Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2020 Issue: Editor’s Note and Table of Contents

This issue offers historical, conceptual, and comparative insights on how techniques of inclusion and exclusion shape possibilities for belonging, collective life, political solidarity, and social contestation. Rim Naguib examines the deportation of socialists, communists, and syndicalists from interwar Egypt. British authorities legitimized the deportation of leftist resident foreigners or “local subjects of foreign extraction.” Naguib argues these ideological-ethnic deportations were central to the colonial rule of differ- ence and its legacies for the postcolonial Egyptian state. Rana AlMutawa’s urban ethnography of Emiratis in Dubai explores how “glitzy” places such as shopping malls and newly-built developments become sites of belonging. Challenging scholarly portrayals of Dubai’s “glitzy” development projects as alienating, inauthentic, or touristic, AlMutawa reveals how her interlocutors experience these spaces in personal and intimate ways while negotiating, upholding, and challenging social norms. Yusri Khaizran analyzes Israeli school curricula as a particular site for the production of a Druze identity and political sensibility severed and distinct from their Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic milieus. Tracing curricular and institutional developments in the education sector since the establishment of the State of Israel, he reveals critical junctures in the transmuting of Druze doctrinal particularism into a segregated sectarian identity, as part of a governance repertoire to exercise control over Palestinian-Arab society as a whole. Sima Shakhsari reads Fatima Mernissi’s 1994 Dreams of Trespass to reconsider queer kinship through temporal bonds and alliances. Shakhsari builds on this reading to challenge the politics of miseration in refugee discourse as well as the epistemological assumptions in gender studies and queer studies curricula that render Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass—and much else from Middle East studies—an impossibility as a teachable text. The issue features a robust reviews section that engages recent major works in the multidisciplinary study of the Middle East. In usual fashion, it brings together a diversity of early career and senior scholars, both as authors and reviewers.