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From the Editors
Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
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الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
The Pedagogy Section
Latest Pedagogy Posts
Tadween Roundup: News and Analysis from the Publishing/Academic World
[The following is a roundup of the latest news and analysis from the publishing world that relates to pedagogy and knowledge production. It was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more updates, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] Tadween Publishing brings you the latest news and analysis from the publishing and academic worlds that relate to pedagogy and knowledge production. How University Admissions Distorts Some Arab Societies By Elizabeth Buckner (Al Fanar) Elizabeth Buckner takes a look at ...
Keep Reading »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 ...
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 recent years, Bourdieu’s early fieldwork in Algeria has been regarded as central to his ...
Keep Reading »Academic Freedom and the Middle East: A Handbook for Teaching and Research
The Middle East is a region that is continuously in the news and frequently the focus of controversial, polarizing, and sometimes virulent debate within both policy and media circles. Scholars working on the Middle East face a unique set of challenges in their teaching and research. What they have to say, and how they say it, is often subjected to intense scrutiny by those with vested political or ideological interests. Such extra-scholarly pressures can pose serious threats to academic freedom and exercising professional responsibility. In light of these circumstances, the Taskforce on ...
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 progress since then. With respect to the question of co-existence of the ethno-national and ...
Keep Reading »The Arab Studies Journal's Twentieth Anniversary Issue
[Jadaliyya will be posting excerpts from the Arab Studies Journal's Twentieth Anniversary issue. What follows is the Editor's Note and Table of Contents from that issue.] Editor’s Note We can scarcely believe that two decades have passed since the publication of the first issue of the Arab Studies Journal. We are proud and humbled to have published groundbreaking work by scholars at the onset of their careers as well as at the pinnacle. During the last twenty years, the Journal has taken part in extraordinary changes in the field of Middle Eastern studies: paradigm shifts (and, on ...
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 ...
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 November 1975, the leaders of the newly formed G7 met at Chateau de Rambouillet, the French ...
Keep Reading »Amidst a Violent Conflict, Syria’s Students Struggle for an Education
[The following article was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more information on the publishing world as it relates to pedagogy and knowledge production, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] In a rare public appearance, Bashar Asad visited Damascus University on 4 May to dedicate a statue to the martyrs from Syrian universities who have been killed in the country’s two-year ongoing violence. While Asad’s appearance is undoubtedly a calculated political move, there is no question that the state of ...
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 ...
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, considered at a variety of scales, from the local to the imperial, international, and global. This ...
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 ...
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 seem to be room for a book that tried to examine the other side of the coin: the ways in ...
Keep Reading »Technology in the Classroom: The Big Brother E-Book
[The following article was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more information on the publishing world as it relates to pedagogy and knowledge production, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] Students are often faced with pages upon pages of reading as part of the curriculum handed to them by their professors. Traditionally, in order to gauge whether or not students are reading books and articles, professors either turn to asking questions in the classroom or assigning papers and essays on the allocated ...
Keep Reading »The Roundup: News and Analysis in Publishing/Academia from the Arab World
[The following is a roundup of the latest news and analysis from the publishing world that relates to pedagogy and knowledge production. It was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more updates, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] News and stories with a focus on the publishing industry, education, and technology from across the Arab world. Gaza’s Academics Face Censorship in Classroom By Asmaa Al-Ghoul (Al-Monitor) "Previously, the Israeli security department used to monitor academic ...
Keep Reading »Reflections of the 21st Annual Cairo Papers Symposium, “The Political Economy of the New Egyptian Republic”
Cairo has long been a tremendously self-aware city—engaging both Egyptian and international scholars in dialogues about events even as they are unfolding. This year’s twenty-first Annual Cairo Papers Symposium is an example of such self-conscious scholarship and dialogue. Taking place on 6 April 2013, as protests around the city commemorated the fifth anniversary of the April 6th workers’ movement, this symposium on the Egyptian political economy was certainly timely and relevant. The Cairo Papers in Social Science (CPSS) hosted the Cairo Papers Annual Symposium. The CPSS was established in ...
Keep Reading »The Arab Studies Journal Celebrates Twenty Years: An Interview with Bassam Haddad, Sherene Seikaly, and Nadya Sbaiti
On 19 April 2013, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) at Georgetown University hosted a reception celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Arab Studies Journal (ASJ). As the journal’s managing editor since September 2011, I used this milestone as an occasion to interview the founding editor Bassam Haddad and co-editors Sherene Seikaly and Nadya Sbaiti about the history of the journal, how it has developed, and where the editors see it going. Lizette Baghdadi (LB): How did the Arab Studies Journal begin? Bassam Haddad (BH): I was a young graduate student at Georgetown ...
Keep Reading »Beyond the PDF 2 Conference: Revolutionizing Academic Publishing
[The following article was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more information on the publishing world as it relates to pedagogy and knowledge production, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] New technology has created a multitude of avenues through which academics, scholars, publishers, librarians, and other related fields can communicate. The challenge, however, is using such technology to communicate effectively and change old habits that no longer seem to be working. This is a challenge that the ...
Keep Reading »The End of an Era: The Less than Grand Opening of the New Ottoman Archives
[The following status update on the new Ottoman Archive Center in Kağıthane was written by Patrick Adamiak, Jeffery Dyer, and Michael Christopher Low.] For generations, historians of the Ottoman Empire and its former territories in the Balkans and the Arab Middle East participated in a rite of passage linking them to the Ottoman bureaucrats they studied. Going to work at the Ottoman Archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) entailed the humbling experience of passing through the famous gates at Bab-ı Ali, or as it came to be known in the West, the Sublime Porte. During Ottoman times, Bab-ı Ali ...
Keep Reading »Tadween Roundup: News and Analysis from the Publishing/Academic World
[The following is a roundup of the latest news and analysis from the publishing world that relates to pedagogy and knowledge production. It was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more updates, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] Tadween Publishing brings you the latest news and analyses from the publishing and academic worlds that relates to pedagogy and knowledge production. Book experts weigh in on the publishing industry’s revolution (The Washington Post) With the publishing industry changing ...
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 slavery and its historical aftermath in the United States. Slavery and racial questions ...
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 ...
Keep Reading »Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula: Introduction to the Roundtable
This electronic roundtable marks the one-year anniversary of Jadaliyya's Arabian Peninsula Page, in which time we have hosted work by activists, journalists, artists, and scholars that has made a significant intellectual—and, we hope, political—contribution. Despite the sophisticated, critical, and oft-politically engaged literature emerging from and about the Arabian Peninsula, however, the region remains marginalized, in multiple ways, within academic and popular analyses. Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula thus addresses the ways in which frameworks of knowledge production have not only ...
Keep Reading »Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Thinking Globally About Arabia
[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.] (1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you ...
Keep Reading »Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Knowledge In the Time of Oil
[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.] (1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you ...
Keep Reading »Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption
[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.] (1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which ...
Keep Reading »Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia
[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.] (1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you ...
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 ...
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 Filmmakers Cooperative, which provided an array of support (including equipment, distribution, ...
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 looking back on the political and social shifts of the previous two decades that gave shape to ...
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 ...
Keep Reading »The Perils for Academic Freedom in the Arab World
[The following article was originally published on Tadween Publishing's blog. For more information on the publishing world as it relates to pedagogy and knowledge production, follow Tadween Publishing on Facebook and Twitter.] Calls for change have swept across the Arab world since the uprisings erupted over two years ago. While the process and struggle for political and social freedoms continue, freedom in the world of academia has become a recent, although not new, target in the region. In late February, a conference on the status of ...
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 region—please email us at reviews@jadaliyya.com. To stay up to date with ongoing discussions by ...
Keep Reading »Battle for the .book Domain
Amazon has come under critical fire recently in the publishing world for its attempt to take control of generic top-level domains (gTLD) that end in .book, .author, and .read. The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Amazon rival Barnes & Noble have all taken issue with Amazon’s pursuit of the domain names. By allowing Amazon to have the monopoly on such domain names would give them greater and unchecked authority over the presence of the publishing world on the internet. The increase in the number of domains, which means new suffixes such as .com and ...
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 ...
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 my graduate students on American policy during the 1970s and 1980s revealed a trove of ...
Keep Reading »Reading Poetry in Tehran: The Case of the Forbidden
Sholeh Wolpé, The Forbidden: Poetry from Iran and Its Exiles. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. La redonda, suprema y celestial sandía Es la fruta del árbol de la sed Es la ballena verde del verano At a Chilean food market in Santiago, a young fruit vendor hums verses in praise of watermelons: “Watermelon: round, supreme and celestial / it’s the fruit of the tree of thirst / it’s the green whale of summer.” The poem’s eloquent simplicity and creative metaphors pique the curiosity of a passerby who decides to eavesdrop in the corner. The boy does not ...
Keep Reading »When I Saw You
Lamma Shoftak [When I Saw You]. Directed by Annemarie Jacir. Jordan-Palestine-UAE-Greece, 2012. Annemarie Jacir’s Lamma Shoftak/When I Saw You extends her examination of exile and occupation begun in her début feature Milh Hadha al-Bahr [Salt of This Sea] (2008), as well as her earlier shorts and documentaries. Salt of This Sea takes the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) as a moment of collective trauma through which Soraya (Suheir Hammad), a young Palestinian American woman from Brooklyn (and Jaffa), attempts to recover her dignity sixty years after her grandparents became refugees. When I Saw You ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, with a preface from Boutros Boutros Ghali. London and New York: Verso and New Delhi: LeftWord, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Vijay Prashad (VP): When I finished The Darker Nations, I felt that the last section was not adequate. That book, published in 2007, told the story of the Third World Project from 1927-8 (the League Against Imperialism meeting in Brussels) to 1983 (the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Delhi). It gave an account of the complex and hopeful elements of the Project—the fight to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Paul Aarts and Francesco Cavatorta, Civil Society in Syria and Iran
Paul Aarts and Francesco Cavatorta, editors, Civil Society in Syria and Iran: Activism in Authoritarian Contexts. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book? Paul Aarts and Francesco Cavatorta (PA & FC): We started collaborating in early 2009 on a project looking at civil society dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. We were not entirely satisfied with the mainstream understanding of civil society activism and its natural or inevitable link to democratization. This was particularly true for traditional civil society organizations ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amr Adly, State Reform and Development in the Middle East: Turkey and Egypt in the Post-Liberalization Era
Amr Adly, State Reform and Development in the Middle East: Turkey and Egypt in the Post-Liberalization Era. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amr Adly (AA): The book is based on my PhD dissertation that I completed in September 2010 at the European University Institute in Florence. I specialized in political economy, and decided to write my thesis on the political economy of the Middle East in general, and Egypt in particular. My choice had to do with finding alternatives to culturalist approaches to studying the region, which usually ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Rachel Beckles Willson, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West
Rachel Beckles Willson, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Rachel Beckles Willson (RBW): In 2004, I was puzzled by the way that the English press—specifically newspapers that are usually rather critical, The Guardian and The Observer—responded to some western classical music initiatives in Ramallah led by the celebrated conductor Daniel Barenboim. It all seemed to be wildly admiring, while also reproducing imperialistic discourses about Arabs and Europe ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ilana Feldman, The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a "Palestine Refugee"
Ilana Feldman, "The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a 'Palestine Refugee.'" Journal of Refugee Studies 25.3 (2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Ilana Feldman (IF): There were two primary motivating forces for writing this article. First, it is part of a special issue in the Journal of Refugee Studies on “The Refugee in the Post-War World, 1945-1960,” that itself was a result of a conference of the same name. By participating in this issue, and by placing the Palestinian refugee experience within the broader landscape of ...
Keep Reading »Deadline for Applications: M.A. in Middle East and Islamic Studies at George Mason University
The Middle East Studies Program and the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University announce the deadline for applications for the Fall/Spring 2013-2014 academic year: 15 March 2013. Click HERE for more information Click HERE to apply The aim of this degree program is to reposition the study of the Middle East and Islam within a global context to help students better analyze particular issues in light of current events and shifting historical paradigms. The program’s core classes provide a solid background in both fields of study, however students can choose ...
Keep Reading »On the UAE's Decision to Refuse Entry to Professor Kristian Coates
This past Thursday, 28 February 2013, I was supposed to go to Dubai. The trip was to attend a one-day workshop on Sunday, 3 March 2013 in which the Alexandria Trust was expected to launch "al-Fanar,” a new publication devoted to the state of higher education in the Arab world. However, given the recent decision by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to deny entry to Professor Kristian Coates Ulrichsen of the London School of Economics (LSE), the whole launch was cancelled. Dr. Ulrichsen was supposed to give a paper on Bahrain in a conference organized by the American ...
Keep Reading »NEWTON in Focus: Egypt
This week we highlight various NEWTON texts relevant to the study of Egypt. The authors of these texts write from a wide range of perspectives and approach questions with which Egypt has grappled, not only in the wake of Tahrir, but throughout its modern existence. 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—whether on Egypt or on any other topics relevant to the region—please email us at reviews@jadaliyya.com. To stay up to date with ongoing discussions by ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Jeannie Sowers, Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State
Jeannie Sowers, Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Jeannie Sowers (JS): In Egypt, as elsewhere, environmental issues are often viewed as secondary to issues of “high politics,” such as national elections and debates among political elites. Yet so many of the core concerns of politics—power, resources, justice—are most clearly seen in who has access to land, health, water, and other essential services and goods. “Environmental” concerns, broadly conceived, are thus central to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance
Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Dina Rizk Khoury (DRK): The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was the chief impetus for writing this book. I had been about halfway through writing a book on the politics of reform and rebellion in Ottoman Baghdad when the build-up for the 2003 invasion began. Ottoman Baghdad receded very quickly from my focus. I was frustrated as a historian and as an opponent of the war with the way that Iraq was reduced to a set of ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Na'eem Jeenah, Pretending Democracy: Israel, An Ethnocratic State
Na’eem Jeenah, editor, Pretending Democracy: Israel, An Ethnocratic State. Johannesburg: Afro-Middle East Centre, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you publish this book? Na’eem Jeenah (NJ): The book emerged out of a conference organized by the Afro-Middle East Centre and which was held in Pretoria, South Africa. The conference brought together important scholars who have being thinking and writing about the issue of the nature of the Israeli state, those who are affected by this, and also ways in which to move beyond the ethnocratic state that Israel is towards a future that can address the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Sally K. Gallagher, Making Do in Damascus
Sally K. Gallagher, Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Sally Gallagher (SG): I have had a long interest in gender and economic development, and had the opportunity to begin a study of the effects of participating in an income-generating project for women in Damascus just as it was getting started. This was a really great opportunity to watch change in the making, rather than go in after the fact and ask people: how is your life different? Slowly I was able to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Natalya Vince, Saintly Grandmothers: Youth Reception and Reinterpretation of the National Past in Contemporary Algeria
Natalya Vince, “Saintly Grandmothers: Youth Reception and Reinterpretation of the National Past in Contemporary Algeria.” The Journal of North African Studies, 18:1 (2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Natalya Vince (NV): The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), or at least a selective and glorified version of the war, has played a key role in both the formation of Algerian national identity and the legitimization of political elites. For the past fifty years, museums, monuments, school textbooks, national holidays, and political speeches have constantly reminded ...
Keep Reading »Why Students in Solidarity with Palestine Should Not Join The Olive Tree Initiative
The Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) calls itself a “conflict analysis” project. Started in 2007 at the University of California Irvine, it is now present at multiple UC campuses. OTI is often referred to as a “dialogue project,” and its mission statement reads as follows: The mission of the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) is to promote conflict analysis and resolution through Experiential Education by providing students and community with the education, training, and experiences needed to better negotiate and solve conflicts. This might sound like an admirable venture at first. However, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: January 2013 Back to School Edition
As we kick off the spring 2013 semester, Jadaliyya would like to remind you of some of the most creative and groundbreaking works in Middle East studies that we have featured in our New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) page. Since we launched this page in 2011, we have had the opportunity to share with you unique interviews by authors and excerpts from their new and forthcoming publications. Here you will find a list divided by topic of some of these texts that you may find particularly useful pedagogically. We encourage you to integrate these into your curricula during this semester and beyond. To ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: John M. Willis, Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past, 1857-1934
John M. Willis, Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past, 1857-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? John Willis (JW): The book began as a dissertation written in the departments of history and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. While I had been interested in the production and mastery of space as a particular technic of power for some time, what drove me to frame the dissertation and then the book in the way that I did was my experience watching the state celebrations associated with the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism
Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London and New York: Pluto Books, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Paolo Gerbaudo (PG): I have been involved in progressive social movements in Italy and the UK for the last twelve years, some times as a participant, other times as a journalist for il manifesto, a newspaper of the Italian New Left, other times as a social movement researcher, and still other times as an organizer. Thus, the first reason for writing this book for me was a strong sense of commitment to, and solidarity with, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Madawi Al-Rasheed, A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia
Madawi Al-Rasheed, A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Madawi Al-Rasheed (MAR): First, the banality of superficial opinions on Saudi women that is so pervasive. In the public sphere, especially in the West, Saudi women are either superstars or victims of their own society and religion. I felt it was time to contribute to this debate from an academic perspective. I do not want to write a book that celebrates the achievement of Saudi women, seeks pity, or ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present
Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Noga Efrati (NE): The US-led invasion of Iraq became a full-scale military occupation while I was in the midst of working on a historical account of women under the British occupation and the British-installed monarchy in the first half of the twentieth century. I found myself more and more intrigued, as contemporary events cascaded, to find that the struggle of Iraqi women’s rights activists, especially between 2003 and 2005, to a large extent revolved ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nicola Pratt, The Gender Logics of Resistance to the "War on Terror"
Nicola Pratt, "The Gender Logics of Resistance to the 'War on Terror': Constructing Sex-Gender Difference Through the Erasure of Patriarchy in the Middle East." Third World Quarterly 33:10 (2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Nicola Pratt (NP): This article is based on fieldwork conducted in 2007 and 2008 at the “Cairo Conferences,” which were a series of conferences in opposition to imperialism, Zionism, neoliberalism, and dictatorship. Initially, I attended the 2007 Cairo Conference as an anti-war activist. At this time, the US and its allies were occupying ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights
Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights. New York: Routledge, 2012 [“Framing Twenty-First Century Social Issues” series]. Jadaliyya (J): What inspired you to write this book? Lisa Hajjar (LH): Torture is my great and terrible obsession. I think, read, write, and talk about torture all the time, as anyone who knows me can attest. I was inspired to write this book in order to share my knowledge, my passion, and—to be blunt—my anger about torture with college students, although hopefully people who are not students also will find it interesting. This book, like others in ...
Keep Reading »NEWTON Author Nergis Ertürk Receives MLA First Book Prize
We are very happy to report that Nergis Ertürk, whose book Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey was featured in New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) in 2012, is the recipient of the Nineteenth Annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. She will receive the award, together with the other winners of 2012 MLA publication prizes, on 5 January at the 2013 Annual MLA Convention in Boston. This gives us the opportunity to congratulate four other 2012 NEWTON authors who were also awarded major prizes for their books: Rochelle Davis, whose book Palestinian Village Histories: ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq
Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Orit Bashkin (OB): I became interested in the topic as a teenager, reading Hebrew novels written by Iraqi Jews who described their experiences in Iraq. When I was working on my first book I met Iraqi Jews who spoke to me about their experiences in Iraq, and Iraqi Muslims and Christians who spoke about their Jewish friends and neighbors. What amazed me about some of these conversations was the personal memories of Iraqi Jews now living ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Marwan M. Kraidy, The Revolutionary Body Politic
Marwan M. Kraidy, “The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5.1 (2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Marwan Kraidy (MK): I received an invitation from the editors to write an essay with a brutal time frame (if I recall correctly, an author had dropped out two weeks before the copy deadline, and I was asked to fill in). But that was just technical. What really made me write the article was that I had been preoccupied with the implications of Alia al-Mahdy’s action ...
Keep Reading »NEWTON 2012 in Review
We have had the opportunity to highlight an extraordinary series of books and articles on New Texts Out Now this year. Before we make our way into the new year, here are all of the NEWTONs that we published in 2012. Enjoy, and see you in 2013. Myriam Ababsa, Badouin Dupret, and Eric Denis, Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East: Case Studies from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent Gilbert Achcar, “Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser’s ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amahl Bishara, Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics
Amahl A. Bishara, Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amahl Bishara (AB): Back Stories is an ethnography of the production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. I started this project in New York City around the beginning of the uprising. I would wake up every morning, and my first step would be to reach for the news. But obviously the news represented only a narrow slice of Palestinian ideas about and experiences of national struggle. I wanted to explore the ...
Keep Reading »كتاب: أمراء وسماسرة وبيروقراطيون: النفط والدولة في السعودية
[“كتب” هي سلسلة تستضيف “جدلية” فيها المؤلفين والمؤلفات في حوار حول أعمالهم الجديدة ونرفقه بفصل من الكتاب.] "أمراء، وسماسرة، وبيروقراطيون: النفط والدولة في المملكة العربية السعودية". تأليف ستيفان هيرتوغ مطبعة جامعة كورنل، 2011. صدر بالإنجليزية. جدلية: ما الذي دفعك لكتابة هذا الكتاب؟ ستيفان هيرتوغ: كانت الفكرة الأصلية وراء هذا البحث هي تحليل كيف أن الاصلاحات الاقتصادية الليبرالية تغير الهياكل الاقتصادية والسياسية في دولة غنية بالنفط ( ريعية) مثل المملكة العربية السعودية. كانت هذه هي الخطة قبل أن أبدأ في بحثي الميداني، ولكن ما اكتسبته من خبرة غير ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies
Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Laleh Khalili (LK): In the course of completing my first book, I was performing some final interviews with Palestinian residents in Lebanon who had been detainees in Israel at various points over the last couple of decades. I was conducting these interviews when the news of Abu Ghraib tortures broke and pictures of detainees being held by leashes, of dogs attacking detainees, of the sexualized torture emerged. More than one ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War
Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar, editors, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar (NA and DA): The idea for this book first emerged in 2006, when Iraqis were generally portrayed either as passive victims or as perpetrators of horrific violence. In the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis and the violence, destruction, killings, and widespread sufferings inside Iraq, we did not hear the voices of contemporary Iraqis. While media and academicians ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Elisabeth Weber, Living Together: Jacques Derrida's Communities of Violence and Peace
Elisabeth Weber, editor, Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this collection? Elisabeth Weber (EW): The volume was conceived after the conference I organized with my colleague Thomas Carlson in October 2003 at the University of California at Santa Barbara, on “Irreconcilable Differences? Jacques Derrida and the Question of Religion.” The conference turned out to be Jacques Derrida’s last public appearance in the United States. The collection of essays is grouped around ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, Fifth Edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ann Elizabeth Mayer (AEM): Many things have changed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since the first edition of this book, published in the mid-1980s, examined proposed “Islamic” versions of human rights. I wanted to update the earlier versions of this book to take into account new developments in the ongoing contention about Islam and human rights, which has intensified in the wake of the crushing of the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir, Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel
Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir, editors. Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Mark LeVine (ML): I first came up with the idea for the book after teaching Terry Burke's seminal volume Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East in a modern Middle East lecture course during the same quarter I was teaching my Israel/Palestine course. I realized that while there were very important advances in scholarship on the conflict and its histories, students were easily overwhelmed by the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order?
Bassam Haddad, Rosie Bsheer, and Ziad Abu-Rish, editors. The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? London: Pluto Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Bassam Haddad, Rosie Bsheer, and Ziad Abu-Rish (BRZ): This volume is primarily comprised of articles that were originally published on Jadaliyya during the first six to nine months of the Arab uprisings. As the initial phase of the uprisings subsided, counter-revolution set in, and grand narratives crystallized, we thought it was important to reflect, remember, and share—in a sense, to ...
Keep Reading »Putting Palestine on the Map
They want their homeland? They should fight for it. -- Ali Khaled, father of Leila Khaled, 1950s With the US embroiled in Afghanistan’s endless theater, the debate around insurgencies has once more taken hold. In 2007, Jeffery Record’s Beating Goliath detailed the story of how some insurgencies end up defeating their much more powerful adversaries. Three years later, the RAND Corporation published Ben Connable and Martin Libicki’s How Insurgencies End, which showed that such struggles last for ten years, giving the stubborn Goliath the best odds if they are able to quell public opinion in ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Jens Hanssen, Kafka and Arabs
Jens Hanssen, “Kafka and Arabs.” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Jens Hanssen (JH): I have been carrying a dog-eared photocopy of Kafka’s three-page animal story “Schakale und Araber” in my luggage ever since a friend of mine at the German Institute in Beirut handed it to me to read. This was back in 1998, and I remember that when I read it I knew I would return to it one day. I think for anyone concerned about the tragedy of Palestine, Kafka’s story resonates. It is ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much
Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End. New York: OR Books, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Norman Finkelstein (NF): I have been active on the Israel-Palestine conflict for the past three decades. I first got involved on 6 June 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. Although I was almost never allowed to teach the Israel-Palestine conflict (I mostly taught political theory), my research and publications have focused on it. I also used to visit the occupied Palestinian territories annually until Israel banned me ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Linda Herrera, Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt
Linda Herrera, “Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt.” Harvard Educational Review (Fall 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Linda Herrera (LH): Schools once served as temples of citizenship education, but this is no longer the case. I came to the realization of the diminished role of schooling in the lives of young Egyptians during a visit to a public high school in 2006. I arrived at a school in the Delta in the middle of the day to interview teachers about curriculum reforms. What I found was a school populated by the teaching and administrative ...
Keep Reading »NEWTON Year in Review
Since we first launched our New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) page a little more than a year ago, we have had the opportunity to feature an astonishing range of books and articles for Jadaliyya readers. With authors generously agreeing to discuss their new works, offer background information on their research, and allow us to post excerpts from their books and articles, we have been able to offer first looks at some of the most important new work in the field, from established names and rising stars alike. This seemed like an opportune moment to look back at the previous year and offer a ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Rikke Hostrup Haugbolle and Francesco Cavatorta, Beyond Ghannouchi: Social Changes and Islamism in Tunisia
Rikke Hostrup Haugbølle and Francesco Cavatorta, "Beyond Ghannouchi: Social Changes and Islamism in Tunisia," Middle East Report 262 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Rikke Hostrup Haugbølle and Francesco Cavatorta (RHH and FC): In October 2011, Tunisia had the first elections after the uprising that had led Ben Ali to flee the country. The months prior to the elections were very confusing and no one really knew whether elections would take place at all. At the same time, it was a very exciting period for the country and those like us who had been ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya's First Book is Now Available from Pluto Press
Jadaliyya Co-Editors are excited to announce the release of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order?, published by Pluto Press. This book is the first publication produced by the Arab Studies Institute, co-edited by Jadaliyya Editors, and featuring Jadaliyya contributors. The volume is currently available in paperback and Kindle format at these and other locations: In the US: Macmillan and Amazon US In the UK: Pluto Press and Amazon UK About the Book The Dawn of the Arab ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Libya, Social Origins of Dictatorship, and the Challenge for Democracy
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Libya, Social Origins of Dictatorship, and the Challenge for Democracy." North African Revolutions, special issue of The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 3.1 (2012) Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Ali Ahmida (AA): This article was inspired by the democratic revolutionary uprising in the Arab World, especially Libya, the least known country. Also, I wanted to go beyond the orientalist and the colonial filtering and categories by bringing in the historical, comparative, and post-colonial context. For example, Libya’s colonial genocide ...
Keep Reading »Turkish Fragments
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York: Knopf, 2009. Nurdan Gürbilek, The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window. Translated by Victoria Holbrook. London: Zed Books, 2011. The year 2009 brought us an English translation of the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence; the year 2011, a translation of Nurdan Gürbilek’s The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window. Gürbilek is an equally prominent figure in Turkey, the recipient of awards including the 2010 Erdal Öz and 2011 Cevdet Kudret Literature ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Myriam Ababsa, Baudouin Dupret, and Eric Denis, Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East
Myriam Ababsa, Baudouin Dupret and Eric Denis, editors. Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East: Case Studies from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Myriam Ababsa (MA), Baudouin Dupret (BD), and Eric Denis (ED): The first impulse behind this book came out of Eric Denis’ and Baudouin Dupret’s collaboration during the nineties at the French Institute in Cairo (CEDEJ), when the former conducted major research on urbanization and the latter on legal ...
Keep Reading »Inaugural Issue of Journal on Postcolonial Directions in Education
Postcolonial Directions in Education is a peer-reviewed open access journal produced twice a year. It is a scholarly journal intended to foster further understanding, advancement and reshaping of the field of postcolonial education. We welcome articles that contriute to advancing the field. As indicated in the editorial for the inaugural issue, the purview of this journal is broad enough to encompass a variety of disciplinary approaches, including but not confined to the following: sociological, anthropological, historical and social psychological approaches. The areas embraced include ...
Keep Reading »What a Seven Day Teachers' Strike Can Accomplish: Key Contract Issues
On 10 September 2012, approximately twenty-nine thousand members of the Chicago Teachers Union began a seven-day strike protesting a host of encroachments on their rights as workers and educators on the part of the Chicago Board of Education. While various news reports have detailed the final contract agreement, the chart below (published by the Chicago Tribune on 18 September) highlights the issues that were on the table and the movement in the board's positions that were achieved through the strike and attendant negotiations. Certainly, there remains much to be analyzed regarding the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Steffen Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia
Steffen Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Steffen Hertog (SH): The original idea behind the research project was to analyze how liberalizing economic reforms were changing the social and political structures of an oil-rich (or “rentier”) state like Saudi Arabia. That was the plan before I did my fieldwork, but my experience there pretty much turned the whole thing on its head. Instead of change, I found deep historical continuities in the way politics and ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber, Speaking about Torture
Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber, editors. Speaking about Torture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this collection? Julie Carlson (JC) and Elisabeth Weber (EW): This is the first book to take up the issue of torture from the array of approaches offered by the arts and humanities. In the post 9/11 era, our volume seeks to challenge the surprisingly widespread acceptance of state-sanctioned torture among Americans, including academics and the media entertainment complex. Speaking about Torture claims that the concepts and techniques ...
Keep Reading »Grappling with Israel: From Sontag to Lacan and the Maoists in Between
Susan Sontag, Promised Lands. Poland/France, 1974. Groupe Cinéma Vincennes, L’Olivier. France/Palestine, 1976. Mike Hoolboom, Lacan Palestine. Canada, 2012. In 1973, Susan Sontag, the visual critic and essayist, traveled to the Middle East to film in Israel, just before the end of the October War that saw Egypt and Syria uniting to launch a surprise attack in retaliation for the colossal losses of the 1967 war. To watch Susan Sontag's Promised Lands in April 2012 as part of the London Palestine Film Festival, playing to a full house, is a testament to the changing mode of representing ...
Keep Reading »When the Lights Go Out: A Discussion with David Theo Goldberg
David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the world’s leading figures in Critical Race Theory. Ten years ago he started SECT (the summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory). From 29 July - 9 August, the eighth session of SECT was held in Beirut, Lebanon on the theme of “Spaces of Resistance.” What follows is a conversation I conducted with David Theo Goldberg during the Seminar, intercut with my reflections as a participant in SECT VIII. Ten days discussing critical ...
Keep Reading »NEWTONs You Might Have Missed
With a new semester on the horizon, NEWTON is about to kick into high gear once again. Below are a few amazing posts that you might have missed the first time around. If you wish to recommend a book to be reviewed or if you have just published a book or a peer-reviewed article, please email us at reviews@jadaliyya.com Mohamed Daadaoui, Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge: Maintaining Makhzen Power Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work Amal N. Ghazal, Islamic ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance
Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Jason Brownlee (JB): I had a series of experiences in 2009 that got me thinking about the intersection of US foreign policy and human rights abuses in Egypt. First, I was in Egypt in January 2009, during the massive protests against Operation Cast Lead (Israel's military assault on the Gaza Strip, which ended just before Obama took office). The demonstrations eclipsed in size anything organized by Kefaya (the ...
Keep Reading »Aesthetic Politics: Iranian Performance and the Challenge of Modernity
Amir Baradaran, Marry Me to the End of Love. Cite internationale des Artes, Paris, France, 23-30 June 2012. Curated by Feri Daftari. Not often is a performance as variegated in its political significance or as generous to critical exposition as Amir Baradaran's recent interactive piece, Marry Me to the End of Love. Inserting itself into current debates surrounding the politics of marriage and Islam in relation to Western modernity, as well as the origin and viability of aesthetic politics, the performance allows us to consider art not merely in its capacity to ...
Keep Reading »Exile and Memory in Contemporary Western Armenian Literature
A thick stack of black and white photographs flutters to the floor. A man stands over the jumbled pile and, looking past bent corners and nibbled edges, sees dozens of faces staring up at him. These faces are vaguely familiar—an old neighbor, a distant cousin, an aunt who used to spend summers with him. Some photos land face down and, from his height, the man can just make out the names and dates scribbled in purple ink across the backs. He kneels down and, with the tips of his fingers, quickly rakes the photographs into a haphazard mound. He leans over it to inspect the faces more closely ...
Keep Reading »Cinematic Occupation
Kamal Aljafari, Port of Memory. France/Germany/UAE/Palestine, 2009. In the state of siege, time becomes place Fossilized in its eternity In the state of siege, place becomes time Lagging behind its yesterday and its tomorrow —Mahmoud Darwish, “State of Siege” Kamal Aljafari’s film Port of Memory (2009) opens with a long tracking shot of a grand, decaying house at twilight. The camera lingers on the skin of this structure that bears traces of other times and previous inhabitations. The footage feels like a memorial for a building that may not live much longer: we see a floorboard of what ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry
Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Khaled Furani (KF): Growing up in thrall to Israeli policies aimed at diluting and obliterating the Palestine that was, I saw in Arabic poetry “what remains,” to quote from Hannah Arendt’s reminiscences of the Germany she once knew (reverberating in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella and Walid Khalidi’s compendium). In the Arab world, poetry has played the kind of role that perhaps blues and jazz have held in black history in the United ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: James Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know
James Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): How did you come to write this book? James Gelvin (JG): In the winter of 2011, I made contact with Oxford University Press about doing a condensed, “trade” (i.e., mass market) version of my The Modern Middle East: A History. I thought this would be useful because, among other things, the book lays out the historical background for the Arab uprisings we were witnessing. The press was not particularly interested in that project, but one of the editors did ask me ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Akram Khater, Embracing the Divine: Gender, Passion, and Politics in the Christian Middle East
Akram Fouad Khater, Embracing the Divine: Gender, Passion, and Politics in the Christian Middle East. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Akram Khater (AK): This book was partly a happenstance, and came partly out of a keen awareness of a gaping hole in Middle Eastern scholarship. The happenstance is common enough in scholarly research. Tired of the texts I was reading at the Bibliotheque Nationale for my PhD dissertation, I turned to the Arabic card catalog to browse for interesting manuscripts. I stumbled upon one titled Aghrab imra’a ...
Keep Reading »Artist Call: NEWSFEED: Anonymity & Social Media in African Revolutions and Beyond (New York, 16 July Deadline)
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts 80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn, New York 11217 | p. 718.230.0492 | f. 718.230.0246 Important Dates: July 16, 2012: Submission deadline August 1, 2012: Artists announced via e-mail and web Exhibition Dates: October, 2012 – January, 2013 Exhibition Theme Be it in New York, Paris, or Bamako, the world is experiencing a paradigm shift that began in Africa. Worldwide, members of the financial and racial majority are no longer satisfied with matriculating into a web of systems designed to benefit only the most privileged individuals and nations. ...
Keep Reading »NEWTONs You Might Have Missed
After taking a brief summer vacation, New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) will return next week. In the meantime, here are a few great posts that you might have missed from the past few months: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, editors, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education Stephen W. Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey Pascale Ghazaleh, editor, Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. London and New York: Zed Books, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hamid Dabashi (HD): As you well know, a massive set of revolutionary uprisings are sweeping across North Africa and Western Asia, from Morocco to Syria and from Bahrain to Yemen. This is all happening in the aftermath of an equally important uprising code-named the Green Movement in Iran. While the Arab uprisings were under way, the Eurozone crisis and civil unrest swept across Europe from Greece to Spain, and before that was completely registered ...
Keep Reading »The Space Between
The Space Between: A Panorama of Cinema in Turkey. 27 April – 10 May 2012, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY. Introducing “The Space Between: A Panorama of Cinema in Turkey,” a major retrospective of Turkish cinema featuring twenty-nine films from 1958 to the present recently screened in New York City, Richard Peña, the revered director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, noted that he first proposed the idea of a major series on Turkish cinema when he was hired in 1987. It took twenty-five years for this vision to be realized; easily the largest retrospective of Turkish ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Maaike Voorhoeve, Family Law in Islam
Maaike Voorhoeve, editor, Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage and Women in the Muslim World. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What led you to edit this book? Maaike Voorhoeve (MV): When I started my PhD on the contemporary application of Tunisian family law by Tunisian judges, my idea was as follows: the Tunisian family code deviates significantly from Islamic law, and therefore it is interesting to examine if judges apply the code, or whether they apply Islamic law instead. This approach was informed by other studies on family law in the Muslim world that focus on ...
Keep Reading »Poetry of the Taliban
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, editors. Foreword by Faisal Devji. Poetry of the Taliban. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2012. Since there is already a substantial discussion surrounding this compilation of poetry "of" the Taliban, it seems important to review the work within a series of broader contexts. Writing on Afghanistan has recently enjoyed an upsurge, but this is not the first such spike of western interest in Afghanistan. Amid a major catalog that has emerged over the past decade, there is a slowly growing subset of work that examines representations of ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion
Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hilal Elver (HE): My experience in Turkey in relation to the headscarf is the main reason for writing the book. Turkey is very much a divided society: ninety-nine percent of the population is Muslim and it is a significantly religious society, yet it has also developed a secular legal order and social structure. I felt this duality even in my own family environment. My mother was an educated woman and a devout ...
Keep Reading »"We Didn't Know It Was Impossible, So We Did It": The Quebec Student Strike Celebrates Its 100th Day
Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”) Students in Quebec are marking their hundredth day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, 22 May, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movement of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada's Arab Spring. Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by seventy-five percent over five years (amended to eighty-two percent ...
Keep Reading »The Melancholia of a Generation
Mohammed Achaari, al-Qaws wa-al-farashah. al-Dar al-Bayda’: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-ʻArabi, 2010. Mohammed Achaari is not new to Morocco’s literary scene; though The Arch and the Butterfly (al-Qaws wa-al-farashah) is only his second novel, he is the author of nine collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and has served as both Minister of Culture and president of the Moroccan Writer’s Union. The brief synopses that accompanied the announcement of his selection as one of two recipients of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (popularly known as the Arabic Booker) for ...
Keep Reading »The Andalus Test: Reflections on the Attempt to Publish Arabic Literature in Hebrew
Should a visitor from another planet happen to arrive here and look around at the reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea without the usual lenses of distortion, she would see that in Israel/Palestine—the land stretching from the river to the sea which has been under one rule for over forty years—almost half the population is Palestinian Arab and Arabic is their mother tongue, as well as that of nearly half of the Israeli Jewish population. Should our guest distinguish—as does the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, as well as the Israeli academy and media—between Israeli ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine
Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, editors. Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine. Special Issue of settler colonial studies 2.1 (2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this special issue? Editors (E): This open-access (and therefore freely accessible) special issue emerges out of a conference we organized in early March 2011, convened by the SOAS Palestine Society. The impetus for the conference came from two main directions. First, we all work on one aspect of Palestine or another, and each of us has grown distressed by the tendency to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an interpretation of the novel that seemed to conceal some of the complexities of how this could ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life
Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Roger Owen (RO): I was intrigued by news reports from Algeria in the spring of 2009 stating that President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika of Algeria was going to amend the constitutional term limits in order to allow him become, in effect, president life, as Ben Ali and other Arab republican presidents had done before him. This led me on to consider the whole phenomenon of personalized presidential power, which did not seem to me to have been properly ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb
Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What led you to write this article? Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman (MS and RF): The post-revolutionary political scene in Egypt, with at least fourteen Islamist parties vying for power, is a timely historical moment to take a close look at the dynamics of religious authority versus the so-called secular. As the Egyptian people succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak’s dictatorship, the importance of popular discourses asserts itself strongly. Our ...
Keep Reading »Degrees of Incarceration
When I started shooting for what would become Degrees of Incarceration in 2003, I had no idea that it would entail anything more than a day’s work. I showed up with a camera because a dear friend and colleague asked if I had a day to document a youth play about prisons. I ended up spending the night (leaving Bethlehem by public transportation after 4pm was impractical, my new friends told me) and then regularly returning to the youth center that organized the play. As I got to know the activists who worked on the play, I heard about the night arrest raids that stunned the camp awake on a ...
Keep Reading »Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] What if capitalists in a particular country could draw on a reserve army of semi-skilled labor that includes hundreds of millions of noncitizens whom they could import, hire, fire and expel at will, without worrying about laws, regulations, and collective action? What if they could perfect labor market segmentation to a degree whereby only ...
Keep Reading »The Free University of New York City (1 May 2012)
Free University in Solidarity with May 1 General Strike New York, NY (27 April 2012): This May Day, a coalition of students and faculty from Brooklyn College, Columbia University, the CUNY Graduate Center, Eugene Lang College, Hunter College, New School for Social Research, New York University, the Occupy University, and Princeton University are collaborating to produce a “collective educational experiment” to be held on Tuesday, 1 May from 10am to 3pm. The action is in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street’s call for a General Strike and a day without the 99%. This day-long ...
Keep Reading »Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature
Mara Naaman, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] In January and February of 2011, Egyptians descended upon public squares throughout the country to bring an end to the thirty-year regime of Husni Mubarak. For those eighteen days—and on many other occasions throughout the following year—the people of Egypt wrested control of public space from the physical and ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Gilbert Achcar, Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt
Gilbert Achcar, “Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Gilbert Achcar (GA): The story of this article resembles that of my book The Arabs and the Holocaust, of which it can be seen as a sequel. In both cases, the initial impulse of writing was not the evolution of my ongoing research, but a fortuitous circumstance. The prelude to the book was a request made to me a few years ago to write a chapter on the Arab reception of the Holocaust for a multivolume work in Italian. ...
Keep Reading »ArteEast Presents Two Literary Events Featuring Poets from Gaza (New York, 24 & 25 April 2012)
April 24 at 7pm: Gazan Writers Salon 1: Fractured Web, Gazan Writing Online at Columbia Center for Palestine Studies, Knox Hall Room 509, Columbia University, 606 West 122 Street, New York, NY 10027. Free and open to the public. April 25 at 7pm: Gazan Writers Salon 2: From Memoir to Reportage and Back Again, a literary reading at Nuyorican Poets Cafe 236 E. 3rd St., New York, NY 10009. Advance tickets $10 (click here to order), $15 at the door. Sponsored by ArteEast. ArteEast is pleased to present a two-part series of literary readings and discussion, the Gazan Writers Salons, ...
Keep Reading »Outside Looking In
City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982. The Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY, 22 February – 5 May 2012. City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982 is an exhibit of design work produced by world-famous architects and firms for the booming Iraqi capital during the mid-twentieth century. Beginning from the year that the Iraq Development Board was established to channel seventy percent of state oil revenues into modernizing schemes for national development, the exhibit traces a thirty-year timeline of foreign architectural practice in Baghdad. Pedro Azara of the Universitat ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Farzaneh Milani (FM): In a way, Words, not Swords is a rebuttal to my first book, Veils and Words. The central argument of Veils and Words revolved around Iranian women's literary output. I claimed that the veil had covered not only Iranian women's bodies, but also their literary voices. Women's self-expression, either bodily or verbal, I surmised, was covered by the material veil and its verbal ...
Keep Reading »Something of Palestine Emerges
2012 London Palestine Film Festival. 20 April – 3 May 2012. For more information and a complete schedule of films, click here. Each year, for the two weeks of the London Palestine Film Festival, there are a bunch of people whose social life for that fortnight becomes the festival. Others dip in and out, while still others see a Palestinian film or a film about Palestine perhaps for the first time. Each year the program is rich and eclectic, ranging from animations to documentaries to features, from conventional to experimental. Here I consider six films out of the more than fifty works to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Junaid Rana (JR): My book was borne out of ethnographic research I completed on the role of labor migration in the global economy. I started with some basic questions: why do people become labor migrants, how does labor migration become transnational and global, what are the conditions that lead to labor migration, and how are labor migrants treated abroad? Each of these questions led to complex answers driven by fieldwork I ...
Keep Reading »Art and Subversion: An Interview with Omar Kholeif
Subversion. Featuring work by Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Khaled Hafez, Larissa Sansour, Marwa Arsanios, Sharif Waked, Sherif El-Azma, Tarzan and Arab, and Wafaa Bilal. Curated by Omar Kholeif. Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, UK. 14 April - 5 June 2012, preview/symposium 13 April 2012. [Omar Kholeif is Curator of Subversion, a large-scale exhibition and public program, which runs until 5 June 2012 at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. More about Omar Kholeif here; follow him on Twitter here.] Anthony Alessandrini (AA): What was the idea behind this show, and ...
Keep Reading »Sonia M'Barek: A Musical Innovator Rooted in Tradition
Sonia M’Barek, Proshansky Auditorium, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, 23 March 2012. In traditional Arabic music, a vocalist is not just referred to as a singer, but is instead spoken of as a mutrib/mutribah. Literally translated, they are the people who bring tarab, or musical ecstasy. As such, the craft of a traditional Arabic vocalist is a demanding one. The singer must possess a pleasing voice, have clear diction, and sing impeccably in tune, all while comfortably navigating the Arabic maqam (mode) scales, whose intervals are smaller than the ones in Western ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800)
Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book, and what particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? Nelly Hanna (NH): The book is part of a large body of literature that deals with the artisans and guilds of the Ottoman Empire. Scholars have written about artisans in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, and Jerusalem (including Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Haim Gerber, and others). More specifically, my work on with the artisans in Cairo follows the ...
Keep Reading »How the PA Enriched an Elite and Normalized Occupation
Khalil Nakhleh, Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland. Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, Inc., 2011. Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland explores the rise of a new Palestinian elite that works together with international organizations against the will of the majority of its compatriots. The book’s author, Khalil Nakhleh, worked in the development sector as director of the Welfare Association (a Palestinian organization) for more than a decade, as well as a consultant on the expenditure of European Union aid. He witnessed first-hand the marriage of the ...
Keep Reading »NEWTONs You Might Have Missed
Since we have featured so much remarkable work in New Texts Out Now (NEWTON), we wanted to pause for a second to let you catch up. Here are a few great posts that you might have missed from the past several months: Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, "Between Nationalism and Women's Rights: The Kurdish Women's Movement in Iraq" Paul Amar, “Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis,’ Industries of Gender in Revolution” James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History, Third Edition and The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know Amal N. Ghazal, Islamic Reform ...
Keep Reading »Threads of Narrating the Arab Spring
“Narrating the Arab Spring,” Cairo University, 18-20 February 2012 Many of us have spoken and thought about those who we wished would have been present to witness—and perhaps participate in—the revolutions. People we have known and loved, and people we have known from a distance. A woman stands up in a plenary at the “Narrating the Arab Spring” conference simply to say she would have loved it if Edward Said were here; she would have loved to hear and read what he had to say “about what is his revolution also.” It is a moving moment; the room breaks into applause. Organized by the English ...
Keep Reading »Amman Critical Language Scholarship: Integrating Language and Culture
Following the September 11 attacks, the US government designated a number of languages as “critical need languages”; Arabic was and still is, of course, on top of the list. In order to ensure enough Americans are learning these “critical need languages” and to ensure higher proficiency levels and deeper understandings of target cultures, the US government established the Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) program. Administered by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with partner institutions, CLS students spend seven to ten weeks in the ...
Keep Reading »How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East
One: Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be. Two: Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of subjectivity in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period forms the background picture of your study? Furthermore, the terms “Middle East,” “the Islamic World” and the “Arab world” do not refer to the same place, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the “state” is a relatively new ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran
Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Winner of the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice, and Honorable Mention in the Biography & Autobiography category in the 2011 PROSE Awards Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Shahla Talebi (ST): I knew since leaving Iran in late 1993 that I wanted to find a way to make whatever sense possible of my experience of imprisonment, and the way the revolution had swallowed its children. I studied anthropology as a way of ...
Keep Reading »...and Counting
Sabah Mustapha Ahmad / Ahmed al-Fahel / Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal/ Ahmad Subhi al-Fahl / Waddah Saadi Saleh al-Obeidi / Brothers of dead man / Daugther of dead couple / Wife of Dead man / Daughter of dead couple…and Counting: Failure and Loss in Wafaa Bilal’s Body Modification Work. In Wafaa Bilal’s recent performance, …and Counting, the artist utilizes tattoo art to document the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed since March 2003, which marked the start of the US-led invasion in Iraq. Over a twenty-four-hour period, tattoo artists methodically rendered the names of ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Stephen Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen
Stephen W. Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Stephen Day (SD): This book had a long gestation period, so answering this question is a bit complicated. I would say the book has been more than ten years in the making. It originates with my doctoral thesis at Georgetown University. I started field research in Yemen in 1995, five years after the country’s national unification and two years after its first multi-party elections, which resulted in political ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey
Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Nergis Ertürk (NE): One of my motives was to try to deepen our understanding of the phoneticizing Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, which replaced a Perso-Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, as well the language reforms of the 1930s, which replaced many Arabic and Persian loanwords with Turkish neologisms. Of the effects of these reforms, the Romance philologist Erich Auerbach observed in a letter to Walter Benjamin dated 3 January ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Mervat F. Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’sha Taymur. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Mervat Hatem (MH): The modern construction of Egyptian history gives the grand old men of nineteenth-century Egyptian modernity (Khedive Ismail, Sheikh Rifa` Rafi` al-Tahtawi, and judge Qasim Amin) credit for promoting the interests of women by respectively building the first general school for women in al-Siyufiya (1873) and publishing one important book that supported the education of ...
Keep Reading »The Rhythms of Egypt's Revolutionaries
Music has been one of the most invigorating and beautiful forms of activism across the Middle East and North Africa during the revolutions and uprisings of 2011. People have rallied around the musicians and their messages, from rappers like Morocco's El Haked or Tunisia's El Général to singers like Syria's Ibrahim Qashoush and Egypt's Ramy Essam. The music is a lasting and emotionally rich record of the demands and sentiments of protesters and revolutionaries. It expresses the decades of suffering, corruption, and oppression under autocratic rule. France24's multimedia documentary, The Songs ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo: Histories of a City
Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo: Histories of a City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): Why did you write this book? Nezar AlSayyad (NA): Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began to wane by the early 1990s, however, when my appreciation for the city began to be tempered by the realities of its problems. By the time I was asked to write this book, in 2006, I had published two other books on various aspects of Cairo and had spent many years devoted to ...
Keep Reading »A New Kind of Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation
In October 2011, the newly renovated Sourp Giragos Armenian Apostolic Church reopened in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir. Among the hundreds gathered to celebrate its first mass in over ninety years were local men and women who had chosen the occasion to be baptized into the Armenian Apostolic Church. Raised as Sunni Muslims, these men and women were the children and grandchildren of Armenians who had converted to Islam to escape persecution in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Living in a society that glorified cultural homogeneity and in a country that still bore the ...
Keep Reading »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 ...
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Amidst a Violent Conflict, Syria’s Students Struggle for an Education
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New Texts Out Now: Wendy Pearlman, Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon
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New Texts Out Now: Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East
by Charles Tripp Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East. Cambridge and New ...
The Roundup: News and Analysis in Publishing/Academia from the Arab World
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Contested Citizenship in Egypt
by Mona Oraby Clashes over the Khusus killings in Egypt are the most recent of a long list of tragic sectarian ...
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New Texts Out Now: Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam
by Chouki El Hamel Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. Cambridge and New York: ...
New Texts Out Now: Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad, Mediating the Arab Uprisings
by Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad Adel Iskandar and Bassam Haddad, editors, Mediating the Arab Uprisings. Washington, ...
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