkeys]—becoming the first Turkish director to receive this award—Nuri Bilge ...
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 ...
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, cultural, and intellectual trends within Iraqi society. The aims of our contribution are to ...
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 ...
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 to his promise to end the war in Vietnam and deliver to the United States an honorable ...
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 ...
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 University in photography. His work has been exhibited internationally. In this exhibition, Awde ...
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 ...
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, presenter, and/or discussant. However, to appreciate the full spectrum of topics, themes, ...
Keep Reading »Our University: On Police Violence at CUNY
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 ...
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? Do you love CANDY? Map out the history of Israel's map . . . with candy! Watch how the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ayca Cubukcu, On Cosmopolitan Occupations: The Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq
Ayça Çubukçu, “On Cosmopolitan Occupations: The Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.3 (2011): 422-442. Jadaliyya: What made you write this article? Ayça Çubukçu: The origin of this article goes back to my fieldwork with the global network of activists that constituted the World Tribunal on Iraq from 2003 to 2005. The World Tribunal on Iraq was an experimental project of the global anti-war movement, which emerged in response to the occupation of Iraq by the United States and allies. I say “experimental,” because although civil ...
Keep Reading »After the Spring: Thoughts on Cultural Production and the Selling Power of Change
“After the Spring: New Short Plays from the Arab World.” Performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, August 2011. As part of their international “Rough Cuts” project, the Royal Court Theatre specially commissioned a series of four short plays from the Arab world in a program entitled “After the Spring,” in response to the uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa. All four writers had previously participated in the Royal Court project when it was first established in 2007 and their first plays for “Rough Cuts,” which were staged as rehearsed readings at the Royal Court in 2008, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Wendy Pearlman, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement
Wendy Pearlman, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Wendy Pearlman: I became captivated by Palestinian history and politics when I studied at Birzeit University in the West Bank from January to June 2000. Thereafter, I returned to Palestine nearly every chance I got. Three months into the second Intifada, I conducted interviews with about two dozen Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These were published in 2003 as the book Occupied Voices: Stories of ...
Keep Reading »Films for the Classroom: Silences of the Palace
Silences of the Palace [Samt al-Qusur], directed by Moufida Tlatli. France/Tunisia, 1994. As a lover of film, I am often asked about my favorites. And as a lover of Arab film in particular, I am usually expected by friends and colleagues to begin with a paean to the Egyptian cinema. Growing up in the home of an Egyptian immigrant to Canada, I was weaned on a steady diet of Fatin Hamama, Rushdy Abaza, and Samia Gamal, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the cinema of the 1950s and the 1960s became a passion. I could never get fired up about the fluff of the forties, and the schlock of the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt
Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Wilson Chacko Jacob: Working Out Egypt has a number of possible origins, some related to decisions I have made and others that seem entirely divorced from me. In the first place, it was a revision of my doctoral dissertation written under Zachary Lockman’s supervision at New York University. Having had a prior incarnation cannot but leave its mark. In this case, that previous life as a PhD thesis ...
Keep Reading »Where the Truth Lies
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, 2011. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia opens with a scene in which the truth is buried; it is there in front of us but hidden. The first thing we see is an image that is shot from outside a dirty window. The camera remains outside, but the faces behind the window slowly become visible: three men are having drinks inside a car-mechanic's workshop. We are left outside, the sound is distant, and the image is blurry. A truck passes by and wipes the image out. This was it; that is when it happened. Shortly after ...
Keep Reading »Announcing the Arab Council for the Social Sciences
A new arrival on the Arab research landscape is the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), which was recently legally established (in March 2011) as a regional, independent, non-profit organization headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon. The Council is dedicated to strengthening social science research and research capacity in the Arab world. It aims to promote a strong and vibrant social science community by facilitating and supporting networking and the collaborative production of knowledge between individuals and institutions within the region and beyond. Its structure includes a General ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Belen Fernandez, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work
Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. London and New York: Verso, 2011. Jadaliyya: Why did you write this book? Belén Fernández: I asked myself this question several thousand times, particularly during my third rereading of every Friedman column published since 1995. The idea for the book came about in a far less climactic fashion than Friedman’s ideas tend to occur—i.e. it did not involve “Quarter-Pounder[ing] my way around the world,” being struck by a “bolt out of the blue that must have hit somewhere between the McDonald’s in Tiananmen ...
Keep Reading »PARC 2012-13 Fellowship Competition for U.S. Scholars: Conducting Field-Based Research on Palestine
PARC Palestinian American Research Center PARC 2012-13 Fellowship Competition for U.S. Scholars: Conducting Field-Based Research on Palestine Fellowship awards from $6,000 to $10,000 Full proposals due January 12, 2012 Awards announced March 12, 2012 The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) announces its 13th annual competition for post-doctoral and doctoral research fellowships in Palestinian studies. Important information about the fellowship competition: Research must contribute to Palestinian studies. Any area of Palestinian studies will be considered, ...
Keep Reading »Romance, not Romanticized: Three Stories of Love and Loss from the Boston Palestine Film Festival
Love During Wartime, directed by Gabriella Bier. Sweden, 2010. Paradise Lost, directed by Ibtissam Mara’anah. Israel-Palestine, 2003. 77 Steps, directed by Ibtissam Mara’anah. Israel-Palestine, 2010. All three films are playing at the Boston Palestine Film Festival this week. In their films, Ibtissam Mara’anah and Gabriella Bier both focus on romantic relationships that cross the Palestinian-Israeli divide. Bier’s Love During Wartime follows a married couple grappling with bureaucrats and policies that deny them permission to live together, while Mara’anah’s autobiographical works ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Alan Mikhail, "Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt"
Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [Winner of the 2011 Roger Owen Book Award] Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Alan Mikhail: In the most general sense, I wrote this book because I wanted to understand the period of Ottoman rule in the Arab World. The Ottomans were in Egypt for over 350 years, so they clearly must have had a fundamental role in shaping its history, politics, culture, and economy. I wondered why so many historians of the Middle East work on the nineteenth and twentieth ...
Keep Reading »The Others, the Elsewhere of Our Here
John E. Drabinski, Godard Between Identity and Difference. New York and London: Continuum, 2008. John Drabinski’s Godard Between Identity and Difference is a rare thing in the world of contemporary academic writing: a book that reveals the author’s personal, idiosyncratic, and loving relationship with his subject. The reader comes away from this book not merely impressed by its arguments and enlightened by its readings, but also moved by its passion. One feels that one has just had an extended discussion with a smart and funny friend at a bar or a diner after coming out of an all-day Godard ...
Keep Reading »The Irvine 11, the Police, and the Autonomy of the University
The recent conviction of ten University of California students of two misdemeanor counts of disrupting and conspiring to disrupt a speech given by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren on 8 February 2010, points to the stifling of free speech and academic work and inquiry in the university. Three of the Irvine 11 are students at the University of California, Riverside, and two of these UCR students have been my own: Taher Herzallah and Shaheen Nassar. Both were studious, inquisitive, and engaged, modeling for others, in their behavior, what being a university student ought to be about. I will even ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Linda Herrera and Asef Bayat, "Being Young and Muslim"
Linda Herrera and Asef Bayat, editors, Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Linda Herrera and Asef Bayat: Both of us (editors) were involved in studying youth in Muslim majority contexts for a number of years and from different angles. Linda had been working on issues of youth in relation to the cultures and politics of schooling for almost two decades. While at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (2005-2010), she convened the Children ...
Keep Reading »The Shibboleths within Albert Memmi's Universalism
Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. “What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?” - Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes’ comment at an academic conference on post-colonialism[1] Is there a place for “Muslim” or “Arab” peoples in “Western” “universal” values of equality, freedom, democracy, rights, and so forth? Both categories frequently subsume religious and/or ethnicized (mis)conceptualizations in current Western discourse. Every day in the news, there is at least one item that reveals (again) the hypocritical ...
Keep Reading »Film and its Voices: The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival
Palestinian Film and Arts Festival September 26 - 30, 2011, Washington, DC Last week Washington, DC joined Chicago, Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, and a string of other cities and communities in putting on the first DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival. Over the past ten years, Palestinian Film Festivals produced by the Palestinian diaspora community have been popping up all over and have come to exhibit a new stage in Palestinian artistic expression and the showcasing of it. In the Middle East, the film industry powerhouse has always been Egypt, and while that is still very much the case, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Max Weiss, "In the Shadow of Sectarianism"
Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Max Weiss: I suppose the central question at the heart of my book is: How did the Lebanese Shi`a become sectarian? Amidst the flood of writing about the rise to prominence and influence of the Shi'i community in Lebanon during the second half of the twentieth century—with starring roles for Imam Musa al-Sadr and his Movement of the Deprived, and subsequently-emerging figures associated with Hizballah—there ...
Keep Reading »Threat: Palestinian Prisoners in Israel
Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (eds.), Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel. London: Pluto Press, 2011. There are many harrowing passages in the excellent new edited volume by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar on the processes of administrative detention and imprisonment of Palestinians in Israel; some of them are even in the book’s academic chapters. But the most harrowing, and paradoxically the most hopeful, is the account Osama Barham gives of his endless arrests, detentions, and interrogations. These began in 1979—when he was detained for flying the colors of Palestine in a flag ...
Keep Reading »Report on Jadaliyya's Conference on Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions
Introduction “Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions…Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Neoliberalism,” a conference sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program and the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, and by the Arab Studies Institute (which includes Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya), brought together forty participants for an intense conversation on 13-14-May 2011 at George Mason University regarding the future of pedagogy and scholarship dealing with the region (see List of ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mohamed Daadaoui, "Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge"
Mohamed Daadaoui, Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge: Maintaining Makhzen Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Mohamed Daadaoui: I wrote the book because of a long-standing interest in my own country’s political system and the remarkable longevity of monarchical rule in Morocco. Looking at the literature in general, the book attempts to fill the literature gap in Maghreb studies in the English language, and sheds light on the idiosyncrasies of the Moroccan special case of regime sustainability. For a sizeable number of Moroccans, ...
Keep Reading »Curriculum: Tools for Reclaiming Communities from Militarism
To mark the now decade-long US-led “Global War on Terror,” The War Resisters League and the South Asia Solidarity Initiative have created an interactive, popular eduction-style workshop that explores how organizing against federal military spending relates to and can forward local campaigns for economic justice, as well as how the past decade of war has effected Afghans and what they are doing in response. Brought to You by Bombs and Budgets: Tools for Reclaiming Communities from Militarism, tries to get to the how of "bringing the war dollars home", as more and more people ...
Keep Reading »"Zahra's Paradise" [Part Two]
[The writer Amir and the artist Khalil (both have chosen anonymity for political reasons) began publishing the webcomic Zahra’s Paradise online in February 2010. First Second Books has just published Zahra’s Paradise as a graphic novel. Last week, Jadaliyya interviewed Amir and Khalil on the occasion of the book’s publication. This week, we present a second excerpt from Zahra's Paradise.]
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Paul Sedra, "From Mission to Modernity"
Paul Sedra, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth Century Egypt. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Paul Sedra: As an undergraduate, I had a strong interest in contemporary relations between Coptic Christians and Muslims in Egypt, and decided to write a senior thesis on the topic. The only problem was that the literature, particularly that in English, was terribly underdeveloped. Generally speaking, there was almost no literature in English on the modern history of the Coptic community. Much was made in the ...
Keep Reading »Reimagining Foreclosure as a World-Making Project
Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility. Curated by Jennifer Burris, Sofía Olascoaga, Sadia Shirazi, and Gaia Tedone, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program, 2010-2011. May 20 - June 11, 2011 The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, NY One sticky summer afternoon, I walked into The Kitchen and encountered a distinctly alienating experience. A red rotary phone—sans rotary dial—rested on a reception desk and was set against a static backdrop of repetitious black numbers that evoked stock exchange tickers. I placed the phone’s receiver against my ...
Keep Reading »On Racial Literacy: "A White Side of Black Britain"
France Winddance Twine, A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Despite the central role they play in our lives, the intimate spaces of family life have unfortunately remained beyond the reach of most sociological research. This empirical blind spot has led to a surprising lack of knowledge around how people, in their private spaces shared with loved ones, think and act about social issues. There are some perfectly understandable reasons why this enormous gap in sociological knowledge exists, even given the unquestionable ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Adam Hanieh, "Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States"
Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Adam Hanieh: Although this book is very much focused on the political economy of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman), it has its origins in the six years (1997-2003) that I lived in the West Bank, Palestine. During that time, I had the opportunity to travel throughout the Middle East, and was repeatedly struck by the centrality of the Gulf to the political economy of the region as a whole. ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Steven Salaita, "Israel's Dead Soul"
Steven Salaita, Israel’s Dead Soul. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Steven Salaita: I'd been wanting for a long time to systematically explore the idea of Israel's soul being in some sort of crisis. The decline of Israel's soul is a notion much ridiculed by those opposed to Zionism, and I thought it would be fun and illuminating to articulate why such ridicule exists—and why it is completely justified. J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? SS: It is a basic discourse analysis of some of the basic ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Khalid Medani, "Strife and Secession in Sudan"
Khalid Medani, “Strife and Secession in Sudan,” Journal of Democracy 22.3 (July 2011): 135-149. Jadaliyya: What made you write this article? Khalid Medani: I wrote the article “Strife and Secession in Sudan” because I felt very strongly that the analysis of the politics in Sudan has long been characterized by misrepresentations and simply a lack of understanding of the roots of the conflicts in the country and the problems having to do with the secession of South Sudan in the longer term. On the one hand, policymakers have been invested in overseeing the secession of the South based on ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amal Ghazal, "Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism"
Amal N. Ghazal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s-1930s). New York: Routledge, 2010. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Amal Ghazal: I wanted to find a topic that bridged my two fields of study, Middle East Studies and African Studies. I thought Omani rule in East Africa would be interesting, especially in that I was initially able to trace correspondence between Arabs in East Africa and newspapers in the Middle East. A research trip to Oman revealed that I was stepping into a goldmine: Omanis in Zanzibar ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: The Back to School Edition
Just in time for the new semester, we are happy to present a series of eminently teachable texts in the latest edition of NEWTON: James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History and The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan We hope that the author interviews and excerpts from these texts, together with the others we have featured thus far in New Texts Out Now, will be helpful for those busy assembling syllabi and reading lists, as well as ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: James Gelvin, "The Modern Middle East" and "The Arab Uprisings"
James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History, Third Edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. James L. Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write The Modern Middle East: A History originally, and what led you to work on this revised and updated edition? James Gelvin: Oxford originally suggested I do the book and I agreed immediately. It was something I had been thinking of doing anyway. Although the book is published by Oxford's textbook ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Stephen Sheehi, "Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims"
Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Stephen Sheehi: Undoubtedly, the assault on decency, sanity, and justice under the Bush regime inspired the book at the most immediate level. More compelling than the neocon-Vulcan agenda, however, was how, when one looks at it structurally (beyond the veneer of its rhetoric), one sees only how it activated the racist unconscious of the American mainstream. Growing up as an Arab-American, as a brown man in a post-Vietnam, post-Camp David ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Saadia Toor, "The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan"
Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Saadia Toor: I felt compelled to write this book because of the increasingly disturbing discourse on Pakistan in the West, both within the media and within academia. There is a mixture of incomprehension and hawkishness in this discourse when it comes to Pakistan, which is extremely dangerous given the increasing extension of the US/NATO war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. I believe that the ease with which even anti-war liberals (and ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nadine Naber, "Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism"
Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism. New York: New York University Press (Nation of Newcomers Series), forthcoming in 2012. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Nadine Naber: As part of my work in Arab American Studies for the last fifteen years, this book is, in part, an internal critique of my own field and much of my own previous scholarship. Most Arab American Studies research—important and necessary as it is—has taken one of two approaches. First and foremost, there are analyses that interrogate the historically specific and changing effect of US ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mohammad R. Salama, "Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History"
Mohammad R. Salama, Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History: Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion since Ibn Khaldun. London and New York: I. B Tauris, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Mohammad Salama: There were a few reasons that compelled me to write this book. First, I am a Muslim who has been living in the US since the September 11 attacks, and I have witnessed the dire consequences of those events on personal and public levels. After so much misinformation about Muslims and Islam invaded the public sphere and was unfortunately widely believed, I felt that ...
Keep Reading »Inhabiting the Possible: Pedagogy and Solidarity at Camp Ayandeh
“A decent education cannot be limited to tolerating youth accessing their ethnic and cultural history but must be about facilitating their right to do so.” — Cornel West Globally and nationally, young people are garnering attention as historical actors and agents of social change. At the same time, federal, state, and local politicians are making drastic cuts to primary and secondary schooling, community services supportive of youth development, and higher education. These cuts coincide with a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and continued demonization of Muslim and Middle Eastern ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Launches "New Texts Out Now" (NEWTON)
Jadaliyya is delighted to announce the launching of its newest section: New Texts Out Now (NEWTON); click here to access the page directly. NEWTON features interviews with writers of recently published and forthcoming books, articles, and translations, along with short excerpts from these new works. We hope it will be a resource for readers anxious to keep up with new publications in the field, as well as those looking for more information about a variety of topics and issues related to the Middle East. In our inaugural installment, we are very pleased to be featuring: Hamid Dabashi, Brown ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hamid Dabashi, "Brown Skin, White Masks"
Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks. New York and London: Pluto Press, 2011. JADALIYYA: What made you write this book? HAMID DABASHI: This book is very much a product of the Bush era (2000-2008) — a record of my fears and trembling at the sight of a criminally delusional man at the helm of an imperial killing machine and lacking any moral conception of what it was he was doing when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, two catastrophic decisions that Afghans and Iraqis continue to pay for with their lives. I was aghast at the sight of the mass frenzy that accompanied those ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Paul Amar, "Middle East Masculinity Studies"
Paul Amar, “Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis,’ Industries of Gender in Revolution,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7.3 (Fall 2011): 36-71. Jadaliyya: What made you write this article? Paul Amar: I began drafting this article two years ago in order to seek ways out of the impasse in which the study of sexuality in the Middle East had become trapped. I was asking myself, how do we highlight aspects of coloniality, geopolitics, and power in the study of sexuality, without, on the one hand, reducing the social subjects of sexuality to the dupes, tools, or ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ahmed Kanna, "Dubai, the City as Corporation"
Ahmed Kanna, Dubai, the City as Corporation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Ahmed Kanna: This is my first book. It emerged from my dissertation research. When I first started studying anthropology in graduate school, I thought I would do fieldwork in Lebanon and on Levantine cultures (having spent a couple of summers traveling and living in Damascus and especially Beirut). At around the same time (early 2000s), I started getting interested in the literature on the ...
Keep Reading »A Creature Which Would Be Impossible If It Did Not Exist: "Midnight's Children" Turns Thirty
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which turns thirty this year, opens with one of the most celebrated bouts of throat-clearing in literary history: I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more...On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s ...
Keep Reading »On the Historical Study of South Asia and Sufism: An Interview with Nile Green
In the following conversation with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Professor of History Nile Green discusses some of the issues arising from the study of “Muslims of South Asia and the wider Persianate world.” The bulk of the interview addresses issues related to the study of the history of South Asia, Sufism, and Islam. It concludes with some advice for graduate students struggling to define their research agendas. The interview was originally conducted in the spring of 2009. Ziad Abu-Rish (ZA): Your bio on the UCLA Department of History ...
Keep Reading »Book Reviews in the Arab Studies Journal's Forthcoming Issue
We are pleased to announce the Book Review section of the upcoming release of the latest issue of Arab Studies Journal, Jadaliyya's sister organization under the umbrella of the Arab Studies Institute, and its peer-reviewed research publication arm. For more information about the Arab Studies Journal, please visit our About page here. This nineteenth year of the Arab Studies Journal review section continues the Journal’s tradition of bringing select new titles of interest together with both rising and established scholars. Our reviews span a ...
Keep Reading »New Arab Studies Journal Issue . . . Around the Corner!
We are pleased to announce the upcoming release of the latest issue of Arab Studies Journal, Jadaliyya's sister organization under the umbrella of the Arab Studies Institute, and its peer-reviewed research publication arm. For more information about the Arab Studies Journal, please visit our About page here. Revolutions, uprisings, demonstrations and protests have unfolded in ways both exultant and heartbreaking across North Africa and the Middle East in the last several months. As individuals, communities, citizenries, and populations tired of decades of a manipulation of ...
Keep Reading »Universal Jurisdiction: A Conversation between Lisa Hajjar and Richard Falk
Richard Falk and Lisa Hajjar engage in a discussion about universal jurisdiction, international law, and criminal accountability for gross crimes (torture, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity). The doctrine of universal jurisdiction was developed in the 19th century to combat piracy and slave trading on the high seas. The aim was to close a jurisdictional gap by allowing governments to prosecute these "enemies of all mankind" in their own national legal systems despite no direct connection to the crime. Developments in the post-World War II era, notably the Nuremberg ...
Keep Reading »Youth, Media and the Art of Protest in North Africa
“Everyone has his own way of fighting, and my weapon is art!” says Milad Faraway, a 20 year-old Libyan who created the rap group Music Masters with another young friend in 2010. Their song “Youth of the Revolution” urges “Moammar [to] get out” and end the violation of Libyans’ rights. “Qadhafi, open your eyes wide” sings another rap group Revolution Beat: “you will see that the Libyan people just broke through the fear barrier.” In neighboring Tunisia, twenty-one year old Hamada Ben Amor, known as El General, circulated on the internet his video song “President: Your people are dying” in an ...
Keep Reading »"Teaching the Middle East" Conference: Conclusions and Moving Forward
The best way to conclude this summary and discussion of “Teaching the Middle East” — indeed, given the structure of the conference and the nature of the conversations, as set out by Bassam Haddad in his opening remarks and reiterated in his remarks before the two closing panels, the only way to conclude — is that the discussions that began at this conference have not yet concluded. Indeed, these discussions are really only getting started. This was part of the conception of the conference itself: as Haddad noted in his opening comments, the idea from the beginning was that it would really be ...
Keep Reading »Panel Summaries for Day 2 of Jadaliyya's "Teaching the Middle East" Conference
Panel 4: Peripheries and Exceptions The second day of the conference began with a panel that focused on states and issues that have been marginal to the dominant discourses about the Arab uprisings. However, the goal of the panel itself was to highlight the actual centrality of these issues to a deeper understating of these uprisings and their consequences for teaching the Middle East. Asli Bali, in her “Comparative and International Law of the Middle East After the Uprisings: Re-assessing the State of the Arab State,” highlighted the ways in which “law” is exceptionalized in Middle East ...
Keep Reading »Introduction: Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions . . . Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Neoliberalism
May 13-14, 2011, George Mason University “Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions…Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Neoliberalism,” a conference sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program and the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, and by the Arab Studies Institute (which includes Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya), brought together forty participants for an intense two-day conversation regarding the future of pedagogy and scholarship dealing with the region (see List of Participants and Abstracts ...
Keep Reading »Panel Summaries from Day 1 of Jadaliyya's "Teaching the Middle East" Conference
Panel 1: Focus on Egypt The conference panels were kicked off by a panel that used Egypt as a case-study, both in terms of understanding the dynamics of one particular uprising as well as thinking specifically about the pedagogical implications of that uprising on the teaching of Egyptian history and contemporary politics. Joel Beinin, in his presentation entitled "Workers and Egypt’s January 25th Revolution: Shifting the Discussion from Autocracy/Democracy to Political Economy and Equity," argued that a political economy approach is vital to understanding and talking about events ...
Keep Reading »Running on Empty: International Education Funding Gets Deep Cuts
Although education reform is a hallmark of the Obama presidency, we have just witnessed the largest cuts ever to the US Department of Education’s international education programs. In 2009, Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, announced Race to the Top. A $4.3 billion program, it is one of the largest and most expensive education programs in US history. A central goal of Race to the Top is to “prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy.” Apparently, study abroad and foreign language training isn’t deemed essential for such ...
Keep Reading »Schedule from Conference on "Teaching the Middle East After the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions."
On May 13 and May 14, more than forty scholars gathered as part of Jadaliyya's first co-sponsored conference on "Teaching the Middle East After the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions." The conference announcement and description can be found here. Presenters' abstracts, panel summaries, and more are forthcoming on the Pedagogy Page. FRIDAY, MAY 13 9:30am - 10:00am Introduction by Bassam Haddad and Cemil Aydin, and Welcome by Provost Peter Stearns 10:00am - 11:30pm Panel 1: Focus on Egypt Paul Amar How the Egyptian Revolution Teaches Political Sociology, ...
Keep Reading »Arab Uprisings and Middle East Studies: Roundtable with Beshara Doumani, Charles Hirschkind, Saba Mahmood, and Stefania Pandolfo
This is an audio recording of an informal roundtable on how the recent popular uprisings in the Arab world have impacted research and teaching on the Middle East in the various disciplines. The roundtable was held on May 2 at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) as part of the Luncheon Seminar, a monthly gathering of faculty and graduate students at UCB who work on the Middle East and North Africa and Islam-related topics. This roundtable capped five meetings of the Luncheon Seminar during the Spring 2011 Semester, all of which were focused on the impact of the Arab ...
Keep Reading »"It's Important to Remember Their Names:" Review of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara
Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. Edited by Moustafa Bayoumi. Chicago: Haymarket Books / New York: OR Books, 2010. First things first: Midnight on the Mavi Marmara is necessary reading. It also provides a strong model for the practice of combining scholarship and activism, and for future endeavors in left publishing more generally. Published as a collaboration between OR Books, a new progressive publishing company specializing in print-on-demand and e-books, and the venerable Haymarket ...
Keep Reading »Latest Commentary:
New Texts Out Now as a Tool for Educators
If you haven’t had a chance to visit Jadaliyya’s newest section, New Texts Out Now (NEWTON), this would be the perfect ...
Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions... Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia and Neoliberalism
May 13-14, 2011, George Mason University “Teaching the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian ...
Open Access Dissertations: Thèses
"Thèses" already has about 5000 dissertations, most of them open access (en ligne). They are labeled according to ...
Youth, Media and the Art of Protest in North Africa
"Everyone has his own way of fighting, and my weapon is art!" says Milad Faraway, a 20 year-old Libyan who created the ...
Palestine context during uprisings
Khalidi and Samour's "Neoliberalism as Liberation" provides an excellent (and so far best) analysis of current ...
Essay Assignment Ideas: Egypt, Anthropology, Economics and the REvolution
Below is an essay assignment I presented to second year undergraduates. It was difficult for them, but they learned a ...
Possible ME readings
Dear Colleagues: We are all consumed by the latest pieces, which makes a lot of sense. We do need to think ...
The Future of the Arab Uprisings
Joseph Massad's "The Future of Arab Uprisings" puts the US-Saudi counter-revolution and its attendant strengthening of ...
Arab Uprisings Syllabus/Reading/Viewing Selections
Next Fall (2011), many of us will be teaching courses (or giving talks, or writing articles) in which we will be ...
I'd also consider one or both of these articles by Paul Amar: Why Mubarak is Out ( http://bit.ly/gabAiK ) and Egypt After Mubarak ( http://bit.ly/mx8IDx ).
Monday May 09, 2011 at 11:35PM
Good First Hand Account of Various Egyptian Stakeholders Surrounding the Revolution
I conducted these interviews with Hossam El-Hamalawy thinking they will be good for the classroom--and the proof WAS in ...
Films in Classes
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More Film Reviews at Jadaliyya
- Revisiting Arna's Children
- From Dance to Transcendence
- The Long and Invisible Road
- From Gun to Pen
- "Budrus": The Potential and Limits of Non-Violent Popular Struggle
- Two Films for the Syrian Unraveling
- Essential Viewing: Five Tunisian Films from a Postrevolutionary Perspective
- "A Space Exodus": A Truly Palestinian Film
- Narrating the Past, Confronting the Present
- Elia Suleiman's Time
- French Wildflowers and Algerian Gangsters
- Zindeeq: Film Review
- Salaam Salim: A Review of the Oath
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In this context, a “human security state” is one that blends increasing police and repressive power with highly gendered logics of militarized rescue, coercive social reform, and humanitarian intervention,click me | أنقرني email quote to a friend
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- It Is What It Is
- New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
- Plundering the Past: Scholarly Treasures
- A Year After: The February 20 Protest Movement in Morocco
- حين يكون الكوكب بأسره ضد الثورة
- The Real Me and the Hypothetical Syrian Revolution - Part 1
- Searching for the Arab Spring in Ramallah
- Remembering Anthony Shadid
- Saving Khader Adnan's Life Saves Our Own Soul
- نداء الأسير خضـر عدنـان إلى العالم
- الإخوان في البرلمان؛ محاولة للفهم
- "Violating Sacred Values" in Morocco: Free Speech with an Exception
- Our Friend Anthony Shadid's Stories
- Statement on Hunger Strike of Khader Adnan by Palestinian Human Rights Organizations
- Struggles That Fueled a Revolution
- Immunity, Accountability, and the Arab Uprisings: Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses the Role of the Human Rights Community
- Anthony Shadid Is No Longer with Us
- Patent for an Invented People
- The Insha'at Exodus
- New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
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One reading that should be included is Mona El-Ghobashy's piece in MERIP, "The Praxis of the Egyptian Revolution" - http://bit.ly/maiEVN
Monday May 09, 2011 at 12:09PM