Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2021 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

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Jan 20, 2022
Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2021 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2021 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

By : ASJ Editors

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XXIX, No. 2
Fall 2021


This issue provides rich and empirically grounded explorations of culture, history, and resistance. Arab Studies Journal is privileged to feature Pelle Valentin Olsen’s groundbreaking interrogation of the establishment of the film industry in Iraq. By identifying and analyzing the transnational and transregional circulation of capital, performers, and film technicians, Olsen offers invigorating and new geographies that greatly expand our understandings of Iraqi cultural politics, cinema in Iraq, and their contribution to filmmaking in the Global South.
 
We are also honored to publish a special section on the Maghrib that rethinks the territorial, cultural, and human geographies of the region. Brahim El Guabli, this special section’s editor, introduces the articles by asking, “Where Is the Maghrib?” He identifies the stakes of posing this question and engaging it critically. El Guabli provides a powerful survey of where the scholarship stands today, how the articles contained in the special section intervene in those conversations, and the importance of taking seriously the ways in which Amazigh peoples, cultures, and language are and are not engaged in such endeavors. In “The Liminal Intellectual: A Contrapuntal Reading of Abdellatif Laâbi’s Un Autre Maroc,” Sonja Hegasy explores Laâbi’s liminality between the postindependence politics of the 1960s and post-2010 popular mobilizations in Morocco. Taking her cue from Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading, Hegasy reveals how Laâbi’s 2013 book-length essay explores his generation’s political aspirations in light of contemporary crises and new political formations. Carlos Cañete and Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla’s “The Maghrib in Spain: An Outer-Inner Space” explores Spanish representations of the Maghrib as both outer and inner to Spanish history and culture. They trace the production and legacies of a particular ambivalence which is primarily expressed in spatial metaphors of heterotopic nature. In “‘Collecting Bosoms’: Sex, Race, and Masculinity at the Pan-African Festival of Algiers, 1969,” Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik explores the racial and sexual tensions of the pan-African moment in writings by and interviews with attendees of this legendary festival. She anchors her analysis in the experiences and reflections of the often-overlooked and understudied Black American poet Ted Joans, alongside Black Power activists Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver and Haitian poet Rene Depestre. 
 
Animated by the May 2021 Palestinian “unity intifada” and Israel’s intensified bombardment of the Gaza Strip, with this issue we inaugurate a new essays section. Charles Anderson, a longtime pillar of Arab Studies Journal, commissioned and edited the articles marking this section’s debut. The section explores what Palestine, Palestinians’ relentless resistance, and new forms of political organizing on the ground might teach us. Anderson provides a piercing introduction to the context that informs the essays. The section features concise and powerful reflections by Diana Buttu, Dana El Kurd, Esmat Elhalaby, Marwa Fatafta, and Maha Nassar. Collectively, these essays and introduction point less to the much-debated causes of these events and more to their significance and meaning for Palestinians across historic Palestine and its diaspora.
 
Complementing the articles and essays is another robust installment of our book reviews section. The works under consideration and the insights offered by the reviewers reflect both the breadth and depth of scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa as well as Arab Studies Journal’s commitment to engaging with disciplined, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary knowledge production on historical and contemporary dynamics of the various geographies that constitute the field.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Articles


Al-Qahira-Baghdad: The Transnational and Transregional History of Iraq’s Early Cinema Industry
Pelle Valentin Olsen

Special Section: The Maghrib


Introduction to Special Section: Where is the Maghrib?
Brahim El Guabli

The Liminal Intellectual: A Contrapuntal Reading of Abdellatif Laâbi’s Un Autre Maroc
Sonja Hegasy

The Maghrib in Spain: An Outer-Inner Space
Carlos Cañete and Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla

“Collecting Bosoms”: Sex, Race, and Masculinity at the Pan-African Festival of Algiers, 1969
Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik

Essays: On Palestine


Introduction: The Fourth Gaza War and the Unity Intifada of 2021
Charles Anderson

Permission to Narrate 2.0
Marwa Fatafta

The Unity Intifada: Assessments and Predictions
Dana El Kurd

The Green Line Never Existed
Diana Buttu

Equality vs. Freedom: Continuity and Change in the Demands of ‘48 Palestinians
Maha Nassar

A Global People
Esmat Elhalaby

Reviews


Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism by Aaron G. Jakes
Reviewed by Rebecca E. Karl

Sinews of War and Trade by Laleh Khalili
Reviewed by Helga Tawil-Souri

Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey by Begüm Adalet
Reviewed by Koca Mehmet Kentel

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
Reviewed by Moné Makkawi

Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey by Ayşe Parla
Reviewed by Timothy Y. Loh

The Ottoman “Wild West”: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries by Nikolay Antov
Reviewed by Sanja Kadrić

The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives by Harry Harootunian
Reviewed by Matthew Ghazarian

Egypt 1919:The Revolution in Literature and Film by Dina Heshmat
Reviewed by Olga Verlato

The Dangers of Poetry: Culture, Politics, and Revolution in Iraq by Kevin M. Jones
Reviewed by Levi Thompson

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ASJ Editors By :
ASJ Editors

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2021 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Arab Studies Journal

Vol. XXIX, No. 1

Spring 2021


In this issue, we are proud to feature articles that explore the production and circulation of knowledge from diverse disciplines and approaches. In “Egyptian Textbooks in Times of Change, 1952–1980,” Farida Makar and Ehaab D. Abdou trace the production and transformation of historical met- anarratives within Egypt’s post-1952 educational bureaucracy. By exploring the bureaucracy as a site of knowledge production, they provide a nuanced portrait of the processes by which changing political contexts inform text- book content. In “Reconceptualizing Algeria in Italy: Amara Lakhous and Leonardo Sciascia,” Claudia Esposito argues that reading these two authors through a transcolonial lens can provide tools to decolonize studies of the Mediterranean. Developing Aldo Moro’s concept of converging parallels, Esposito reveals how Lakhous’s use of the giallo crime novel genre permits new kinds of readings of Algeria and the Maghrib, and new understand- ings of power, corruption, and memory that transcend the national frame. Esposito’s article is the first in a series of articles expounding new approaches to Maghrib studies, assembled by guest editor Brahim El Guabli, which will continue in Arab Studies Journal’s Fall 2021 issue. Finally, in “Arab Critical Culture and Its (Palestinian) Discontents after the Second World War,” Adey Almohsen historicizes the consolidation of a particular understanding of iltizam. By exploring specific Palestinian literary and cultural critics, Almohsen brings to the fore those writers that did not subscribe to that understanding or who otherwise wrote from a different set of concerns they viewed as central to the Palestinian reality. In doing so, Almohsen forces us to rethink the chronologies and categories that have emerged in the historiography to narrate Arab literary and critical output since the Nakba. We are equally proud, as always, to feature a robust and incisive collection of reviews examining the latest contributions to the interdisciplinary study of the Middle East and North Africa.

This Spring 2021 issue marks the third during the COVID-19 pandemic and the second of our co-editorship of Arab Studies Journal. We would like to acknowledge the volunteer labor of the entire editorial team and our network of anonymous reviewers. We are well aware of the burdens, stresses, and dislocations—not to mention physical and emotional toll—the pandemic has inflicted upon our articles, reviews, and administrative sections, both collectively and individually. That our team, external reviewers, and authors have maintained their commitments to Arab Studies Journal and its publication cycle during this difficult time is something we hold dear and do not take for granted. Our success as a journal reflects this joint commitment, even if the responsibility for any shortcomings are our own as co-editors.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Articles


8. Egyptian Textbooks in Times of Change, 1952–1980
Farida Makar and Ehaab D. Abdou

38. Reconceptualizing Algeria in Italy: Amara Lakhous and Leonardo Sciascia
Claudia Esposito

56. Arab Critical Culture and Its (Palestinian) Discontents after the Second World War
Adey Almohsen 

Reviews


84. Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire by Lâle Can
Reviewed by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

89. Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt by Samah Selim
Reviewed by Adéla Provazníková 

94. Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel by Kifah Hanna
Reviewed by Rachel Green

99. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 by Judith Surkis
Reviewed by Darcie Fontaine 

104. Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Languages of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-39 by Dónal Hassett
Reviewed by Jim House 

109. L’Algérie face à la catastrophe suspendue. Gérer la crise et blâmer le peuple sous Bouteflika (1999–2014) by Thomas Serres
Reviewed by Ratiba Hadj-Moussa

114. The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State by Mazen Masri
Reviewed by Raef Zreik

118. Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation by Fadi A. Bardawil
Reviewed by Nate George