Middle Eastern history Books

Book SynopsisThe 1967 Arab–Israeli War rocketed the question of Israel and Palestine onto the front pages of American newspapers. Black Power activists saw Palestinians as a kindred people of color, waging the same struggle for freedom and justice as themselves. Soon concerns over the Arab–Israeli conflict spread across mainstream black politics and into the heart of the civil rights movement itself. Black Power and Palestine uncovers why so many African Americans—notably Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, among others—came to support the Palestinians or felt the need to respond to those who did. Americans first heard pro-Palestinian sentiments in public through the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. Michael R. Fischbach uncovers this hidden history of the Arab–Israeli conflict's role in African American activism and the ways that distant struggle shaped the domestic fight for racial equality. Black Power's transnational connections between African Americans and Palestinians deeply affected U.S. black politics, animating black visions of identity well into the late 1970s. Black Power and Palestine allows those black voices to be heard again today. In chronicling this story, Fischbach reveals much about how American peoples of color create political strategies, a sense of self, and a place within U.S. and global communities. The shadow cast by events of the 1960s and 1970s continues to affect the United States in deep, structural ways. This is the first book to explore how conflict in the Middle East shaped the American civil rights movement.Trade Review"Michael R. Fischbach explores one of the most important international ramifications of the political awakening of African Americans in the 20th century: how movements ranging from the Black Muslims and Black Panthers to SNCC and the NAACP related to the Palestinian struggle. Original and timely, Black Power and Palestine offers fascinating insight into a vital issue in the self-definition of the African American community, one that continues to have great relevance today in the growing linkages between the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian activism."—Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University, author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East"Black Power and Palestine is an indispensable read on the civil rights and Black Power era, shedding new light on just how deeply the Arab-Israeli conflict has shaped black domestic politics. Anyone interested in why conflict in the Middle East continues to cast its long shadow over U.S. foreign and domestic policy should read this book."—Cynthia A. Young, The Pennsylvania State University, author of Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left"Fischbach's work is nothing short of an historical tour de force, shedding light on the interplay between Black activist spheres of the 1960s and '70s and their wider world.... A masterpiece of investigative research, this book is the fruit of many years spent deep in the archives, chasing down government documents, and of extensive interviews with activists and key players....Black Power and Palestine is without doubt a fresh, invaluable addition to the canons of Black struggle and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."—Amin Gharad, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"[A] meticulously researched history of the ties between the Black and Palestinian liberation struggles from the 1960s to the 1980s.... Fischbach explores how the Black Power movement of the 1960s embraced the Palestinian cause and how this eventually influenced moderate civil rights organizations that had unquestioningly supported Israel....Black Power and Palestine is essential reading."—Rod Such, Electronic Intifada"Fischbach offers a fascinating account of the under-examined, little-known relationship between Black Power and Palestinian activists. This well-documented book demonstrates how black militants aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause as a result of their international, anti-imperialist struggle for liberation...Most significant, this book dispels the notion of an American domestic consensus with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and points the reader toward the nuanced ways in which this conflict has impacted American society...Highly recommended."—M. F. Cairo, CHOICE"Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color by Michael Fischbach is a unique and necessary contribution to the fields ofblack, Middle Eastern, and world history. It creates a panoramic and simultaneously nuanced narrative about the history of Black Power solidarity with Palestinians."––Nadia Alahmed, H-Diplo"Michael Fischbach's Black Power and Palestine is the best book yet written on the contemporary history of Afro-Palestinian solidarity. The book is invaluable as a scholarly record of Black efforts to organize with and in support of Palestinian liberation, but also as a political argument about the centrality of Palestinian solidarity work to building internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity in our time."––Bill V. Mullen, Mondoweiss"Fischbach's book makes two major contributions to the field of of Black-Palestinian solidarity: first, a nuanced understanding of politics and second, an insistence on the significance of the historical moment. Resonances with today's headlines fill the book.Fischbach's historically driven narrative stands at the cutting edge of scholarship on the Black Power movement."—Elizabeth Bishop, Journal of Palestine Studies"Black Power and Palestine is history at its best. Well-researched and interesting to read, it attests to the long-term impact that grass-roots activists can have, though it may not be recognised at the time. Fischbach delves into the recent past to elucidate a pivotal time and issue that still has prime relevance today."—Sally Bland, The Jordan Times"Black Power and Palestine makes a crucial intervention by excavating a rather forgotten history that undermines any notion of a timeless American consensus over U.S. Middle East policy and proposes a genealogy of the opposition to the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the treatment of Palestinians there and in the diaspora."—Oz Frankel, American Historical ReviewBlack Power and Palestine is a remarkable and timely study about solidarity between the struggle of African Americans and Palestinian Resistance. This well- researched study is in ten chapters, with a prologue, epilogue, and extensive notes. Although the struggle of African Americans has been acknowledged by scholars, black affiliations with Palestinians have not received scholarly attention. Black Power and Palestine fills the gap in the literature about the mutual connections between the two struggles."—Arab Studies QuarterlyTable of Contents1. Black Internationalism: Malcolm X and the Rise of Global Solidarity 2. The Fire This Time: SNCC, Jews, and the Demise of the Beloved Community 3. Reformers, Not Revolutionaries: The NAACP, Bayard Rustin, and Israel 4. Balanced and Guarded: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Arab-Israeli Tightrope 5. The Power of Words: The Black Arts Movement and a New Narrative 6. Struggle and Revolution: The Black Panthers and the Guerrilla Image 7. Middle East Symbiosis: Israelis, Arabs, and African Americans 8. Red, White, and Black: Communists, Guerrillas, and the Black Mainstream 9. A Seat at the Table: Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, and Black Foreign Policy 10. Looking over Jordan: Joseph Lowery, Jesse Jackson, and Yasir Arafat

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 1943, Lebanon gained its formal political independence from France; only after two more decades did the country finally establish a national central bank. Inaugurated on April 1, 1964, the Banque du Liban (BDL) was billed by Lebanese authorities as the nation's primary symbol of economic sovereignty and as the last step towards full independence. In the local press, it was described as a means of projecting state power and enhancing national pride. Yet the history of its founding—stretching from its Ottoman origins in mid-nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth—tells a different, more complex story. Banking on the State reveals how the financial foundations of Lebanon were shaped by the history of the standardization of economic practices and financial regimes within the decolonizing world. The system of central banking that emerged was the product of a complex interaction of war, economic policies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests. It served rather than challenged the interests of an oligarchy of local bankers. As Hicham Safieddine shows, the set of arrangements that governed the central bank thus was dictated by dynamics of political power and financial profit more than market forces, national interest or economic sovereignty.Trade Review"Banking on the State is a brilliant exploration of finance and banking as sites of state formation, sovereignty, regional alliances, and national subjectivities. By revealing the institutional origins of bank power in Lebanon, Hicham Safieddine rewrites the history of a misunderstood place. He challenges us to rethink sectarianism, exceptionalism, and civil strife." -- Sherene Seikaly * University of California, Santa Barbara *"Banking on the State makes a critical contribution to emerging research on Lebanon's political economy. Hicham Safieddine takes on critical questions and provides illuminating new insights, sure to help shift debates on Lebanon." -- Bassam Haddad * George Mason University *"A profoundly rich and highly readable account of Lebanon's financial foundations. Hicham Safieddine tells a riveting story of how Lebanon's banking system came to be the way it is—tracing the complex interplay of private finance and public policy, and the global (and regional) forces that so powerfully shaped the emergence of state institutions in Lebanon. A stunning book that upturns much of the conventional wisdom about Lebanese politics and economics, while also pushing new conceptual boundaries in how we think about the entwined histories of central banks, financial markets, and state sovereignty." -- Adam Hanieh * author of Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Contemporary Political Economy of the Middle East *"As some in Lebanon may prepare to celebrate the country's first century (1920–2020), this study of its financial foundations is not only a brilliant rewriting of history but also timely and prescient." -- Clement M. Henry * Middle East Journal *"Banking on the State is an innovative and groundbreaking contribution to the historiography of Lebanon. It is a treasure for researchers and students interested in the political, social, or economic history of Lebanon as well as financial history and post-colonial state building more broadly." –Ziad Abu-Rish, International Journal of Middle East Studies"While economic histories have explored the banking sector's centrality to Lebanon's political economy, scholars have not historicized the financial system's institutional foundations or analyzed bankers as a social group. In that light, Hicham Safieddine's groundbreaking monograph, Banking on the State, could not be more timely." -- Oain Lawson * Arab Studies Quarterly *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Introduction: Illusions of Financial Independence chapter abstractThe introduction highlights the fact that although insightful studies of colonizing projects and postcolonial Arab state formation in a late and post-Ottoman context have covered the realms of education, military, law, civic space, and, later, the economy, Lebanese finance has rarely if ever been studied. This book addresses that lacuna. It explores the role of central banking in the making of Middle Eastern states both at the level of challenging dominant ideologies of political economy, like Michel Chiha's laissez-faire paradigm, and at the level of rethinking institution-building in relation to private lobbying groups like the Association of Banks in Lebanon and government regulatory structures like the central bank. The introduction offers an alternative reading of Lebanon's political economy that shies away from the fetishized invocation of sectarianism as a primary explanatory variable of historical change. 2The Long Monetary Mandate chapter abstractChapter 2 traces the evolution of central banking in Lebanon first under the Ottoman Imperial bank (BIO) and later under French occupation. The BIO's successor, the Banque de Syrie et du Liban (BSL), became the primary institutional guardian of a long French monetary mandate over Lebanon and Syria. Colonial authority guaranteed BSL legitimacy and its privileged position within an emerging national space. In return, BSL policies reproduced the dominance of French capital in the money market. More broadly, mandatory financial regulations, including BSL policies, played a central role in the formation of a new monetary space stretching from Lebanon to Iraq that underpinned the emergence of what is best described as heteronomous national economies. 3Central Bank Reform: Ideas and Institutions chapter abstractThe conflict over Lebanon's financial regulatory regime and economic orientation was not only of interests, but also of ideas. Chapter 3 explores the role of a group of "money doctors" at the International Monetary Fund and the American University of Beirut who tried to argue for economic reform and banking regulation after World War II. They challenged the dominant paradigm of laissez-faire espoused by followers of Michel Chiha in public fora like the Cénacle libanais and acted as emissaries of global currents of thought, namely, a modified version of economic institutionalism as propounded by the U.S. economist Wesley Mitchell. The chapter examines the ideal central bank prototypes that they believed "underdeveloped" countries like Lebanon should adopt. 4Barons of Banking: The Untouchables chapter abstractChapter 4 recounts the conflict within the bankers' ranks and vis-à-vis state technocrats and government ministers over the form and extent of banking regulation during the post–World War II post–World War II "merchant republic" era." The chapter examines failed projects of setting up development banks and traces the transformation of the banking community into an organized and powerful lobby thanks to the efforts led by the Eddé brothers, Raymond and Pierre. The former introduced banking secrecy legislation. The latter spearheaded the formation of the association of banks in Lebanon (ABL) in 1959, the first of its kind in the Arab world. The ABL managed to prevent central banking reform from tampering with the laissez-faire system at the basis of its power and prestige. 5Banque du Liban: A Façade of Economic Sovereignty: chapter abstractChapter 5 analyzes the making of the central bank in relation to the social reform project of Lebanese President Fuad Chehab (in office 1958–64), which was inspired by contemporary trends of state-led management of national economies. It is a comparative examination of the provisions of the 1964 Law of Money and Credit, which acted as the primary legal framework of Lebanon's financial regulatory system and monetary policy. The law laid out the statutes establishing the BDL and outlining its monetary policy mandate and management structure. Placed in the context of Arab financial reform, the chapter shows how the BDL under the direction of the former BIO official Joseph Oughourlian retained a degree of managerial autonomy vis-à-vis the government and the banks. Such autonomy that reflected Chehab's philosophy of planned laissez-faire. 6Suits and Shadows: The Intra Affair chapter abstractChapter 6 investigates the crash of one the region's top banks, Intra, which became a subject of conspiracy theories. The crisis took place two years after the BDL's inauguration and exposed the fragility of the financial system. It reflected the degree to which the Lebanese state lacked economic sovereignty and robust financial control. The chapter shows how the collapse of Intra, founded by the Palestinian-Lebanese businessman Yusif Beidas, was the product of structural transformation of the world's political economy combined with contingent historical developments and conspiratorial actions. Regionally, the outflow of Arab capital away from Beirut was intertwined with Arab Cold War political rivalries between Cairo and Riyadh. Locally, the structural limitations of the newly founded central banking system combined with the decision by Lebanese governing elites to sink Intra in order to save their market share and the laissez-faire system sustaining it. 7Financial Regime Change: The Last Refuge of Laissez-faire chapter abstractThe Intra crisis was itself a turning point in shaping the regulatory role of the BDL. The chapter traces the supranational policy networks that impacted the decision-making process. Aided by American experts like Roger Tamraz and Eugene Black, legal restructuring of the sector took place. Reforms included a temporary ban on entry to the banking sector, which led to international capital taking over local shares, as well as the introduction of a deposit insurance scheme. These new measures led to the emergence of banker-bureaucrats and banker-technocrats like Elias Sarkis, who was appointed BDL governor, and Salim Hoss, the first head of the Banking Control Commission. Both, among others, oversaw construction of a new financial regulatory regime that institutionalized and protected rather than overhauled laissez-faire well after the civil war that broke out in 1975, the closing point of the book. 8Conclusion: Sovereign Debt, Sovereign Banks chapter abstractBy the end of the civil war, Lebanon had become internationally synonymous with a failed state and endemic sectarian violence. State institutions including the military, the judiciary, the presidency, parliament, and public education were seen as weak, corrupt, partisan, or powerless. The conclusions show how, by contrast, the central bank remained largely resilient in the face of war, significantly autonomous from government intervention, and relatively immune to sectarian manipulation. Thanks to debt-dependent postwar reconstruction projects implemented by Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and financial engineering policies designed by the BDL's governor, Riad Salameh, Lebanese banks were able to secure a steady source and high level of profit via sovereign lending. Throughout Hariri's era and following his assassination in 2005, the BDL and the big banks remained key decision-makers in managing the debt, the currency, and the money market.

Read more less

Book SynopsisBeirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence. For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of "the war yet to come": urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects.Trade Review"Once in a while, a book comes along that makes a field of inquiry reconsider its assumptions, categories, and vocabularies. Through elegant ethnography and nuanced theorization, Hiba Bou Akar's For the War Yet to Come gives us a new way of thinking about violence, development, modernity, and ultimately, the city. This city is not just Beirut but rather urban life everywhere." -- Ananya Roy * University of California, Los Angeles *"For the War Yet to Come upends our conventional notions of center and periphery, of local and transnational, even of war and peace. It takes courage and smarts to navigate these spaces, let alone to write about them. With daring and precision, Hiba Bou Akar proves herself to be a complete master." -- AbdouMaliq Simone * Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity *"How do you plan cities when the specter of war is always present? Hiba Bou Akar places 'planning' on its head to show how Beirut has developed to serve a sectarian order. Fascinating, theoretically astute, and empirically rich, For the War Yet to Come enriches our understanding of fragile cities in the Middle East and beyond." -- Asef Bayat, University of Illinois * Urbana-Champaign *"For the War Yet to Come is a feminist and postcolonial critique of a masculinized geography of urban militarism that favors the spectacular and the sublime. This vision of the city at war is blindingly technological and curiously devoid of people, as if seen from above (perhaps from a fighter jet). Bou Akar's Beirut is peopled, swirling with rumor. It is the site not of anonymized destruction but of calculated and complex construction." -- Emma Shaw Crane * Public Books *"Bou Akar is able to assess how years of sectarian warfare and conflict have turned Beirut into an arena for competing religious/political parties and groups to seize footholds and influence in the city. [Her] in-depth analysis reveals a painful reality: Beirut's urban planning reflects Lebanon's political factions' acceptance of the inevitable continuation of sectarian violence and human displacement." -- Refael Kubersky * Middle East Journal *"Hiba Bou Akar's For the War Yet to Come is an important contribution, shedding light on urban planning in unstable contexts....I highly recommend this book to readers interested in further understanding how urban planning could be viewed as a sword with two edges, for consensus or conflict building." -- Christine Mady * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Hiba Bou Akar convincingly reveals the considerable weight of the anticipation of war and violence in the production of urban geographies in one emblematic contested city, Beirut. She names this phenomenon 'the war yet to come.' The mechanisms she skillfully describes are profoundly anchored in the urban dynamics of this city but could also be easily found in other cities....an enormous effort that succeeds in describing how fear of 'the war yet to come' is profoundly affecting urban and territorial dynamics in the contested suburbs of Beirut." -- Oula Aoun * H-Nationalism *"For the War Yet to Come is an incredibly brave book. It would have required enormous courage, fortitude, inventiveness and discipline in order to engage the sites and actors of this book—municipal officials, street-level bureaucrats, bankers, housing developers, landowners, draughtsmen in public and private planning agencies, police officers, militiamen, religious charity workers and even asphalt company employees. Instead of being overwhelmed with rumours, impressions and partial understandings, the book resounds with confidence and clarity." -- AbdouMaliq Simon * Urbanisation *"In the literature on urban development, Beirut takes on symbolic significance as a prefigurement for cities where political difference is assumed to be primordial and inherent. In contrast to this assumption, Bou Akar's focus on 'everyday sectarianism,' located in 'zones of awkward engagement' between people, and between people and place, has shown sectarianism to be spatially and temporally produced and contingent." -- Hannah Sender * Environment & Urbanization *"[With] the theoretically astute concept of 'the war yet to come'....Bou Akar masterfully weaves a spatial and temporal logic together to demonstrate how these territorial contestations are both a reconfiguration of past violence and a patchwork of destruction, construction, lavishness and poverty, otherness and marginality." -- Mona Atia * Society and Space *"[A] beautifully written book....In an almost forensically meticulous manner, Bou Akar shows us the tangible connections between territoriality, geopolitics and everyday urban life." -- Sara Fregonese * Society and Space *"Bou Akar deftly moves across transnational, national, city-wide, and neighborhood spaces, while remaining sharply attuned to the complex temporalities of 'urban warscapes'....in Beirut, as Bou Akar vividly shows, urban strategy is far from unitary and coherent." -- Federico Pérez * Society and Space *"Bou Akar's work is a fascinating study of how planning is discussed and practiced in contexts of conflict. Furthermore, her analysis provides a compelling example of the way that contestations over identity have important spatial dimensions.This book is vital reading not only for anyone who wants to better understand sectarian politics in Lebanon but also for anyone interested in the interplay of conflict and planning in urban spaces across the region and the globe." -- Matthew DeMaio * Anthropological Quarterly *"For the War Yet to Come makes an important contribution to urban studies, to be sure. Moreover, while the book is in strong dialogue with the already rich scholarship of planning and politics in Lebanon, its insights apply more broadly to contexts of urban political conflict well beyond Beirut and the Arab world" -- Alice Stefanelli * PoLAR *"Bou Akar makes an essential contribution to the urban studies and planning fields....Her analysis of Beirut's planning political economy is fascinating and insightful." -- Gerardo Francisco Sandoval * Journal of Architectural Education *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: War in Times of Peace chapter abstractThe Prologue offers a theorization of the spatial and temporal logics of the war yet to come through which Beirut's south and southeastern peripheries are governed and regulated. It locates these peripheries spatially in the city, and provides an overview of how these peripheries, in times of peace, have been transformed into frontiers of urban growth and sectarian violence largely through the spatial practices of religious-political organizations, mostly former civil war militias and the major political players in post–civil war Lebanon. These organizations include the Shiite Hezbollah, the Sunni Future Movement, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), and the Christian Maronite Church. Chapter 1: Constructing Sectarian Geographies chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the discourses through which sectarian geographies are constructed in Beirut's peripheries. It discusses how commonly used terms like environment (bīa in Arabic) and demography can be used to depoliticize spatial policies and practices of segregation, discrimination, and fear by relegating them from realm of the political to the realm of the natural and scientific. Through an overview of the study's approach, which included patching stories and maps together with real-time data collection, this chapter engages with the methodological question of conducting research in contested spaces and violent geographies. This chapter also situates the book within the interdisciplinary fields of urban and planning studies, Middle Eastern studies, and studies on conflict urbanism and militarization. It also explains the three research sites, and theorizes the ways in which they, together, contribute to an understanding of the geographies and temporalities of the war yet to come in contested spaces. Chapter 2: The Doubleness of Ruins chapter abstractThis chapter examines the still visible, expansive geography of war-scarred ruins left by the civil war in Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail, by examining the transformation of these geographies of ruins within the unfolding sectarian-political spatial conflict. The doubleness of ruins arises from their being products of both a past civil war and a present territorial war that is not so different from the civil war but that uses different tools. Through this exploration, the chapter shows how the Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail neighborhoods have become one of the major contested frontiers, one where the Christians (through the Maronite Church) and the Shiites (through Hezbollah-affiliated real estate developers) are struggling over land locally and through global networks of finance, fundraising, and religious allegiances, and where this struggle is transforming Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail into a sectarian frontier in times of peace. Chapter 3: The Lacework of Zoning chapter abstractThis chapter traces how urban planning and zoning technologies have become technologies of warfare in times of peace, transforming Sahra Choueifat, a southeastern periphery of Beirut, into a deadly frontier of contestation and violence. The territorial battle of Hezbollah and the PSP over the area through zoning policies and real estate and housing markets is resulting in what this chapter calls the lacework of zoning. This low-income periphery is now a patchwork of apartment buildings that are in the vicinity of industries that are next to one of the most active urban agricultural areas around Beirut, with severe repercussions on the everyday life of area residents. The chapter describes how areas known to be Hezbollah's spaces in Beirut are in fact produced by the continuities and discontinuities of neoliberal practices with practices of religious affiliation, sectarian constructions, service provision, resistance ideologies, and militarization. Chapter 4: A Ballooning Frontier chapter abstractThis chapter shows how access to development sites and individual project characteristics are resulting in the simultaneous (and competitive) ballooning of Shiite al-Dahiya and the city core (primarily Sunni west Beirut) toward Doha Aramoun, a periphery that emerged as a violent frontier in the May 2008 sectarian violence. Ballooning takes place on a variety of scales, from constructing more floors than initially permitted in a building to working behind the scenes with government agencies or religious-political organizations to bypass market mechanisms to using international aid to build infrastructure that enables the extension of sectarian patterns of urbanization. Thus, in Doha Aramoun, large-scale, nationally sanctioned building and planning projects have combined with the building-by-building efforts of Hezbollah-affiliated developers to transform a formerly marginal periphery into a prime new site for sectarian violence. In these territorial battles, minority religious groups become brokers between dominant religious groups. Chapter 5: Planning without Development chapter abstractThis chapter describes the genealogy of the sectarian order in Lebanon and how it came to be understood and practiced spatially. This genealogy is constructed by tracing the debates and discourses that circulated among experts in the fields of development and urban planning since the 1950s, soon after the establishment of the Lebanese post-colonial nation state. The chapter shows how, over time, urban planning was voided of its development discourses, and transformed through militias' and religious-political organizations' interventions into a collection of "innovative" exercises aimed at balancing the spatiality of a sectarian order. It illustrates how these shifts in logic coincided with global moments of anxiety around Communism, and later, political Islam, ultimately ushering in the spatial and temporal logics of the wars yet to come. It closes with a discussion on how planning experts have become the technicians of this logic. Epilogue: Contested Futures chapter abstractThis closing discussion of contested futures shows how the geographies and temporalities of the war yet to come are often dystopic, foreclosing the possibilities of urban politics and social change outside the sociopolitical order of political difference. At the same time, it shows that hope for change lies in the continuously shifting and contested spatialities of the sectarian order. It also explains this study's relevance beyond Beirut, discussing the implications of the findings for urban studies research in cities across the Global South and Global North. By contending that the urban futures of all cities are being contested, this chapter argues that while the logic of anticipated wars is particular to cities like Beirut, many other cities are governed, regulated, and contested by the logics of conflicts that are yet to come, driven by terror, gun violence, and climate change.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe city of Jaffa presents a paradox: intimate neighbors who are political foes. The official Jewish national tale proceeds from exile to redemption and nation-building, while the Palestinians' is one of a golden age cut short, followed by dispossession and resistance. The experiences of Jaffa's Jewish and Arab residents, however, reveal lives and nationalist sentiments far more complex. Twilight Nationalism shares the stories of ten of the city's elders—women and men, rich and poor, Muslims, Jews, and Christians—to radically deconstruct these national myths and challenge common understandings of belonging and alienation. Through the stories told at life's end, Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan illuminate how national affiliation ultimately gives way to existential circumstances. Similarities in lives prove to be shaped far more by socioeconomic class, age, and gender than national allegiance, and intersections between stories usher in a politics of existence in place of politics of identity. In offering the real stories individuals tell about themselves, this book reveals shared perspectives too long silenced and new understandings of local community previously lost in nationalist narratives.Trade Review"In Twilight Nationalism, Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan go far beyond standard narratives about Jaffa, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians have long shared the city. The authors break through the thicket of established notions and give us an alternative description. And they do so brilliantly."—Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions"Twilight Nationalism gives voice to ten elderly Palestinian survivors and Jewish immigrants from Jaffa who narrate and, indeed, analyze, how the burden of history and the tyranny of the nation fragmented the rhythms of their lives. Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan produced a multivocal elegy that is as profound as it is imaginative and nothing short of brilliant."—Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego, author of A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict"This groundbreaking book exposes the hidden gems of a binational city, that even indigenous Jaffans like myself tend to overlook."—Moussa Abou-Ramadan, University of Strasbourg, coauthor of Treatise of Comparative Islamic Law"InTwilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at Life's End,authors Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan offer an original and thought-provoking ethnographic study of nationalist identity in the "mixed" city of Jaffa...[W]hat their analysis does amply and sensitively show is the value of a relational and situational approach to the study of nationalist identities and discourses, and the importance of being attentive to different social, spatial, and temporal configurations in analyses of their import upon everyday lives."––Una McGahern, H-Nationalism"One of the strengths of this ethnography is the intimate humanity of the individuals who appear in it...Together, the historical breadth and personal depth of the life histories narrated in this book could offer rich teaching material for students interested in old age, memory, the intersection of identity, politics, and gender, the false dichotomy of collaboration versus resistance, and mixed cities in Israel/ Palestine."––Basma Fahoum, Review of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Toward Twilight Nationalism 1. Besieged Nationalism: Fakhri Jday and the Decline of the Elites 2. Worn-Out Nationalism: Rabbi Avraham Bachar and the Community's Betrayal 3. Surviving Nationalism: Isma'il abu-Shehade and Testimony amid the Ruins 4. Circumventing Nationalism: The Hakim Sisters and the Cosmopolitan Experience 5. Domesticated Nationalism: Nazihah Asis, a Prisoner of Zion 6. Dissolved Nationalism: Subhiya abu-Ramadan and the Critique of the Patriarchal Order 7. Overlooking Nationalism: Talia Seckbach-Monterescu In and Out of Place 8. Suspended Nationalism: Moshe (Mussa) Hermosa and Jewish-Arab Masculinity 9. Masking Nationalism: Amram Ben-Yosef on a Tightrope 10. Speechless Nationalism: Abu-George on the Edge Conclusion: From Identity Politics to Politics of Existence Epilogue: Earth to Earth: Posthumous Nationalism

Read more less

Book SynopsisIran is home to the largest Jewish population in the Middle East, outside of Israel. At its peak in the twentieth century, the population numbered around 100,000; today about 25,000 Jews live in Iran. Between Iran and Zion offers the first history of this vibrant community over the course of the last century, from the 1905 Constitutional Revolution through the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Over this period, Iranian Jews grew from a peripheral community into a prominent one that has made clear impacts on daily life in Iran. Drawing on interviews, newspapers, family stories, autobiographies, and previously untapped archives, Lior B. Sternfeld analyzes how Iranian Jews contributed to Iranian nation-building projects, first under the Pahlavi monarchs and then in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic. He considers the shifting reactions to Zionism over time, in particular to religious Zionism in the early 1900s and political Zionism after the creation of the state of Israel. And he investigates the various groups that constituted the Iranian Jewish community, notably the Jewish communists who became prominent activists in the left-wing circles in the 1950s and the revolutionary Jewish organization that participated in the 1979 Revolution. The result is a rich account of the vital role of Jews in the social and political fabric of twentieth-century Iran. Trade Review"Lior Sternfeld has given us a highly nuanced and perceptive study of not only the Jewish community in Iran but also the Jewish community's integral relationship with the larger Iranian nation. The book is especially insightful on the position of the Jewish community in the 1979 Islamic Revolution." -- Ervand Abrahamian * City University of New York *"Between Iran and Zion is an exciting reconstruction of modern Jewish life in Iran. Lior Sternfeld unearths mesmerizing and previously untold stories to ask important questions about Jewish identities and offer hope for a better future to the peoples of the region, Jews and Muslims alike." -- Orit Bashkin * University of Chicago *"Between Iran and Zion offers a compelling history of Iranian Jews in the twentieth century. Lior Sternfeld proves himself an honest and judicious storyteller with this sobering account of a people caught between their historic homeland and a symbolic call for 'return.'" -- Hamid Dabashi * Columbia University *"Sternfeld's strength lies in his ability to successfully situate Iran's Jews within the broader context of Iranian history...Between Iran and Zion is highly recommended not only for readers interested in an original and nuanced examination of Iranian Jewish life between the early 1940s and the early 1980s, but also for those seeking an understanding of the greater Iranian society during this time. It is an excellent demonstration that minority communities cannot be studied in a vacuum." -- Daniella Farah * H-Nationalism *"To the best of my knowledge,Between Iran and Zionis the first utterly successful attempt to liberate the historiography of twentieth-century Iranian Jews from its conceptual and institutional straitjackets. Hence, it provides exciting, novel and thought-provoking insights and findings regarding the modern history of Jews in Iran." -- Haggai Ram * The Tel Aviv Review of Books *"Between Iran and Zion is an important contribution to the current post-Zionist debate on the status and history of Middle Eastern Jews. More importantly, it brings forth the history of Iranian Jews outside of the context of Israeli society and tries to determine its legacy within the Iranian context. I would recommend the book to everyone interested in understanding the complexity and development of Iranian society as a whole between the early 1940s and the early 1980s." -- Alessandra Cecolin * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction sets the background for the situation of the Jews in Iran at the turn of the twentieth century. This initial chapter provides a brief history of Jews in Iran and in the Middle East and touches on the creation of transnational networks that became increasingly important in the twentieth century. It seeks to introduce and contextualize for the reader Iran's Jewish community and the manner in which it has been addressed in past works. It provides an overview of the political, social, and cultural changes the community experienced, including the implementation of a constitution, urbanization, and a different perception of the "nation" in terms of postimperial identity and structure. 1Shifting Demographics: The Arrival of Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jews chapter abstractChapter 1 explores ways that the Jewish community became more diverse following World War II. It examines the sociological and demographic transformations that the Jewish population experienced during the war. This chapter argues that the 1941 invasion of Iran by Allied forces and the subsequent collapse of the rigid state structure facilitated social mobility and redefinition. At the same time, a wave of Iraqi Jews arrived in Iran and added another layer of identity to the growing Jewish population. This chapter also debunks the traditional portrayal of Iran as passive in the war historiography, where it is usually examined in an insufficiently complex or nuanced way, and analyzes the ways in which the war and its aftermath shaped Iran. Contrary to the traditional historiography's stagnant or, rather, declining analysis of Iranian Jewry, the Jewish population in Iran witnessed a golden age in terms of becoming Iranian citizens. 2The Iranian Political Sphere: Shaping a National Identity chapter abstractChapter 2 examines the politicization of Jews in Iran during World War II and through the early 1950s. Traditional historiography distances Jews from politics in Iran. When mentioned at all, Jewish political activity usually references support of the Shah, especially in relation to his close alliance with Israel. However, this chapter argues that political activism became a means for Iranian Jews to impact their future role and sociopolitical position in Iran. Many Jews were adamant supporters and members of the Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party, and later engaged in many other political initiatives (such as student movements and intellectual associations). The Tudeh was the most vocal opponent of fascism in the 1940s and arguably the most popular political force in Iran. The Tudeh's enduring defense of the Jewish community, combined with its message of equality, attracted many young Jews from the Iranian middle and lower middle classes. 3Iranian Jews and Israel: From Indigenous to State-Sponsored Zionism chapter abstractThis chapter examines the roots and effects of Zionism in Iran. It analyzes Zionism first as an indigenous movement that emerged in Iran as a response to the needs of Iranian Jews (with relation to the global movement of Zionism) and transformed itself as the needs of Iranian Jews changed in the course of the century. After 1948 and the establishment of Israel, Zionism could no longer be taken as a local movement alone. The contact with Israel and Israeli emissaries and the impact of state-sponsored Zionist activities ignited a new set of emotions and means of identification with or antagonism to Zionism, and a range of reactions in between. This chapter examines the way Israel dealt with the case of Iranian Jews, which was atypical compared with other Middle Eastern communities. In addition, this chapter examines the responses to Zionism among the non-Jewish intellectual elites in Iran. 4Unintended Consequences: The Lead-Up to the Iranian Revolution chapter abstractThe ultimate success of the nation-building project, led by the Shah, was evident in the decade leading up to the revolution—when the Jewish community in Iran finally achieved its release from traditional loyalties and viewed itself, first and foremost, as Iranian. This chapter explores the first manifestations of Jewish revolutionary discourse and actions and discusses postrevolutionary Iran and a new nation-building paradigm that Jews faced following the Islamic revolution. This chapter follows the Jewish response to the rapidly unfolding events: from the Shah's overthrow through the redefinition of the Iranian national identity, from the Iran-Iraq War to the post-Khomeini period. In the post-Khomeini era, Iranian Jews had to navigate between their religious ancestral homeland (Israel) and their national and political homeland (Iran). They had to deftly maneuver between the misinterpretations and deceptions that characterized the harsh rhetoric between Israel and Iran. Conclusion chapter abstractThis concluding chapter shows that the trajectory of the Jews of Iran from the early twentieth century led them ultimately to integration into each of the nation-building projects of that era.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLos Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration, in particular, to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA's Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.Trade Review"Arab Routes charts a radical new history of the early Syrian community in Southern California, revealing its fascinating cross-border, multilocal, and multiethnic networks and coalitions across the US, Latin America, and the Arab world. Drawing on a rich repertoire of archives, cultural texts, and oral histories, Sarah Gualtieri complicates and revises our understanding of Arab immigration to the Americas. An expansive, cutting-edge, and much-needed book."—Carol W.N. Fadda, Syracuse University, author of Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging"This beautifully written study explores the ties between Latino/a and Syrian communities in California. Sarah Gualtieri upends standard narratives about Arabs in the United States, showing how multiple migrations and lasting ties to Latin America forged an Arab Latinidad. A wonderful and riveting book that will reshape binary understandings of US–Middle East relations."—Melani McAlister, George Washington University, author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945"In this ingenious study, Sarah Gualtieri maps hemispheric immigration histories that redress the erasure of Syrians from California history and complicate our understandings of Mexicanidad. Rigorous and creative, Arab Routes will transform how we conceptualize immigration, race, gender, and the histories and boundaries of Arab and Latin America."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism"Through recounting the personal stories of migrants and analyzing an expansive archive of census records, articles, letters, etc., author Sarah Gualtieri counters the narrative that Middle Eastern migrants are recent arrivals from a conflict-ridden region. Instead, she provides a new story where Syrian Americans are deeply woven into the history of California."—Rafael Hernández, The Middle East Journal"[Arab Routes] sits among the most important books in Middle East migration studies; in its critical rigor, it is also an essential and indispensable contribution to comparative US ethnic studies.the book will irrevocably transform the study of Arab and Middle Eastern American migration and racialization for years to come."—Neda Maghbouleh, Mashriq & Mahjar"Gualtieri has produced a significant accomplishment: providing a necessary intervention in the scholarship on migration, American ethnicity, and Arab American history, while ensuring the book is accessible to a popular audience."—Pamela E. Pencock, The American Historical Review"Arab Routes 'pivots the [Arab American studies] canon west' (p.127). More importantly, though, it locates Arab American histories more firmly in transnational, South-South, and critical ethnic studies conversations where—as many of us argue—they have always been."—Amira Jarmakani, Pacific Historical Review"Arab Routes is not only a must-read for those interested in mahjar history and transnationalism but is a shining example of how the marriage of critical ethnic studies and migration history (by prioritizing movement over settlement) can produce more nuanced studies that take into account multiple registers of identity"—Reem Bailony, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Arab Amairka 1. The Syrian Pacific 2. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon 3. Meeting at the Mahrajan 4. Fragments of the Past, Identities of the Present 5. Palimpsests in Iconic California Conclusion: Mestizaje in Arab American Families

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations within Zionist and Israeli culture. In the Judaic textual tradition, it evokes exile and punishment, yet is also a site for origin myths, the divine presence, and sanctity. Secular Zionism developed its own spin on the duality of the desert as the romantic site of Jews' biblical roots that inspired the Hebrew culture, and as the barren land outside the Jewish settlements in Palestine, featuring them as an oasis of order and technological progress within a symbolic desert. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society's semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the "besieged island" trope in Israeli culture and politics.Trade Review"Written with passion, innovation, and clarity, Desert in the Promised Land makes an original and significant contribution towards understanding the deeper currents of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By analyzing the role of the desert in Zionist ideology and the collective identity of Israel, Zerubavel adds new dimensions to her groundbreaking and acclaimed study of Israeli myths and memory, Recovered Roots." -- Tom Segev * author of 1949: The First Israelis *"In Desert in the Promised Land, space and memory, desert and settlement, are interwoven into a complex and fascinating portrait of Israel. Yael Zerubavel has written an engaging book that combines anthropology, culture, and history." -- Anita Shapira * author of Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel *"Yael Zerubavel has produced an important, original study of the multiple meanings of the desert in Zionist and Israeli culture. Ranging from the early twentieth century to the present, Zerubavel brings together a vast array of sources, which she reads with deep insight and describes in graceful prose." -- Derek J. Penslar * author of Jews and the Military: A History *"In a rewarding but not easy read, Zerubavel analyzes the complex meanings and varied perceptions of this desert for Jews before 1948 and for Israelis thereafter. She organizes her analysis as a metaphysical yet also a chronological journey through the symbolic desert landscape of space and meaning. The text moves from the ancient biblical story of divine revelations and of national birth of the Jewish people to the more recent tension between the themes of desert and settlement as opposing symbolic landscapes. Recommended." -- B. Harris Jr. * CHOICE *"Desert in the Promised Land is not an academic exercise in abstract distinctions, but a 'metaphorical journey' through the collective Jewish Israeli imaginary drawing from literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons. Recommended to all academic libraries." -- Roger S. Kohn * Association of Jewish Libraries *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: chapter abstractThe introduction sets the stage for exploring the divergent meanings of the desert as a symbolic landscape within the "spatial code" that Hebrew, and later Israeli, culture developed. Hebrew culture foregrounded the settlement as the key to Jewish national revival and relegated the desert to the background. This study reverses this relation, placing the desert at the center and setting out to examine the ambiguities underlying desert-settlement relations. The introduction presents the historical and thematic framework of the book. The first part addresses the duality of the symbolic desert in the Hebrew culture of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. The second part focuses on post-1948 Israel and the concrete Negev desert that is now included in its territory, examining the construction of the desert within the discourses and practices of settlement, environmentalism, and tourism, thus revealing the diverse visions of the desert in Israeli culture. 1Desert as Historical Metaphor chapter abstractThis chapter explores the dual meaning of the desert as a chronotope that links space and memory. The desert plays a critical role in the biblical exodus, as the "nonplace" set between Egypt, the land of exile, on the one hand, and the Promised Land, on the other, and the desert is hence the site of divine revelations and profound transitions that shaped the Israelites' collective identity. Jewish memory views the desert as representing the period of Jewish exile that led to the destruction of the homeland. Jewish tradition interprets exile as a divine punishment and Zionism constructed it as a regressive period within its decline narrative. References to the landscape outside Jewish settlements as a desolate "desert" and a "wasteland" underscored the redemptive mission of the Zionist settlement. The discussion addresses the tension between these interpretations and the use of the desert as a symbolic category. 2The Desert Mystique chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on European Jewish immigrants' fascination with the desert mystique. The desert appealed to European Zionist Jews as the mythical site of origins that preserved their ancient heritage. Orientalist images of the desert as resistant to modernity and change further reinforced the mythical view of the desert and its Bedouin inhabitants, but also Yemenite Jews, as inspiration for the construction of a modern Hebrew culture and identity. A nostalgic longing for the ancient past led some Zionist settlers and Hebrew youth to selectively adapt cultural idioms from Palestinian Arabs and generated the hybrid "Hebrew Bedouin" identity and a Hebrew desert lore. Other Zionist immigrants warned against the impact of the East on the Hebrew culture. The competing attitudes to the East reveal the Zionist Jewish settlers' ambivalence, as exiles returning to their homeland with conflicting ideas of separateness and belonging to the Middle East. 3Desert as the Counter-Place chapter abstractThis chapter explores settlement discourse and its competing interpretation of the desert as the counter-place. Early Zionist settlement narratives allude to wide-ranging terrains such as sands, swamps, barren mountains, and arid land as aspects of a hostile and chaotic "desert" while presenting the Jewish settlement as an "oasis" or "island" of order, modernity, and progress. The gendering of landscapes, the veneration of technology, and the use of war rhetoric enhance the achievements of the Jewish settlement in transforming its environment, and these ideas have been articulated in literature, songs, and art. The discussion addresses the influence of prevalent Western colonialist and modernist ideas and land-reclamation practices on the discourse and practices of Zionist settlement. As the national conflict in Palestine flared up in the 1930s, the discourses of settlement and security became intertwined and played a more prominent rolein shaping the view of the desert-settlement relations. 4The Negev Frontier chapter abstractAfter the 1948 war, the new state of Israel included the large and arid Negev region, and the discussion shifts from the symbolic desert outside the Jewish settlement to a concrete desert that has become an internal Jewish frontier. Although Prime Minister Ben-Gurion championed the goal of "making the desert bloom" and the state transferred water to the Negev, the limited response by established Israeli Jews led to the forced settlement of new immigrants in the desert in the 1950s and 1960s. These rural settlements and development towns faced major hardships, and the post-1967 Jewish drive to settle the occupied territories further blurred the Negev's status as a frontier and a periphery. Even with large areas of the Negev designated as national parks, nature reserves, and military bases, the call for new Jewish settlements continued, leading to experimental forms that diversified the Negev's Jewish population. 5The Negev Bedouins chapter abstractThe Negev's Bedouin population, greatly diminished after 1948, is the focus of this chapter. The state relocated most Negev Bedouins to the enclosed Siyag area, where they remained under military administration until 1966. Since then it has pursued an urbanization plan for the fast-growing Bedouin population in designated "Bedouin towns," yet a significant number of Bedouins refuse to settle their land claims, preferring to remain in their unrecognized rural villages. The government regards the so-called "Bedouin dispersion" as the embodiment of a chaotic and subversive counter-place while it promotes Jewish settlements in the Negev. Residents of the unrecognized villages live in the gray zone of a semi-permanent temporary state. The Bedouins' growing alienation, the rise of crime in the Negev, and harsh measures by law enforcement contribute to the perception of the Negev as the Wild South. 6Unsettled Landscapes chapter abstractThis chapter examines the environmental discourse and its revisionist view of desert-settlement relations. The environmental lobby acknowledges the desert-settlement opposition but reinterprets its meaning: the desert represents nature and the open space that must be protected from an overly aggressive settlement drive and development projects, and from its perception as a "national dump" for undesired, discredited, and dangerous human and material elements. Most of the desert is designated for nature reserves, national parks, and military bases. The environmentalists employ salvage rhetoric and the legal recourse to defend the desert environment from settlement development and industrial projects, while some proponents of the settlement agenda attack their position as anti-Zionist. The discussion highlights the contested visions of the desert and the fluidity of the coalitions formed between the state, local authorities, the army, the industry, tourism, and the environmental lobby in different cases. 7The Desert and the Tourist Gaze chapter abstractThis chapter examines the discourse and practices of tourism, which offer multiple visions of the desert that highlight its contrast with life at the urban center and ignore the tensions between them. Sinai desert tourism offered a popular alternative to Israeli desert tourism in the post-1967 period, yet today Eilat and the Dead Sea area are major tourist attractions, and Negev tourism is developing. Tourist publicity highlights the unspoiled landscape, yet offers tours of archeological sites that are World Cultural Heritage sites, as well as a diversity of modern rural settlements in the Negev. Tourism highlights the simple life in nature in the open space and its spiritual dimension, but also offers a rough terrain for adventure seekers and upscale lodgings with "pampering amenities." Jewish desert sites perform "Bedouin hospitality" for tourists, but visits to Bedouin towns and villages reveal rapidly changing and diverse lifestyles in different settings. Epilogue chapter abstractIn the post-1967 era, the emergence of two divergent visions of Israel reveals continuity with earlier themes and metaphors surrounding desert-settlement relations. One advocates a return to pre-1967 borders in exchange for peace, which led to the peace treaty with Egypt and the Oslo agreement and advances transnational cooperation around common interests. The second vision promotes the Jewish settlement and security agenda in the occupied territories, embracing the view of an inherently conflictual relation between Israel and its neighbors. The epilogue examines the entrenchment of Israel settlement and security discourse and the growing impact of the "besieged island" template. Israel has surrounded itself with walls to prevent illegal entry and terrorist attacks, recreating a modern Jewish ghetto while imposing territorial divisions and besieged islands within the Palestinian territory. Israeli culture may also provide alternative solutions for the negotiation of a different future in the Middle East.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange forcibly relocated one and a half million people: Muslims in Greece were resettled in Turkey, and Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey were moved to Greece. This landmark event set a legal precedent for population management on the basis of religious or ethnic difference. Similar segregative policies—such as creating walls, partitions, and apartheids—have followed in its wake. Strikingly, the exchange was purportedly enacted as a means to achieve peace. Humanism in Ruins maps the links between liberal discourses on peace and the legacies of this forced migration. Aslı Iğsız weaves together past and present, making visible the effects in Turkey across the ensuing century, of the 1923 exchange. Liberal humanism has responded to segregative policies by calling for coexistence and the acceptance of cultural diversity. Yet, as Iğsız makes clear, liberal humanism itself, with its ahistorical emphasis on a shared humanity, fails to confront an underlying racialized logic. This far-reaching and multilayered cultural history investigates what it means to be human—historically, socially, and politically. It delivers an urgent message about the politics of difference at a time when the reincarnation of fascism in different parts of the world invites citizens to participate in perpetuating a racialized and unequal world. Trade Review"Aslı Iğsız offers original and creative insight into the aftermath of the 1923 population exchange. A superb genealogy of cultural policy and the politics of culture in Turkey." -- Yael Navaro * University of Cambridge *"Humanism in Ruins incisively reveals how liberal discourses of peace and tolerance have been entangled with the racialization of social difference. An impressive contribution to the critical study of liberalism in the Middle East." -- Kabir Tambar * Stanford University *"At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people were displaced by war or violent conflict. It is virtually certain that mass population movements will continue, and it is clear that there is a pressing need to change the terms of the international debate and policy regarding the issue. This reality deems Aslı Iğsız's insightful book, Humanism in Ruins, to be not only timely but also an essential read."––Elektra Kostopoulou, Jadaliyya"[An] original and necessary work....At the center of Iğsız's virtuoso argument here is the suggestion that the liberal humanism that has established the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is built upon a ruinous foundation: "the policies of biopolitics"....intellectually, politically, and in every other sense, a truly courageous book."––Anthony Alessandrini, Jadaliyya"Iğsız's work is...unique in tracing the foundational imprint historicist humanism has made on liberal humanism....As we see the segregative logic of walls and fortresses emerging anew, as a response to the largest refugee crisis to occur since World War II, attending to the complex and contradictory histories and effects of existing humanitarian regimes takes on great urgency."––Esra Özyürek, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"[Humanism in Ruins] is the latest addition to the growing literature of critical analysis of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and without a doubt debunks the myth that it was a win-win solution and a clear achievement once and for all....Each part is strong enough to be a stand-alone treatise and an invitation for engaged and committed practices of cultural analysis." -- Nergis Canefe * EuropeNow *"Iğsız's perceptive analysis shows how arguments both for and against diversity are in fact informed by biopolitics. Her study thus presents a unique vantage point for an examination of the limits of the key notions of liberal cultural policies....Humanism in Ruins is an excellent and complex analysis of the racist legacies of population exchanges in modern-day cultural policies." -- Ceren Özgül * New Perspectives on Turkey *"Humanism in Ruins is a brilliant, path-breaking book....Igsiz makes major interventions into debates on liberalism, culture, and politics. And for those who have been decrying the paucity of works on race in Middle East studies, this book is a very welcome addition....There is much to digest in this fascinating and highly original work, so much that it is hard to do justice to it in a short review." -- Beth Baron * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Humanism in Ruins is a stimulating and well-structured book.[It] manages to move successfully through a great variety of material, historical and theoretical, and offers a fruitful contribution in the field of migration studies." -- Alexandros Sakellariou * International Migration Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsBy Way of an Introduction: The Entangled Legacies of a Population Exchange chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the key concepts as well as the general approach and methodology of the book: biopolitics, humanism, ruins, and palimpsests. These concepts are later further developed in the relevant chapters, in relation to the analysis of the sources, but here they are laid out in relation to the entangled legacies of the 1923 exchange in general. The Introduction also provides a lengthy historicization of the 1923 exchange together with the notion of "racialized thinking" that constitutes the basis for the discussion of biopolitics and humanism. Part I: Humanism and Its Discontents: Biopolitics, the Politics of Expertise, and the Human Family chapter abstractThis chapter discusses various scholars—eugenicists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars among others—and their intellectual networks to unravel a complex, transnational intellectual and cultural history, and addresses the entangled dynamics revolving around the segregative legacy of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. Focusing on the first decade after 1945, this part traces how segregative biopolitics was addressed transnationally through a refugee association presided over by a Turkish eugenicist, Fahreddin Kerim Gökay, and founded in collaboration with an Italian eugenicist and statistician, Corrado Gini—who also was a supporter of Mussolini's fascism. The 1923 exchange was a reference point for the association and for the research it promoted. Against this backdrop, the chapter also analyzes the rise of UNESCO-oriented cultural policies developed to address alterity and race during that period, with a special focus on liberal humanism and a photography exhibition: The Family of Man. Part II: Of Origins and "Men": Family History, Genealogy, and Historicist Humanism Revisited chapter abstractThis part turns to the notions of genealogy and origins and attends to their different uses across time and space in relation to the 1923 exchange, racialized thinking, and historicist humanism. It begins with post-1990s Turkey and traces how legacies of segregative biopolitics were primarily engaged on a personal level through family histories configured as cultural heritage. Engaging individual and institutional practices that configured family histories as sites of articulating different backgrounds—alterity—after the 1980 military coup, the part considers the implications of engaging biopolitical ruins via individual genealogies and origins configured through the family. Next, it historicizes other forms of engaging genealogies and origins and examines this process through historicist humanism and racialized thinking, which were instrumental in categorizing peoples on the paths that led to segregative policies in general, the 1923 Greco-Turkish exchange in particular. Part III: Unity in Diversity: Culture, Social Cohesion, and Liberal Multiculturalism chapter abstractThis part traces the palimpsests of cultural policy pertaining to contemporary liberal multiculturalism in Turkey and the European Union. Addressing liberal and historicist humanism embedded in liberal multiculturalism narratives in Turkey and beyond, this part engages the discourses and policies that enabled the building of the first 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Museum in Turkey as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture project. Considering the impact of UNESCO's cultural policies on the EU, which then traveled to Turkey, this part addresses the limits of liberal multiculturalism and the form it took in Turkey: neo-Ottomanism. After tracing the transnational crossing of liberal multiculturalism to Turkey, the part turns to the local historical context that neo-Ottomanism draws from: cultural policy in the post-1980 coup era and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis and its broader implications for the fascistic historicist humanism mobilized during the 1980 coup era. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Cultural Analysis in an Age of Securitarianism chapter abstractThe Conclusion picks up the threads of the analysis laid out throughout the book and reconsiders the relevance of the book's key concepts such as biopolitics, segregation, and culture from the perspective of the contemporary rise of neofascism, securitarianism, and xenophobia.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSoqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state. Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution. Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.Trade Review"Islands of Heritage is at once a dazzling ethnography of everyday life and a well-researched history that is as extraordinary as its subject, the island of Soqotra in the Arabian Sea. It is truly a pleasure to read." -- Steven C. Caton * Harvard University *"Nathalie Peutz has written a beautiful account of the unsettling effects of and dynamics between international conservation efforts, national politics, and Soqotran notions of heritage, history, and place. Islands of Heritage is one of the richest ethnographies of the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean region that I have read in years." -- Mandana Limbert, Queens College and the Graduate Center * CUNY *"This book, the result of ten years of research and follow up, explores the sociopolitical transformation of Soqotra, the main island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago. Peutz offers a detailed ethnographic presentation of the complicated and unsettled recent history of the island within its larger regional and global context...Recommended." -- A. Rassam * CHOICE *"Upon closing Islands of Heritage one can only be impressed by such a piece of interdisciplinary scholarship. Nathalie Peutz brilliantly manages to bring to life and interpret the local dynamics she observed in Soqotra, updating their significance and making them meaningful beyond the archipelago of Soqotra, and that of anthropologists." -- Laurent Bonnefoy * Arabian Humanities *"Peutz's book is required reading for anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and those investigating the impact of tourism, while being readable and compelling for nonspecialists... It is a delight to read and one of the strongest anthropological texts on heritage published in recent years." -- Victoria Hightower * Arab Studies Journal *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractBeginning with an anecdote of a Soqotran teacher convening a political protest (during the Yemeni Revolution) and a poetry contest on the same day, the Introduction asks how heritage (a nominally conservative endeavor) and revolution (a nominally transformative endeavor) could be connected. It lays out the importance of studying heritage. It reviews the history and politicization of heritage in the Arab world. And it provides a geographic and historical overview of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, a UNESCO-inscribed natural World Heritage Site with a long genealogy of being deemed exceptional and "protected." It then describes the author's fieldwork and methodology. It concludes by arguing that, despite important arguments for working to transcend the nature-culture divide (in heritage making, as in other things), certain "islands" (boundaries) may be productive. 1Hospitality in Unsettling Times chapter abstractThis chapter introduces readers to a transhumant pastoralist community living in a newly established protected area (Homhil). It shows how the unprecedented opening of Soqotra gave rise to a crisis of hospitality, a long-held cultural value. Soqotrans' discourse of hospitality (karam) in crisis reveals significant mutations in the island's political economy and social structures, precipitated by its 1990 absorption into the unified Yemeni state and its transformation from a militarized enclave to a national protected area. Karam (and the ostensible lack of it) has become the idiom through which the islanders have been processing these changes. In light of current debates in the West about the dangers of "hosting" (im)migrants, this chapter points out that, in Soqotra, the crisis was exacerbated not nearly as much by Soqotrans' fears of being too hospitable as by their concern that they were no longer being hospitable enough. 2Hungering for the State chapter abstractDue to the archipelago's annual isolation during the southwest monsoon, in addition to its arid climate, Soqotrans are no strangers to food insecurity or famine. Accordingly, their interactions with each entering state—the Sultanate, the British Protectorate, South Yemen, and the Saleh regime—have been mediated by food. Yet, as this historical chapter demonstrates, it was not only the state's administration of food that governed Soqotrans' interactions with each regime. Soqotrans have a long history of feeding—and simultaneously "hungering" for—the state in return. Drawing on oral histories, archives, and interviews, this chapter surveys Soqotra's political history as one governed through food, famine, and fear. It argues that Soqotrans may have experienced physical hunger in the past, but in the 2000s they hungered for a state that would provide real and lasting sustenance. 3When the Environment Arrived chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the implementation of four major integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) between 1996 and 2013, which resulted in the archipelago's inscription as a UNESCO natural World Heritage Site. It begins by reviewing how these projects were preceded by the decades-long arrivals of foreign researchers and the continued dissemination of their ideas about Soqotra's environmental exceptionality. It then discusses the establishment of environmental legislation in unified Yemen (post-1990) and details the various ICDP projects that were implemented on Soqotra during this period. It ends by describing two "environmental awareness" meetings in the protected area (Homhil). Drawing on project documents and literature, observation of rural outreach and environmental awareness programs, and daily participation within a the protected-area community, this chapter reveals why "the Environment," as project and concept, failed to mobilize these pastoral communities so dependent on their natural surroundings. 4Arrested Development chapter abstractThis chapter presents an ethnographic narrative of the material, social, and political effects of several conservation-and-development initiatives in a pilot protected area inhabited by pastoralists (Bedouin). It focuses on the implementation of three development projects by the Socotra Conservation and Development Programme: a new tourist campground, a community home garden, and piped water. Although these projects were meant to improve the pastoralists' material well-being, they wound up pitting leaders, tribes, villages, and men and women within the community against one another. Through a close "mapping" of these tensions, this chapter underscores why, in these pastoralists' view, "the Environment" had little traction—despite its strong influence in the island. As a result, some Soqotrans sought to preserve their livelihoods by shifting their focus to cultural heritage instead. 5Reorienting Heritage chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the influence of the Soqotran diaspora in island politics in the decade preceding the 2011 revolution. Beginning with an overview of the three major phases of twentieth-century emigration from Soqotra to the Arab Gulf, it illustrates how pervasive these Soqotra-Gulf connections were and are. It explores the ways in which emigrants politicized Soqotran identity, culture, heritage, and history through their histories, their poetry, and the island's first museum. And it examines the ways in which the diaspora sought to denature and reorient Soqotran heritage by shifting the focus from nature to culture, from Soqotran autochthony to Arab descent, from Indian Ocean hybridity to genealogical purity, and from the Yemeni nation to the transnational Gulf. These heterogeneous, kaleidoscopic, and entangled processes of heritage making reveal a deep-seated anguish over past political events and an ongoing struggle to reorient Soqotra's future. 6Heritage in the Time of Revolution chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how the islanders mobilized cultural heritage in the years bracketing the Yemeni Revolution, when several positioned themselves as "para-experts" alongside foreigners working for the environmental projects. It explores three individuals' growing interest in heritage as a political and profitable resource. It examines debates over the contours of this heritage. And it traces the development of an islandwide poetry competition, its overt politicization in the wake of the Arab uprisings, and the eventual recognition of the Soqotri language in the draft constitution for the new Yemen. It argues that Soqotrans' preoccupation with their cultural heritage during this period bears a strong resemblance to nineteenth-century European nationalists' "cultivation of culture." Thus, it was not a provincial, insular, or even conservative concern. Rather, it reflects a distinctly twenty-first-century realization that vernacular languages and endemic species are on the verge of extinction. Conclusion chapter abstractThe Conclusion provides an overview of the current humanitarian crisis in Yemen and Soqotra's renewed isolation since Yemen's civil war began in 2015. It underscores what a small group of Soqotran laymen (para-experts) were able to achieve through their mobilization of cultural heritage during a time of crisis, before the war. It then briefly discusses the two most recent, and potentially competing, visions for the archipelago: UAE-funded development and a new, Global Environment Facility (GEF)-funded conservation-and-development project. It offers suggestions for how ethnic and linguistic minorities like Soqotrans can be supported in their cultural work. And it concludes with some lessons learned from the author's interlocutors.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book offers a provocative retelling of Palestinian political history through an examination of the international commissions that have investigated political violence and human rights violations. More than twenty commissions have been convened over the last century, yet no significant change has resulted from these inquiries. The findings of the very first, the 1919 King-Crane Commission, were suppressed. The Mitchell Committee, convened in the heat of the Second Intifada, urged Palestinians to listen more sympathetically to the feelings of their occupiers. And factfinders returning from a shell-shocked Gaza Strip in 2008 registered their horror at the scale of the destruction, but Gazans have continued to live under a crippling blockade. Drawing on debates in the press, previously unexamined UN reports, historical archives, and ethnographic research, Lori Allen explores six key investigative commissions over the last century. She highlights how Palestinians' persistent demands for independence have been routinely translated into the numb language of reports and resolutions. These commissions, Allen argues, operating as technologies of liberal global governance, yield no justice—only the oppressive status quo. A History of False Hope issues a biting critique of the captivating allure and cold impotence of international law.Trade Review"This brilliant study not only succeeds in recovering the lives, aspirations and agency of Palestinians written out of history, but helps correct the balance of long-term bias against them. All those who have wondered why successive investigative commissions in Palestine have created only impotent solidarity should read this book."—Raja Shehadeh, author of Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation"Lori Allen provides a remarkable account of how investigative commissions shaped the form, content, and tenor of conversations about Palestine and between Palestinians and western powers. A History of False Hope is indispensable for understanding the nature of the failure of international law in Palestine."—Ilana Feldman, George Washington University"Lori Allen has produced a fascinating, engaging, and innovative scholarly assessment of how international commissions have failed to deliver political results to the Palestinian people. This disillusioning narrative of good intentions gone awry sheds light on the interplay of law and politics in international relations, and is further enriched by illuminating archival research and the arresting insights of a first-class anthropologist."—Richard Falk, Former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, author of Palestine's Horizon: Toward a Just Peace"Allen's book juxtaposes Palestinian investment in their political rights against the international community's determination to thwart a solution. A book that takes a subaltern view of history, the book presents the illusion of "hope" in an accessible and chronological manner, pinning culpability on the international culprits that exploited Palestine for the spoils of settler-colonialism."—Ramona Wadi, The New Arab"A History of False Hope constitutes a significant contribution to the scholarly understanding of the workings of international law and of investigative bodies, along with a fresh perspective on how and why they have failed the Palestinians."—Zachary Lockman, H-Diplo"If history serves as a signpost for the future, Allen's book expertly shows the limitations of engaging with international commissions and international law as a mechanism for Palestinians to attain their long-denied rights."—Josh Ruebner, The Electronic Intifada"Focusing on half a dozen of the most important missions with a sharp anthropologist's eye, Lori Allen highlights the reaction of Palestinian opinion to the ostensible opportunities offered by the commissions, and the hopes they raised and dashed."—Jim Muir, London School of Economics Review of Books"The project of [A History of False Hope] is to explain why Palestinians have generally provided consent to processes that have contributed to their subjugation and undermined their national desires at every turn. Allen does this successfully through careful explication of how the liberal paradigm came to dominate Palestinian politics."—Abraham Silberstein, Israel Studies ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: International Law as a Way of Being 1. Petitioning Liberals: The King-Crane Commission 2. Universalizing Liberal Internationalism: The Arab Revolt and the Boycott of the Peel Commission 3. The Humanitarian Politics of Jewish Suffering: The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry 4. Third World Solidarity at the General Assembly: A UN Special Committee on Human Rights 5. The Silences of Democratic Listening: The Mitchell Committee 6. The Shift to Crime and Punishment: UN Missions Renewing Hope in International Law Conclusion: Toward an Anthropology of International Law, and Next Time and Again for Palestine

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange forcibly relocated one and a half million people: Muslims in Greece were resettled in Turkey, and Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey were moved to Greece. This landmark event set a legal precedent for population management on the basis of religious or ethnic difference. Similar segregative policies—such as creating walls, partitions, and apartheids—have followed in its wake. Strikingly, the exchange was purportedly enacted as a means to achieve peace. Humanism in Ruins maps the links between liberal discourses on peace and the legacies of this forced migration. Aslı Iğsız weaves together past and present, making visible the effects in Turkey across the ensuing century, of the 1923 exchange. Liberal humanism has responded to segregative policies by calling for coexistence and the acceptance of cultural diversity. Yet, as Iğsız makes clear, liberal humanism itself, with its ahistorical emphasis on a shared humanity, fails to confront an underlying racialized logic. This far-reaching and multilayered cultural history investigates what it means to be human—historically, socially, and politically. It delivers an urgent message about the politics of difference at a time when the reincarnation of fascism in different parts of the world invites citizens to participate in perpetuating a racialized and unequal world. Trade Review"Aslı Iğsız offers original and creative insight into the aftermath of the 1923 population exchange. A superb genealogy of cultural policy and the politics of culture in Turkey." -- Yael Navaro * University of Cambridge *"Humanism in Ruins incisively reveals how liberal discourses of peace and tolerance have been entangled with the racialization of social difference. An impressive contribution to the critical study of liberalism in the Middle East." -- Kabir Tambar * Stanford University *"At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people were displaced by war or violent conflict. It is virtually certain that mass population movements will continue, and it is clear that there is a pressing need to change the terms of the international debate and policy regarding the issue. This reality deems Aslı Iğsız's insightful book, Humanism in Ruins, to be not only timely but also an essential read."––Elektra Kostopoulou, Jadaliyya"[An] original and necessary work....At the center of Iğsız's virtuoso argument here is the suggestion that the liberal humanism that has established the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is built upon a ruinous foundation: "the policies of biopolitics"....intellectually, politically, and in every other sense, a truly courageous book."––Anthony Alessandrini, Jadaliyya"Iğsız's work is...unique in tracing the foundational imprint historicist humanism has made on liberal humanism....As we see the segregative logic of walls and fortresses emerging anew, as a response to the largest refugee crisis to occur since World War II, attending to the complex and contradictory histories and effects of existing humanitarian regimes takes on great urgency."––Esra Özyürek, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"[Humanism in Ruins] is the latest addition to the growing literature of critical analysis of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and without a doubt debunks the myth that it was a win-win solution and a clear achievement once and for all....Each part is strong enough to be a stand-alone treatise and an invitation for engaged and committed practices of cultural analysis." -- Nergis Canefe * EuropeNow *"Iğsız's perceptive analysis shows how arguments both for and against diversity are in fact informed by biopolitics. Her study thus presents a unique vantage point for an examination of the limits of the key notions of liberal cultural policies....Humanism in Ruins is an excellent and complex analysis of the racist legacies of population exchanges in modern-day cultural policies." -- Ceren Özgül * New Perspectives on Turkey *"Humanism in Ruins is a brilliant, path-breaking book....Igsiz makes major interventions into debates on liberalism, culture, and politics. And for those who have been decrying the paucity of works on race in Middle East studies, this book is a very welcome addition....There is much to digest in this fascinating and highly original work, so much that it is hard to do justice to it in a short review." -- Beth Baron * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Humanism in Ruins is a stimulating and well-structured book.[It] manages to move successfully through a great variety of material, historical and theoretical, and offers a fruitful contribution in the field of migration studies." -- Alexandros Sakellariou * International Migration Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsBy Way of an Introduction: The Entangled Legacies of a Population Exchange chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the key concepts as well as the general approach and methodology of the book: biopolitics, humanism, ruins, and palimpsests. These concepts are later further developed in the relevant chapters, in relation to the analysis of the sources, but here they are laid out in relation to the entangled legacies of the 1923 exchange in general. The Introduction also provides a lengthy historicization of the 1923 exchange together with the notion of "racialized thinking" that constitutes the basis for the discussion of biopolitics and humanism. Part I: Humanism and Its Discontents: Biopolitics, the Politics of Expertise, and the Human Family chapter abstractThis chapter discusses various scholars—eugenicists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars among others—and their intellectual networks to unravel a complex, transnational intellectual and cultural history, and addresses the entangled dynamics revolving around the segregative legacy of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. Focusing on the first decade after 1945, this part traces how segregative biopolitics was addressed transnationally through a refugee association presided over by a Turkish eugenicist, Fahreddin Kerim Gökay, and founded in collaboration with an Italian eugenicist and statistician, Corrado Gini—who also was a supporter of Mussolini's fascism. The 1923 exchange was a reference point for the association and for the research it promoted. Against this backdrop, the chapter also analyzes the rise of UNESCO-oriented cultural policies developed to address alterity and race during that period, with a special focus on liberal humanism and a photography exhibition: The Family of Man. Part II: Of Origins and "Men": Family History, Genealogy, and Historicist Humanism Revisited chapter abstractThis part turns to the notions of genealogy and origins and attends to their different uses across time and space in relation to the 1923 exchange, racialized thinking, and historicist humanism. It begins with post-1990s Turkey and traces how legacies of segregative biopolitics were primarily engaged on a personal level through family histories configured as cultural heritage. Engaging individual and institutional practices that configured family histories as sites of articulating different backgrounds—alterity—after the 1980 military coup, the part considers the implications of engaging biopolitical ruins via individual genealogies and origins configured through the family. Next, it historicizes other forms of engaging genealogies and origins and examines this process through historicist humanism and racialized thinking, which were instrumental in categorizing peoples on the paths that led to segregative policies in general, the 1923 Greco-Turkish exchange in particular. Part III: Unity in Diversity: Culture, Social Cohesion, and Liberal Multiculturalism chapter abstractThis part traces the palimpsests of cultural policy pertaining to contemporary liberal multiculturalism in Turkey and the European Union. Addressing liberal and historicist humanism embedded in liberal multiculturalism narratives in Turkey and beyond, this part engages the discourses and policies that enabled the building of the first 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Museum in Turkey as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture project. Considering the impact of UNESCO's cultural policies on the EU, which then traveled to Turkey, this part addresses the limits of liberal multiculturalism and the form it took in Turkey: neo-Ottomanism. After tracing the transnational crossing of liberal multiculturalism to Turkey, the part turns to the local historical context that neo-Ottomanism draws from: cultural policy in the post-1980 coup era and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis and its broader implications for the fascistic historicist humanism mobilized during the 1980 coup era. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Cultural Analysis in an Age of Securitarianism chapter abstractThe Conclusion picks up the threads of the analysis laid out throughout the book and reconsiders the relevance of the book's key concepts such as biopolitics, segregation, and culture from the perspective of the contemporary rise of neofascism, securitarianism, and xenophobia.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq—from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba'th coup and support of Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation. Zainab Saleh shares the experiences of Iraqis she met over fourteen years of fieldwork in Iraqi London—offering stories from an aging communist nostalgic for the streets she marched since childhood, a devout Shi'i dreaming of holy cities and family graves, and newly uprooted immigrants with fresh memories of loss, as well as her own. Focusing on debates among Iraqi exiles about what it means to be an Iraqi after years of displacement, Saleh weaves a narrative that draws attention to a once-dominant, vibrant Iraqi cultural landscape and social and political shifts among the diaspora after decades of authoritarianism, war, and occupation in Iraq. Through it all, this book illuminates how Iraqis continue to fashion a sense of belonging and imagine a future, built on the shards of these shattered memories.Trade Review"Writing exiled and diasporic Iraqis into the imperial history of the United States, Zainab Saleh exposes the long-term effects of American action on sovereignty and nation-building attempts in Iraq. Powerful and heartbreaking, Return to Ruin is a must-read for all who are interested in the fraught relationships between colonial durability and political action."—Deborah A. Thomas, University of Pennsylvania"In this outstanding book, we encounter the poignant life stories of Iraqis, stories too often reduced to statistics and stereotypes when they are visible at all. If Iraq is an open wound, as one of the interlocutors in this book says, these narratives sketch the wound's history and its visceral depth. Return to Ruin is an illuminating study of Iraqi diasporic subjectivities."—Sinan Antoon, author of The Book of Collateral Damage"[Saleh] effectively does justice to each story's nuances and contradictions while also using the stories as springboards to discussing Iraqi history, politicization, and diasporic experiences in depth... While many scholars of the Middle East know basic facts about Iraq, learning from Iraqis themselves is both illuminating and tragic. As an American, Return to Ruin was necessary reading, highlighting how my own imperial subjectivity is inextricably intertwined with theirs."—Neha Vora, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Empire and Subjectivity One: Emancipation and Revolution Two: Revisionist Politics Three: Religious Paths, Secular Pasts Four: Itineraries of Homecomings Five: Dispossession and Authenticity Conclusion: Enduring Legacies

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish–Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.Trade Review"Alan Verskin has provided a masterful translation of Hayyim Habshush's gripping account of his travels and a rare and intimate glimpse into Jewish and Muslim life in the Arabian hinterlands. A Vision of Yemen should be of great interest not only to students and scholars of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern history, but also to the wider audience of travel literature."—Norman A. Stillman, University of Oklahoma"A Vision in Yemen reveals Hayyim Habshush's remarkable curiosity about his own society in nineteenth-century Yemen and its ancient history. With his masterful translation, Alan Verskin elucidates time and place for modern readers, bringing Habshush and his European interlocutors to life."—Brinkley Messick, Columbia University"Alan Verskin's book goes a long way in countering the various orientalist tropes that have often characterised our understanding of Yemeni Jews by rendering accessible the travelogue A Vision of Yemen....It enhances our understanding of encounters between East and West, and more importantly is a testament to Muslim-Jewish relations in the Middle East just as cacophonous sectarian voices dominate the region's public discourse."—Thanos Petouris, Asian Affairs

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country's fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt's emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt's Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed. Aaron Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. He traces the complex ramifications and the contested legacy of colonial economism, the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only a recognition of their own bare economic interests. Even as British officials claimed that "economic development" and the multiplication of new financial institutions would be crucial to the political legitimacy of the occupation, Egypt's early nationalists elaborated their own critical accounts of boom and bust. As Jakes shows, these Egyptian thinkers offered a set of sophisticated and troubling meditations on the deeper contradictions of capitalism and the very meaning of freedom in a capitalist world.Trade Review"Egypt's Occupation offers a richly researched study of finance, racism, and popular politics and an insightful account of the fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy in the colonial and post-colonial world. With this book, Aaron Jakes makes an important intervention in our understanding of the history of capitalism." -- Andrew Zimmerman * George Washington University *"Aaron Jakes gives us a masterpiece of historical interpretation. Weaving together stories of global finance, imperial rule, the devastations of cash-crop agriculture, and anti-colonial politics, Egypt's Occupation is a rare synthesis: a finely crafted regional study that grasps the worldwide movements of capital and empire at every turn. With elegant prose and extraordinary narrative power, Jakes's insights on modernity's webs of power, capital, and life left me reeling. We will be debating and synthesizing these arguments for many years to come." -- Jason W. Moore * Binghamton University, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life *"An important and engaging rereading of the history of British colonialism in Egypt through the revealing lens of 'colonial economism.' The voices of classic figures, both British and Egyptian, are heard anew as Aaron Jakes guides us smoothly through a forest of thoughts and policies about matters economic and political in British-occupied Egypt." -- Judith E. Tucker * Georgetown University *"Aaron Jakes has written a definitive study of the British occupation of Egypt.[A] magisterial account." -- Robert L. Tignor * Middle East Journal *"Jakes's book is a much-welcomed contribution, reflecting a renewed interest in political economy analysis—and critical political economy as such—that reunites the study of economic theory and interests with that of colonial politics." -- Relli Schechter * Mediterranean Historical Review *"Jakes has produced a well-written, rewarding reinterpretation of Britain's occupation of Egypt from 1882 to WW I in 1914 that will engage serious readers... Egypt's Occupation skillfully ties together important economic and political themes and may become the definitive analysis of Britain in Egypt. Highly recommended." -- B. Harris Jr. * CHOICE *"Like the finest Egyptian long-staple cotton, Egypt's Occupation is an ideal union of strength of argumentation and beauty of prose. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of Egypt or the history of economic thought. It will be of great interest to intellectual historians, colonial historians, and scholars of Middle East Studies and political economy. It deserves to be read by anyone concerned with the inequities and contradictions of global capitalism." -- Johan Mathew * EH.net *"Jakes' powerful merging of economic and intellectual history advances the U.S.-dominated field of 'histories of capitalism' and provides a detailed account of the impact of colonialism on economic underdevelopment through an authoritative study of the British occupation of Egypt. The book adds important new dimensions to this crowded field of scholarship by relying on novel Egyptian archival and press sources to approach the subject through the eyes of the Egyptian population. Jakes argues that the British aimed to improve the fortunes of the ordinary peasant farmer in order to cement their control over Egypt. In a strategy he terms 'economism,' Jakes traces how the British promoted light taxation and increased access to irrigation for cotton cultivation while expressly avoiding efforts to reform the country in the European model, a choice they justified on culturalist grounds. In the end, these policies worsened the fortunes of the fellahin and enhanced the position of large landholders, leaving Egypt in far worse shape than when they originally took over." -- Committee for the Roger Owen Book Award * sponsored by the Middle East Studies Section *"In its theoretical and empirical exposition of the relationship between colonial governance and economism, this ambitious book's reach goes far beyond Middle East studies. It is about the modern global structures of domination and subordination wrought in and through the instantiation of capitalist relations across the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This history is a past, but it has not passed. Those structures—remade as they continuously have been over the last century—continue to shape our world, albeit now with China joining in the global movement toward "formless dismembering" and with economism wedded to culturalism in as potently poisonous a discourse as ever. In mining Egypt's past, Jakes's book contributes hugely to this critique of our present." -- Rebecca E. Karl * Arab Studies Journal *"Given its theoretical breadth and analytical specificity and sophistication, the book's compelling re-examination of the purpose and native reception to Britain's occupation promises to be applicable beyond Egypt and the field of Middle East studies and succeeds in being a fascinating read that deftly weaves together a wide range of subjects." -- Kylie Broderick * Maydan *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Colonial Economism chapter abstractThis chapter introduces two major arguments about the history of capitalism in Egypt that animate much of the narrative that follows. First, prior accounts of Egypt's "cotton economy" have focused on long-term continuities in a global division of labor between agriculture and industry; this approach has made the significance of financialization and other major transformations in the global dynamics of capital accumulation harder to discern. Second, methodological debates about economism have largely obscured the role economism has played as a form of social thought inside the history of capitalism itself. By reconsidering economism as a problem internal to liberal thought, the chapter then explains the occupation's discourse of "colonial economism" as a particular variant that treated the relationship between the economic and the political in terms of a developmental progression. Liberal political economy, on this understanding, could apply in a country like Egypt; liberal political theory could not. 1Infrastructures of Occupation chapter abstractThis chapter recounts the spectacular elaboration of rural infrastructures that nearly all contemporary observers identified as the primary focus of the British occupation in its first decade. According to the accounts of Egypt's recent history that informed this initial phase of British policy, bankruptcy was a predictable consequence of the "despotism" that had tainted every aspect of the old regime. For years, the British claimed, the khedivial dynasty and a privileged class of rural notables had monopolized the fabled resources of the Nile Valley and squandered that vast natural bounty to line their own pockets. By reconfiguring the state as a more perfect instrument for the increase of agricultural wealth, the occupation would unleash the extraordinary productive potential of Egypt's peasant majority. In targeting the smallholding peasantry as the chief beneficiaries of "British justice," this program of infrastructural development gave colonial economism a tangible form in the rural landscape. 2Egypt's Colonial Interior chapter abstractThis chapter identifies the British takeover of the Ministry of Interior as a defining moment in both the colonial reconfiguration of state institutions and the emergence of a coordinated opposition to British rule. The overhaul of the provincial administration that followed the appointment of a British adviser to the Interior in 1894 aimed to evacuate politics from village life. In place of customary village elections, the British imposed a hierarchical system of administrative appointments that would, they promised, make local officials into faithful bureaucratic agents of agrarian reform. But as they wandered the countryside, the network of spies working for Khedive Abbas Hilmi II instead documented what they saw as a deterioration of the mores upon which good government had once rested. Keenly sensitive to the occupation's emphasis on monetary gain, their ribald accounts of drunken shaykhs, lecherous judges, and absentee governors cohere as an early critique of colonial economism. 3Fields of Finance chapter abstractThis chapter charts the making of Egypt's fin-de-siècle financial boom. The earliest British efforts to attract foreign financial investment rested upon a controversial assertion that Egypt's peasants possessed a basic economic rationality that would allow them to employ mortgage loans as productive capital. By the late 1890s, credit experiments and tax reforms had together generated a mass of new, standardized data about the value of landed property and the extent of the country's mortgage debt. On that basis, a growing crowd of European investors began to calculate that Egypt could offer safe and substantial returns on their idle capital. The country's new financial sector mushroomed, and property values soared. Yet even as the British hailed "the Egyptian boom" as proof of the occupation's success, this wave of financial investment and speculation amplified the very rural inequalities colonial officials had promised repeatedly to alleviate. 4Gilded Speech chapter abstractThis chapter takes up the challenge that Egypt's financial boom posed to the country's fledgling nationalist movement. Confronted with a discourse of economic improvement that appeared to be succeeding on its own terms, commentators in the budding Arabic press vied to articulate an effective and compelling case against the occupation. For some, that predicament led toward an insistence that political legitimacy could not rest on a narrow calculus of quantifiable interests. For others, British claims to economic success themselves begged closer scrutiny. The chapter first examines financial reporting from the leading nationalist papers to explore the political-economic analyses that anchored their accounts of the boom's spatial, temporal, and social unevenness. The second half then reconsiders the central set piece of prewar Egyptian nationalism, the Dinshaway Incident of 1906, to show how the nationalist press first seized upon the incident for the rejoinder it furnished against colonial economism. 5The Many Agents of Azmah chapter abstractThis chapter opens with a detailed account of the financial crisis of 1907, which first manifested as a crash on the Egyptian stock market but soon led to a spate of peasant mortgage defaults. It then tracks the journey of the crisis concept from a term in financial reporting to a category of everyday discourse. Through a close reading of successive efforts in the Egyptian press to explain the crisis and to pin its causes on a particular set of malicious actors, the chapter locates in the protracted experience of the crisis a series of significant shifts in nationalist conceptions of the independence they demanded. New hardship gave the lie to the occupation's claims of material improvement. At the same time, the crisis revealed the extent to which even poor farmers had come to depend on flows of foreign capital, as much as water, to sustain their very existence. 6Unions of Mass Mobilization chapter abstractThe final years of the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented eruption of popular political action, from the establishment of new parties, associations, and unions to the proliferation of mass demonstrations. British officials in Cairo and London fretted about the specter of revolution, and nationalist organizations made new inroads not only among urban working classes but also among peasants in the countryside. Rather than a mechanistic response to economic hardship, this chapter explains, the upsurge in political contestation was the outcome of a complex and extraordinary conjuncture of events that included the departure of Lord Cromer and the startling victory of the Young Turks' constitutional revolution. In Egypt, the keywords of the Ottoman revolution—union and progress— assumed a particular resonance as terms for grappling with the deepening entanglements between political and economic domination and for asking what it might mean to live differently after British rule. 7Punjab on the Nile chapter abstractThis chapter follows British efforts after 1910 to reconfigure the agrarian development regime that had once brought the occupation global accolades. Underlying plans to revive foreign investment and combat the ecological ravages of cotton cultivation, however, was a marked retreat from the premise upon which colonial economism had rested. Where once peasants were assumed to possess an economic rationality that made them capitalist farmers-in-waiting, the occupation now justified coercive farming regulations that appropriated the work of smallholders and their children by denouncing them as an irrational menace to the land and the overall material prosperity of the country. In these same years, new business ventures aimed to profit from crisis conditions by lending to the country's wealthiest landowners at inflated interest rates. The outcome was both a deepening of rural inequalities and a widespread identification of foreign financial institutions as the most immediate threat to Egypt's national wealth. 8The Material Occupation chapter abstractThis chapter explores the form of economic nationalism that emerged in the years immediately prior to World War I. Surveying the prolonged hardship of the 1907 crisis, the leading figures of the nationalist movement lamented that even as its hegemonic pretensions rang hollow, colonial economism had remade Egyptian society in its own image. Subject to the volatilities of global commodity markets and financial flows, Egyptians appeared more and more as the self-interested economic individuals that British officials had once imagined them to be. Independence, in that sense, could no longer be treated in narrowly political terms as the mere substitution of Egyptian for British officials. Ending the occupation, on this understanding, would require as its preconditions a far more sweeping reconstitution of political-economic subjectivities and the creation of institutions to promote the growth of national capital. Conclusion: Economism Militarized chapter abstractThis chapter carries the story of British rule through the years of World War I and the 1919 revolution. As the British scrambled to maintain their wartime protectorate in Egypt after 1919, their account of the popular insurgency reprised the central claims of colonial economism in a minor key. They had once insisted that rising prosperity would translate into political consent. Now they interpreted the eruption of agrarian unrest as the other side of the same coin. The revolt, they alleged, was simply the effect of material hardship and mismanagement of the war economy. Both renderings of the argument denied that most Egyptians were capable of genuine political thought and action. While the British extended Egypt a qualified independence, they therefore constrained popular involvement in the country's newly constituted electoral institutions. This continuation of exclusionary arrangements forged during the occupation would haunt Egyptian politics for decades to come.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWaste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.Trade Review"There are so many reasons to read this book: it's brilliantly written, theoretically innovative, and politically necessary. Waste Siege is not only one of the most original accounts of waste to date, it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the ongoing occupation of the West Bank from the perspective of ordinary Palestinians."—Joshua Reno, author of Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill"Waste Siege is an original and innovative account of living with the inundation of debris and toxicity in Palestine. Taking the reader on a journey through landfills and rubbish markets, encounters with bags of bread left hanging on the sides of dumpsters, and the movement of sewage across political barriers, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins brilliantly excavates the ambient politics of waste and its management."—Ilana Feldman, author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics"[An] insightful, penetrating account of life under six decades of military occupation for the nearly three million Palestinians....In this well-written, intelligent account based on firsthand ethnographic fieldwork, the author displays a keen understanding of both waste ecology and contemporary life in occupied Palestine. Highly recommended."—G. M. Massey, CHOICE"Although Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins' marvelous new book is about waste management in Palestine, it asks extremely timely and relevant questions about the putative universality of environmental threats, mobility, fixity, political violence, and state governance."—Kareem Rabie, PoLAR"Waste Siege is a welcome addition to the sparse literature about the environment, waste, and infrastructure in Palestine and the Middle East more broadly.[An] important work."—Basma Fahoum, Arab Studies Quarterly"By tracing the flows and forces of waste siege, this text enables a more refined understanding of the socio-political worlds forged with, under, and against occupation....In Stamatopoulou-Robbins's ethnography, environment, occupation, and everyday life are grasped in a single frame."—Mohammed Rafi Arefin and Benjamin Kaplan Weinger, Cultural Geographies"Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution. The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid. We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book. A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste."—Sharon Stephens Book Prize Committee"Stamatopoulou-Robbins provides a visceral and theoretically sophisticated guide to the disposability, toxicity, and ethical dilemmas that Palestinians confront in the West Bank today.Grounded in the anthropology of waste, the state, the environment, and infrastructure,Waste Siegeis a theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, beautifully written exploration of the 'kind of living we do in the constantly changing ruins we have made.'"—Andy Clarno,Journal for Palestine Studies"Waste Siege is a captivating book on the impact of the global inundation of waste, and waste infrastructure, on the lives of Palestinians. In a sense, Stamatopoulou-Robbins carves out the constellation surrounding waste, and in a bigger picture, a global economy of inundation... This book is a fantastic read for anyone interested in the lives of Palestinians under occupation from a refreshing perspective on the nation, and the nation-state. It is a wonderful analysis of Palestinian statehood and the ensuing debate on the Authority's success as a governing body."—Christina Bouri, Journal of Middle Eastern Politics & Policy"Stamatopoulou-Robbins's interviews are a particular strength of Waste Siege. Some of her interlocutors are the men of the rabish and the consumers of second-hand goods who tell a story about garbage intertwined with the issues of class and views of the other, all set within the sprawling networks of flea markets."—Lauren Banko, International Journal of Islamic Architecture"Waste Siegeis a brilliant and insightful ethnography into the West Bank's inundation of waste dumped from Israel, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian cities. Stamatopoulou-Robbins does not just focus on what the Israeli military does to the Palestinians, but the role Palestinian political parties, bureaucrats, humanitarian NGOs, and the international community play in the slow degradation of Palestinian life through waste."—Tina Guirguis, Society and SpaceTable of ContentsPreface Introduction 1. Compression: How to Make Time at an Occupied Landfill 2. Inundated: Wanting Used Colonial Goods 3. Accumulation: Toxicity and Blame in a Phantom State 4. Gifted: Unwanted Bread and Its Stranger Obligations 5. Leakage: Sewage and Doublethink in a "Shared Environment" Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations within Zionist and Israeli culture. In the Judaic textual tradition, it evokes exile and punishment, yet is also a site for origin myths, the divine presence, and sanctity. Secular Zionism developed its own spin on the duality of the desert as the romantic site of Jews' biblical roots that inspired the Hebrew culture, and as the barren land outside the Jewish settlements in Palestine, featuring them as an oasis of order and technological progress within a symbolic desert. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society's semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the "besieged island" trope in Israeli culture and politics.Trade Review"Written with passion, innovation, and clarity, Desert in the Promised Land makes an original and significant contribution towards understanding the deeper currents of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By analyzing the role of the desert in Zionist ideology and the collective identity of Israel, Zerubavel adds new dimensions to her groundbreaking and acclaimed study of Israeli myths and memory, Recovered Roots." -- Tom Segev * author of 1949: The First Israelis *"In Desert in the Promised Land, space and memory, desert and settlement, are interwoven into a complex and fascinating portrait of Israel. Yael Zerubavel has written an engaging book that combines anthropology, culture, and history." -- Anita Shapira * author of Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel *"Yael Zerubavel has produced an important, original study of the multiple meanings of the desert in Zionist and Israeli culture. Ranging from the early twentieth century to the present, Zerubavel brings together a vast array of sources, which she reads with deep insight and describes in graceful prose." -- Derek J. Penslar * author of Jews and the Military: A History *"In a rewarding but not easy read, Zerubavel analyzes the complex meanings and varied perceptions of this desert for Jews before 1948 and for Israelis thereafter. She organizes her analysis as a metaphysical yet also a chronological journey through the symbolic desert landscape of space and meaning. The text moves from the ancient biblical story of divine revelations and of national birth of the Jewish people to the more recent tension between the themes of desert and settlement as opposing symbolic landscapes. Recommended." -- B. Harris Jr. * CHOICE *"Desert in the Promised Land is not an academic exercise in abstract distinctions, but a 'metaphorical journey' through the collective Jewish Israeli imaginary drawing from literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons. Recommended to all academic libraries." -- Roger S. Kohn * Association of Jewish Libraries *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: chapter abstractThe introduction sets the stage for exploring the divergent meanings of the desert as a symbolic landscape within the "spatial code" that Hebrew, and later Israeli, culture developed. Hebrew culture foregrounded the settlement as the key to Jewish national revival and relegated the desert to the background. This study reverses this relation, placing the desert at the center and setting out to examine the ambiguities underlying desert-settlement relations. The introduction presents the historical and thematic framework of the book. The first part addresses the duality of the symbolic desert in the Hebrew culture of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. The second part focuses on post-1948 Israel and the concrete Negev desert that is now included in its territory, examining the construction of the desert within the discourses and practices of settlement, environmentalism, and tourism, thus revealing the diverse visions of the desert in Israeli culture. 1Desert as Historical Metaphor chapter abstractThis chapter explores the dual meaning of the desert as a chronotope that links space and memory. The desert plays a critical role in the biblical exodus, as the "nonplace" set between Egypt, the land of exile, on the one hand, and the Promised Land, on the other, and the desert is hence the site of divine revelations and profound transitions that shaped the Israelites' collective identity. Jewish memory views the desert as representing the period of Jewish exile that led to the destruction of the homeland. Jewish tradition interprets exile as a divine punishment and Zionism constructed it as a regressive period within its decline narrative. References to the landscape outside Jewish settlements as a desolate "desert" and a "wasteland" underscored the redemptive mission of the Zionist settlement. The discussion addresses the tension between these interpretations and the use of the desert as a symbolic category. 2The Desert Mystique chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on European Jewish immigrants' fascination with the desert mystique. The desert appealed to European Zionist Jews as the mythical site of origins that preserved their ancient heritage. Orientalist images of the desert as resistant to modernity and change further reinforced the mythical view of the desert and its Bedouin inhabitants, but also Yemenite Jews, as inspiration for the construction of a modern Hebrew culture and identity. A nostalgic longing for the ancient past led some Zionist settlers and Hebrew youth to selectively adapt cultural idioms from Palestinian Arabs and generated the hybrid "Hebrew Bedouin" identity and a Hebrew desert lore. Other Zionist immigrants warned against the impact of the East on the Hebrew culture. The competing attitudes to the East reveal the Zionist Jewish settlers' ambivalence, as exiles returning to their homeland with conflicting ideas of separateness and belonging to the Middle East. 3Desert as the Counter-Place chapter abstractThis chapter explores settlement discourse and its competing interpretation of the desert as the counter-place. Early Zionist settlement narratives allude to wide-ranging terrains such as sands, swamps, barren mountains, and arid land as aspects of a hostile and chaotic "desert" while presenting the Jewish settlement as an "oasis" or "island" of order, modernity, and progress. The gendering of landscapes, the veneration of technology, and the use of war rhetoric enhance the achievements of the Jewish settlement in transforming its environment, and these ideas have been articulated in literature, songs, and art. The discussion addresses the influence of prevalent Western colonialist and modernist ideas and land-reclamation practices on the discourse and practices of Zionist settlement. As the national conflict in Palestine flared up in the 1930s, the discourses of settlement and security became intertwined and played a more prominent rolein shaping the view of the desert-settlement relations. 4The Negev Frontier chapter abstractAfter the 1948 war, the new state of Israel included the large and arid Negev region, and the discussion shifts from the symbolic desert outside the Jewish settlement to a concrete desert that has become an internal Jewish frontier. Although Prime Minister Ben-Gurion championed the goal of "making the desert bloom" and the state transferred water to the Negev, the limited response by established Israeli Jews led to the forced settlement of new immigrants in the desert in the 1950s and 1960s. These rural settlements and development towns faced major hardships, and the post-1967 Jewish drive to settle the occupied territories further blurred the Negev's status as a frontier and a periphery. Even with large areas of the Negev designated as national parks, nature reserves, and military bases, the call for new Jewish settlements continued, leading to experimental forms that diversified the Negev's Jewish population. 5The Negev Bedouins chapter abstractThe Negev's Bedouin population, greatly diminished after 1948, is the focus of this chapter. The state relocated most Negev Bedouins to the enclosed Siyag area, where they remained under military administration until 1966. Since then it has pursued an urbanization plan for the fast-growing Bedouin population in designated "Bedouin towns," yet a significant number of Bedouins refuse to settle their land claims, preferring to remain in their unrecognized rural villages. The government regards the so-called "Bedouin dispersion" as the embodiment of a chaotic and subversive counter-place while it promotes Jewish settlements in the Negev. Residents of the unrecognized villages live in the gray zone of a semi-permanent temporary state. The Bedouins' growing alienation, the rise of crime in the Negev, and harsh measures by law enforcement contribute to the perception of the Negev as the Wild South. 6Unsettled Landscapes chapter abstractThis chapter examines the environmental discourse and its revisionist view of desert-settlement relations. The environmental lobby acknowledges the desert-settlement opposition but reinterprets its meaning: the desert represents nature and the open space that must be protected from an overly aggressive settlement drive and development projects, and from its perception as a "national dump" for undesired, discredited, and dangerous human and material elements. Most of the desert is designated for nature reserves, national parks, and military bases. The environmentalists employ salvage rhetoric and the legal recourse to defend the desert environment from settlement development and industrial projects, while some proponents of the settlement agenda attack their position as anti-Zionist. The discussion highlights the contested visions of the desert and the fluidity of the coalitions formed between the state, local authorities, the army, the industry, tourism, and the environmental lobby in different cases. 7The Desert and the Tourist Gaze chapter abstractThis chapter examines the discourse and practices of tourism, which offer multiple visions of the desert that highlight its contrast with life at the urban center and ignore the tensions between them. Sinai desert tourism offered a popular alternative to Israeli desert tourism in the post-1967 period, yet today Eilat and the Dead Sea area are major tourist attractions, and Negev tourism is developing. Tourist publicity highlights the unspoiled landscape, yet offers tours of archeological sites that are World Cultural Heritage sites, as well as a diversity of modern rural settlements in the Negev. Tourism highlights the simple life in nature in the open space and its spiritual dimension, but also offers a rough terrain for adventure seekers and upscale lodgings with "pampering amenities." Jewish desert sites perform "Bedouin hospitality" for tourists, but visits to Bedouin towns and villages reveal rapidly changing and diverse lifestyles in different settings. Epilogue chapter abstractIn the post-1967 era, the emergence of two divergent visions of Israel reveals continuity with earlier themes and metaphors surrounding desert-settlement relations. One advocates a return to pre-1967 borders in exchange for peace, which led to the peace treaty with Egypt and the Oslo agreement and advances transnational cooperation around common interests. The second vision promotes the Jewish settlement and security agenda in the occupied territories, embracing the view of an inherently conflictual relation between Israel and its neighbors. The epilogue examines the entrenchment of Israel settlement and security discourse and the growing impact of the "besieged island" template. Israel has surrounded itself with walls to prevent illegal entry and terrorist attacks, recreating a modern Jewish ghetto while imposing territorial divisions and besieged islands within the Palestinian territory. Israeli culture may also provide alternative solutions for the negotiation of a different future in the Middle East.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThere are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.Trade Review"With stunning analytic precision, intellectual grace, and captivating ethnography, Ayşe Parla takes on key debates about precarity and hope. If the migrant is the quintessential figure of our anxious times, this magnificent book is the essential guide to thinking more politically and profoundly about her predicament." -- Lila Abu-Lughod * Columbia University *"Boldness is required in writing a book on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of hope. It is Ayşe Parla's remarkable achievement to have developed in such context an insightful critique of this affective relation to the world. Her fine-grained ethnography offers a profound reflection on ethnonational communities and their imagined futures." -- Didier Fassin * Institute for Advanced Study *"One leaves this book with a profound understanding of hope as a tool of governmentality, a way of being in the world, and a political act. Ayşe Parla shows us how deeply connected law, politics, and emotions are in the precarious lives of migrants." -- Esra Özyürek * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Ayşe Parla's study is truly original and thought-provoking in its focus on the Bulgaristanlı immigrants, a group both welcomed as 'Turkish kin' and marked as different at the same time....Precarious Hope is a welcome and indeed, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the hopes for belonging that migrants have and how they manage the precariousness of legal recognition." -- Nikos Christofis * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *"It is Parla's insightful, grounded treatment of the unequal distribution of hope that represents the most productive through line inPrecarious Hope, one that might enrich often unproductive discussions surrounding hope and activism in unequal societies." -- Brian Van Wyck * H-Migration *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Shielding Hope chapter abstractThe introduction maps the contours of Turkey's migration regime, highlighting its peculiarities in terms of minimal regulation, its excessive reliance on circulars and exceptions, and its religious and racialized criteria for who qualifies as a migrant. It provides a historical overview of migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey since the twentieth century to situate the predicament of the post-1990 labor migrants. It thus presents the ways in which the deep-seated alliance between religious identity (Sunni-Islam) and ethnoracial identity (Turkishness) have defined the legal and affective structures of belonging in Turkey, which in turn, constitute the structural conditions of possibility on which the hope of contemporary Bulgaristanlı migrants rests. The chapter also outlines the theoretical approach taken to hope as a collective structure of feeling that is simultaneously conducive to perseverance and complicit in exclusionary acts. 1The Historical Production of Hope chapter abstractThis chapter probes the cultural significance and legal ramifications of the category of soydaş (racial kin) claimed by the Bulgaristanlı. It locates the status of being soydaş within the hierarchy of otherness produced by Turkey's citizenship regime. Presenting a historical account of migration policy toward soydaş since the founding of the Turkish nation-state, it explains the ebb and flow in the privileges granted to soydaş through a constellation of factors that include ethnonational appropriation, transpolitical instrumentalization, and labor market exploitation. The chapter demonstrates how the status of soydaş both enables legal and cultural access and also reinstates a distance from unmarked belonging. Such strategic but uneasy appropriations of identification as soydaş provide a window onto the hegemonic grammar of racialized citizenship in Turkey not from the point of view of those who are most marginalized but from the point of view of the relatively privileged. 2Entitled Hope chapter abstractThis chapter explores the political and affective economy of hope. It demonstrates how the hope for legalization is differentially distributed and embodied across different migrant groups. This chapter develops the notion of "entitled hope" to characterize the hope cultivated by the Bulgaristanlı migrants. Rather than hoping against the odds, entitled hope veers closer to expectation and draws on a different lineage of thinking about hope that locates its kernel in rationality and attainability. In its emphasis on hope as "structured expectation," this chapter presents ethnographic accounts of the expressions and performances of hope that Bulgaristanlı migrants enact and take for granted in their encounters with the law. Finally, even as this chapter attends to the affective aspects of the differential distribution of hope, it argues against an ontological or epistemological gap between affect and emotion. 3Precarious Hope chapter abstractIf the notion of entitled hope is intended to highlight expectation and likelihood, the notion of precarious hope that is elaborated in chapter 3 aims to capture the uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants. The chapter presents thick descriptions of precarity experienced by Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, and work in the exploitative market of domestic labor. Heeding the ever-present tension between privilege and precarity in the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants who are neither entirely exposed nor entirely protected in their legal and economic status, this chapter also attempts to demarcate the concept of precarity from vulnerability. 4Nostalgia as Hope chapter abstractAlthough ethnic affinity provides a certain protection from the marginalization and harassment routinely faced by other undocumented migrant women in Turkey, the Bulgaristanlı women's morality, too, can quickly become suspect if they are perceived as straying too far from expected gendered norms of dress, demeanor, or work habits. Bulgaristanlı women, in turn, counter the resentment of the class- and gender-based marginalization they suffer through recourse to post-communist nostalgia. Rather than reducing post-communist nostalgia to a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, chapter 4 explores the ways in which Bulgaristanlı migrants utilize post-communist nostalgia as a resource to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. Considering the temporalities of hope in their full range, the chapter also suggests that any residual attachments to the communist past are manufactured into hopes for a more secure future. Conclusion: Troubling Hope chapter abstractThe concluding chapter brings together the theoretical grounds and the ethnographic terrain covered in the book to posit hope as a criticizable category of analysis and experience. It challenges neat distinctions between goal-oriented hope and open-ended hope by foregrounding the struggles of migrants who hope for the reasonably expected rather than desire the wildly unexpected. It discusses the troubling implications for migrant activism of associating hope only with possibility at the expense of probability. The conclusion reiterates why it is not only crisis-laden hope that carries significance. Hope that is emboldened by a sense of entitlement but that nonetheless remains precarious speaks to a larger predicament in which increasing numbers of migrants and citizens grapple with a relentless anxiety that is barely held in balance by the production and collective cultivation of hope within structures of inequality. A Note on Method, or Hopeful Waiting in Lines chapter abstractThis short chapter describes the scope, duration, and sites of fieldwork as well as the different ethnographic methods deployed. It also discusses questions of categorization, positionality, and the relationship between ethnography and epistemology, especially as it pertains to research on emotions.

Read more less

Book SynopsisKirkuk is Iraq's most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Over the following decades, Kirkuk became the heart of Iraq's booming petroleum industry. City of Black Gold tells a story of oil, urbanization, and colonialism in Kirkuk—and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk's citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict. Arbella Bet-Shlimon reconstructs the twentieth-century history of Kirkuk to question the assumptions about the past underpinning today's ethnic divisions. In the early 1920s, when the Iraqi state was formed under British administration, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid. But as the oil industry fostered colonial power and Baghdad's influence over Kirkuk, intercommunal violence and competing claims to the city's history took hold. The ethnicities of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs in Kirkuk were formed throughout a century of urban development, interactions between communities, and political mobilization. Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.Trade Review"This remarkable study of Kirkuk uncovers the ways in which the city became—and did not become—part of the Iraqi state. Arbella Bet-Shlimon bravely covers silenced histories, as she encourages us to look at Iraqi history through its northern urban peripheries. A fascinating urban history." -- Orit Bashkin * University of Chicago *"Based on extensive primary research, City of Black Gold is essential for anyone interested in the modern history of Iraq and the roots of the standoff between the government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government. Written with care and sensitivity, Arbella Bet-Shlimon's history of Kirkuk is a delight to read." -- Joost Hiltermann, Middle East and North Africa Program Director * International Crisis Group *"City of Black Gold is a masterful account of Kirkuk. Blending smooth storytelling and sharp analysis, Arbella Bet-Shlimon challenges readers to rethink much of what passes as conventional wisdom about Iraq, and about power, oil, and ethnicity in the twentieth century. A wonderful book, richly documented, accessible, and creative." -- Toby C. Jones * Rutgers University *"This fine social history of the city of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, traces a century of political upheaval." -- John Waterbury * Foreign Affairs *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe book's introduction raises the fundamental questions that drive this project: How did the politicization of ethnicity in Kirkuk come about, and what did that process have to do with petroleum, urbanization, colonialism, and Iraqi nation building? It argues that, throughout the twentieth century, oil, urbanization, and colonialism shaped Kirkukis' identity formation and relationship to the state and that the divided city that these forces built gave rise to an ethnic conflict. The introduction explains that oil was the central mediating factor that affected how other forces transformed Kirkuk in the twentieth century. It explains the significance of the book's approach to this subject, including the difficulty of finding a research methodology when studying a city that is hard to access and whose archives have repeatedly been destroyed. This introduction situates the book among relevant scholarly conversations about identity formation, the politics of oil, urban history, and nation building. 1The Forging of Iraq chapter abstractThis chapter concerns the beginnings of Kirkuk's process of political reorientation after the British occupation following World War I severed the town's formal ties with Ottoman Istanbul. It argues that opposition to centralization under a Baghdad-based government, which took several different forms, was the single most important political trend in Kirkuk and its rural hinterland from 1918 to the early 1920s and was bolstered by the ambiguity of Kirkuk's status as a part of the disputed Mosul region. Anticolonial forces in Kirkuk nevertheless had to contend with the patronage networks built by the officials of the British Empire among some local notables, and the division between these two groups formed Kirkuk's most potent political fault line at a time when the distinctions among ethnolinguistic groups were not at all clear and had little to do with political interests. 2The British Mandate chapter abstractThis chapter explores how Mandate rule in Kirkuk produced a variety of relationships between urban notables, rural leaders, corresponding communities, and British and Iraqi local and central government authorities. It finds that these relations were unpredictable as long as Kirkuk was caught in the territorial dispute between the British Empire's Iraq Mandate and the Republic of Turkey. After a treaty cemented the Mosul region's status as part of Iraq in 1926, the Turkish-speaking urban elite of Kirkuk began to exhibit closer and more consistent ties with Baghdad, creating an emergent but still minor ethnic dispute with the Kurdish community, which was more inclined to oppose centralization. The League of Nations mediation process to resolve the "Mosul question" had assumed that "Kurds," "Turks," "Arabs," and "Christians" each had distinct interests as a group, thereby creating a rigid, ethnically based paradigm that structured regional politics moving forward. 3Oil and Urban Growth chapter abstractThis chapter begins by analyzing Kirkuk's growth from a provincial market town into an oil city after the discovery of oil by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in 1927, along with the changes in geography, society, and politics that this process engendered. For instance, Kirkuk began to see immigration by those seeking work with the oil company at an accelerating rate. According to Iraqi censuses, many of these immigrants were Kurds from rural areas close to Kirkuk. At the same time, however, Baghdad expanded its influence in the city through the growing prevalence of Arabic-language use in schools. The IPC maintained an isolated existence of segregation and, despite its enormous influence in the city, lacked productive relations with its labor force. Kirkuki oil workers were therefore amenable to organizing under the auspices of the ascendant Iraqi Communist Party. Urban political tensions culminated in a 1946 strike during which Kirkuk police killed many oil workers, a watershed moment that stimulated the oil company's active involvement in Kirkuk's evolving urban political arena. 4The Ideology of Urban Development chapter abstractThis chapter examines the development and housing projects that resulted directly from the strike and the violent British-ordered police crackdown in 1946, defining the trajectory of Kirkuk's urban politics until the revolution of 1958. It analyzes the ways that these projects became sites of interaction and competition for influence between the company, British authorities, and Kirkuki and Iraqi authorities at several levels, lending increasing significance to the local political domain. The Iraq Petroleum Company, British officials, and Iraqi officials sought to promote the values of capitalism among Kirkuki oil workers to counter the influence of communism. The chapter also examines how the presence of the oil industry and of development projects aimed at achieving "modernity" also defined Kirkuk's civic identity as the Iraqi "city of black gold," which Kirkukis, other Iraqis, and Westerners alike portrayed eagerly in various public discourses. 5The Intercommunal Fight chapter abstractThis chapter returns to the theme of the ethnicization of local politics. It begins with the Iraqi revolution of 1958, which brought the development projects of the previous decade to a halt, led to the decline of British influence, and instantly altered the axes around which local politics in Kirkuk revolved. Unlike in the monarchy era, Kirkukis' political interests aligned with their ethnic groups in the revolutionary era more than with any other single attribute, leading to intercommunal violence. The Turkmen and Kurdish communities sought to assert their control over the city and its institutions literally and symbolically, demonstrating that the Kirkuki civic identity that had emerged in recent years exacerbated fault lines that corresponded with ethnicity. The Kurdish nationalist movement, which was based in areas north and east of Kirkuk, actively and forthrightly claimed Kirkuk's oil and turned the Kirkuk province into a battleground for the first time. Baghdad met these efforts with a level of brutality that, up to that point, had been unprecedented in modern Kirkuk and its hinterland. 6Nationalization and Arabization chapter abstractThis chapter covers the changes that Kirkuk experienced in the era of Ba'th (Baath) Party rule between 1968 and the 1990s. After the nationalization of the oil industry in 1972, the company became yet another manifestation of Baghdad's ever-growing influence in Kirkuk. The Ba'th regime, which was Arab nationalist at its roots, used ethnicity—in Arabic, qawmiyya—as shorthand for loyalty to the state, regarding all non-Arabs as suspect. The Ba'th regime intensified the process of consolidating Arabs' position in Kirkuk through administrative reforms, resettlement, and gerrymandering. Many non-Arabs were forced to formally register as Arabs, an active attempt to combat competing ethnonationalisms as well as cultural pluralism. This logic of Arabization culminated in ethnic cleansing and the Anfal genocide against the Kurds, which was planned from Kirkuk. Conclusion chapter abstractThe book's conclusion describes events in Kirkuk from the 1990s to the present, including the era of the Iraq War and the 2017 Kurdistan independence referendum. It urges readers to consider what the preceding chapters tell us about Kirkuk, and similar places, today. The conclusion argues that it is time to think beyond ethnopolitics when trying to understand the problems and possibilities of a diverse, disputed city such as Kirkuk. It notes that, for instance, Kirkukis' political stances are not wholly predictable on the basis of ethnicity. It argues that the complex of cultures and institutions that accompany the oil industry are part of Kirkukis' lives and political stances regardless of their individual relationships to the industry. It concludes with a call for a frank reckoning with Kirkuk's history of conflict and the role of oil in that conflict as part of any process of reconciliation.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn April 1909, two waves of massacres shook the province of Adana, located in the southern Anatolia region of modern-day Turkey, killing more than 20,000 Armenians and 2,000 Muslims. The central Ottoman government failed to prosecute the main culprits, a miscarriage of justice that would have repercussions for years to come. Despite the significance of these events and the extent of violence and destruction, the Adana Massacres are often left out of historical narratives. The Horrors of Adana offers one of the first close examinations of these events, analyzing sociopolitical and economic transformations that culminated in a cataclysm of violence. Bedross Der Matossian provides voice and agency to all involved in the massacres—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Drawing on primary sources in a dozen languages, he develops an interdisciplinary approach to understand the rumors and emotions, public spheres and humanitarian interventions that together informed this complex event. Ultimately, through consideration of the Adana Massacres in micro-historical detail, this book offers an important macrocosmic understanding of ethnic violence, illuminating how and why ordinary people can become perpetrators.Trade Review"The Horrors of Adana is a truly groundbreaking and highly nuanced exploration of intercommunal, sectarian, and nationalist violence in the late Ottoman Empire. A must-read for scholars of the modern Middle East."—Ussama Makdisi, Rice University, author of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World"The Horrors of Adana is an outstanding analysis of a massacre never before deeply studied. Bedross Der Matossian offers a thorough inquiry into the perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and social-political context, useful to all those interested in understanding processes of mass violence."—Jacques Semelin, Sciences Po Paris, author of Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide"With The Horrors of Adana, the Adana Massacres get their own story, a story that needs telling. Bedross Der Matossian's deeply researched and engagingly argued book situates Adana in a longer trajectory of 'forgotten' massacres and as part of Ottoman history more broadly."—Michelle Tusan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, author of The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill"Der Matossian's well-written and meticulously researched book, utilizing rare documentation from fifteen different archives, employing an interdisciplinary perspective and an objective, conversational tone, offers insights into this untold history."—Eleni Sakellis The National Herald"Der Matossian draws on an impressive array of sources in Armenian, Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Ladino, Russian, and both Ottoman and modern Turkish to paint an all-encompassing picture of the events from the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders."—Samuel Sweeney, The American Conservative"Der Matossian himself is rather modest about his aims and achievements, but I do not have to be, so here goes: The Horrors of Adana is the first broad, deep, and analytical take on the Adana massacres. The introduction alone is a tour de force... The author's detailed micro level analysis of the actions and reactions of perpetrators, bystander, and victims – who fight back, outnumbered and outgunned – is dispassionate, evenhanded, and yet reads like a thriller."—Matthias Bjørnlund, International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies"By analyzing the structure of violence from various perspectives, Professor Der Matossian was able to bring attention to the spiral of violence that occurred in Adana while explaining the multi-faceted, complex phenomenon of massacre and violence."—Natalie Agazarian, Hye Sharzhoom"The Horrors of Adana is a rich work on an episode which has never before been investigated so closely.... Even for readers new to the region and its history, the nuanced and multi-layered presentation of this complex time period is engaging. It also offers much to think about in echoing other places and our own era."—Nareg Seferian, Armenian Review"Written by the pioneer historian who has worked on one of the most horrendous events that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, The Horrors of Adana would surely be an insightful and commendable contribution to the vast literature on ethnoreligious conflict, massacres, genocide, and ethnic conflict."—Önder Uçar, New Perspectives on Turkey"This beautifully written, carefully constructed, and convincingly argued book is based on deep reading of archival and published sources and a strong command of the existing, multilingual literature, and it is judicious in its conclusions. Der Matossian not only deploys the best tools of his own historical profession but appreciates the insights, findings, and techniques of qualitative political science and historical sociology. This is a major and original contribution to Armenian historiography, late Ottoman history, and the comparative study of ethnic violence."—Ronald Grigor Suny, American Historical Review

Read more less

Book SynopsisBy the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir had been home to a vibrant and substantial Sephardi Jewish community for over four hundred years, and had emerged as a major center of Jewish life. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir tells the story of this long overlooked Jewish community, drawing on previously untapped Ladino archival material. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally unremarkable? Dina Danon argues that while Jewish religious and cultural distinctiveness might have remained unquestioned in this late Ottoman port city, other elements of Jewish identity emerged as profound sites of tension, most notably those of poverty and social class. Through the voices of both beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, this book argues that it was new attitudes to poverty and class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community's encounter with the modern age.Trade Review"Dina Danon opens new windows onto the changing socioeconomic realities and values of Jews in a major port city of the late Ottoman Empire. Those interested in modern Jewish and Ottoman history alike have much to learn from this fascinating study."—Julia Phillips Cohen, Vanderbilt University"In this skillfully researched and beautifully written book, Dina Danon gives voice to Jews from various social and economic backgrounds. In the best tradition of social history, she masterfully relates their experiences in an often overlooked corner of the Ottoman Sephardi world to the broader forces that reshaped their city, region, and the nineteenth-century world."—Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington"The hard work Danon invested in the book is evident in its convincing narrative, its clear and accessible style, and its generous scientific apparatus. It is safe to assume that henceforth this monograph will be regarded as the central work on the Jews of Izmir in the last Ottoman century."—Tamir Karkason, Middle East Journal"This work provides a major contribution to the study of a Jewish community in general, and an Ottoman one in particular."—Rachel Simon, Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews"This eloquently written and expertly researched book is the outcome of Dina Danon's work over the past decade. It reflects Danon's original approach and scholarship. The book deals with the Jewish community of Izmir during the late Ottoman period. This is an important addition to our knowledge of this overlooked community at a time of tremendous changes about which we still know very little."—Eyal Ginio, The American Historical Review"Danon has succeeded in describing and analyzing how social and economic conditions led to communal struggles and the desire for change. ... [H]er book is a singular contribution and an important landmark for future research on other Sephardic communities in modern times."—Jacob Barnai, Association for Jewish Studies Review"Dina Danon's new book is an excellent work of social history that significantly enhances our understanding of Ottoman Jewish history in the late imperial period. It does so in a multi-layered way, such that it ultimately consists of more than its title suggests—that is, a history of the Jews of Izmir (though it is that, as well)...[T]hanks to Danon's deft handling of the tools of social history, and her attentiveness to an array of studies of the Ottoman empire in this period, what emerges is a portrait of social stratification in late Ottoman Izmir writ large...Danon's scholarship not only fruitfully builds on work that has come before, but... it will in turn be a critical stepping stone for the work of others."—Katherine E. Fleming, Slavic Review"This work should be treasured. Not just because it is a well-wrought and at times elegant addition to the Judaic Studies, but because it enlightens those of us who are fascinated with Jewish life specifically, and late Ottoman history more generally, and fills a critical space in our understanding of the revolutionary changes occurring during this period."—Jeffrey Kahrs, Tikkun"Unlike recent literature on Ottoman non-Muslims that focuses on the relationship between Istanbul's Jewish community and the city's Muslim political elites, Danon's work looks inward to explore the dynamics within Izmir's vibrant Jewish society. What emerges is a comprehensive social history of a community that to a great extent maintained a character unique from those of other Sephardic Ladino-speaking communities, such as in Istanbul and Salonica."—Louis Fishman, H-Nationalism"The Jews of Ottoman Izmirfills an important gap in the scholarship on modern Ottoman Jewish and Sephardic history by offering a locally focused account of social and political change in one of the most important, yet also understudied, Ladino-speaking communities in the Ottoman Empire. But Danon does more than fill a gap, valuable as it is to have this first monograph on modern Jewish Izmir in English. She also shifts the narrative about Ottoman Jewish history in a new direction by emphasizing social class as a central framework for her analysis, and by looking, in particular, at the city's Jewish working class, at poverty, and at class conflict. By raising the question of what Jewish modernity looked like in a context in which Jewish distinctiveness itself was 'wholly unremarkable,' she offers an important impulse to move beyond the conventional paradigms of emancipation, assimilation, and shifting patterns of 'identity.'"—Matthias Lehmann, H-Judaic

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity. Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.Trade Review"The Lived Nile offers a creative and smart account of a river and a nation, fluidly braiding together a history of labor, disease, and political economy, brimming with keen insight and filled with unexpected turns." -- Gregg Mitman * University of Wisconsin-Madison *"The Lived Nile offers a highly original synthesis of environmental and political history. Jennifer Derr shows how the remaking of the Nile River in the colonial period remade the very bodies of the country's political subjects." -- Timothy Mitchell * Columbia University *"A brilliant book, The Lived Nile captures the complexities and unintended consequences of experts intervening in a river's flow—and the displaced and diseased bodies that result—in a most compelling story. This is history at its best." -- Beth Baron * author of The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood *"The Nile River has sustained Egypt's material economy for millennia, a role Derr argues has continued into the colonial era, though subject to external considerations. Egypt's integration into the British imperial economy as a producer of sugar and cotton, combined with the poverty of its landowning class, reshaped the material culture of the river. Highly recommended." -- S. L. Smith * CHOICE *"Jennifer Derr has written an innovative and well researched study....The book is concise, well organized, and a pleasure to read. It will interest medical historians and geographers as well as specialists in Egyptian and African history. The illustrations are well selected, and the bibliography is useful. With a massive new dam rising on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, the book could not be timelier." -- Nancy E. Gallagher * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *"Situated at the intersection of the history of science, the history of medicine, and the history of the body, as well as environmental history and the history of technology, The Lived Nile stands out for the way it brings science and technology studies into conversation with the social and political history of the Middle East. This is an important undertaking, and a great deal of work still remains to be done before our field truly reflects what a global phenomenon the practice of science became in the modern world. Derr's book offers a timely contribution in this regard, bringing archival depth and conceptual rigor to her study of a part of the world that deserves far more attention among science studies scholars. This, in addition to its empirical richness and analytical rigor, should make it required reading for scholars interested in the global history of science, the relationship between science and capitalism, and the intersection between knowledge, the environment, and the state." -- Lukas Rieppel * Brown University, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: A River, Remade: Making Subjects on the Perennial Nile chapter abstractThe Introduction describes Egypt's colonial economy and outlines the book's main areas of intervention. The chapter describes the forms of agricultural production on which Egypt's colonial economy rested, arguing that while cotton was Egypt's top-ranking export, perennial irrigation facilitated the production of other crops, specifically sugarcane and maize, that also shaped the conditions of rural life. It then argues that bodily experiences of colonial economy included new encounters with disease, the experience of which was central to the production of the subject. This chapter next makes an argument that the experience of authority in the countryside was geographically variable and constituted by an assemblage of actors. Finally, the Introduction explores the nature of expert knowledge, arguing for the significance of acts of performance in constituting this knowledge. 1Nile Articulations: Decolonizing the History of Irrigation Engineering chapter abstractChapter 1 revisits the work of irrigation engineering and the construction of the perennial Nile River in the nineteenth century. This chapter chronicles the emergence of the profession and training of state engineers under Egypt's strong governor Mehmed Ali. It then compares these engineers to those in the British Empire. Finally, this chapter examines the processes through which British engineers learned Nile irrigation while working to establish themselves as colonial experts. The historiography of British irrigation engineering in Egypt has begun from the notion that British engineers possessed great skill. This chapter challenges this notion by situating these engineers within the historical context of nineteenth-century Egypt and revisiting their work in Egypt and the performative strategies they deployed to establish their knowledge. 2The Dammed Nile: The Thirty-Year Project to Build Khazan Aswan chapter abstractChapter 2 chronicles the construction of the first modern dam on the Nile River and the two subsequent projects to heighten it. The chapter charts the material processes through which the dam was constructed and threatened as well as the forms of political economic aspiration and erasure that were attached to the structure during its first three decades of existence. It argues that during the British colonial period and that of the interwar-period Egyptian regime, the dam helped to support a particular geography of capital production. It also lent the perennial Nile a degree of permanency and shaped the conditions of possibility for the production of expertise moving forward. This chapter also traces the progressive displacement of historical Nubia during the first three decades of the twentieth century. 3Beyond the Frontier: Negotiating the Geography of Authority in Egypt's South chapter abstractChapter 3 explores the histories of the areas of central and southern Egypt that were perennially irrigated, focusing on the production of sugarcane in Egypt. Beginning in the 1860s, Khedive Ismail established a sugarcane industry on his estates, the Daira Sanieh. Following the construction of Khazan Aswan, cotton moved into central Egypt, pushing sugarcane south. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Egyptian Sugar Company, controlled by the same colonial capitalists who helped build the dam and profited from the production of cotton, controlled large swathes of southern Egypt. "Beyond the Frontier" argues that the history of central and southern Egypt demonstrates the geographically variable nature of colonial authority in the Egyptian countryside. It also describes everyday contestations over authority and the violence that marked labor and daily life in these regions. 4Cruel Summer: Environmental Labors and the Scales of Subject Making chapter abstractChapter 4 follows perennial irrigation into the bodies of laborers and cultivators in the countryside. The introduction and extension of perennial irrigation produced new agricultural ecologies and modes of environmental engagement, in particular labor. One effect of these changes was a dramatic uptick in the prevalence of the disease pellagra and infection with the parasites schistosomiasis and hookworm. The majority of the population in perennially irrigated regions suffered from at least one—and often more than one—of these diseases. Just as the bodies of many rural Egyptians were transformed, practitioners in Egypt formed colonial medical projects based on a racialized understanding of bodies afflicted by the diseases of perennial irrigation. They posited disease as normative and formulated ideas of the Egyptian epidemic as ancient, eliding the role of colonial economy in fueling disease. 5Treated Subjects: Irrigating the Veins of the Nation chapter abstractChapter 5 explores the history of the project to treat hookworm and schistosomiasis in Egypt. In the period preceding World War I, British occupation authorities organized a limited project to survey and treat hookworm. When the program resumed after the war, it was paired with that for schistosomiasis. Under the interwar-period regime, treatment programs expanded throughout the countryside, treating millions of Egyptians for parasitic disease. Efforts to treat disease were complemented by those of the Rockefeller Foundation to stem its spread through sanitation programs. During the decades of the interwar period, the ecologies of disease associated with the perennial Nile helped to shape the terms of medical expertise and gave Egyptian scientists and physicians an entrée into a field of tropical medicine that continued to be dominated by racial hierarchies. Conclusion: The Afterlives of the Perennial Subject chapter abstractThe Conclusion summarizes the book's primary contributions to the literature. First, it outlines the role of perennial irrigation and the behaviors associated with it in fueling disease and the significance of symptoms in producing new normative habitations of the body. It then describes the role of treatment programs in producing national (physical) subjects. Second, the Conclusion describes the manner in which authority was constituted as a geographically and temporally variable assemblage in the countryside during Egypt's colonial economy. Finally, it discusses the significance for materiality in the production and practice of expertise and that of acts of performance in establishing expertise as authority among engineers and medical practitioners. The Conclusion then follows the constructions of the perennial subject into the period that followed the end of Egypt's colonial economy, exploring the afterlives of the environment of Egypt's colonial economy.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.Trade Review"In this beautifully written and extraordinarily rich book, Narges Bajoghli demonstrates a deep anxiety within the Iranian regime about how to transmit the ideology of the Revolution forty years on. With Iran Reframed, we come to understand the contradictions and frustrations behind the regime's justifications of its past, present, and imagined future."—Sherine F. Hamdy, author of Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt"Iran Reframed is incomparable. A must-read on Iran's media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative."—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran"Iran Reframed offers marvelously original insight into one of the world's most misunderstood countries. Narges Bajoghli reflects on the success and failure of revolutions, the meaning of ideology, youth and aging, and the ways politics seeks to address deep human longings."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"[A] lively book that offers great insight into the mindset and approach of the officials who try to keep the Islamic Revolution, and the regime it produced, alive by producing promotional material, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq War, and rap-filled music videos extolling the nation and its heroes. Highly recommended."—R. P. Mathee, CHOICE"[Bajoghli] skilfully breaks the myth of singular Iranian political Islam through an engaging storytelling style that encourages readers' dialogic imagination rather than presumed categories."—Younes Saramifar, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies"Iran Reframed is an important book not just in the study of post-revolutionary Iranian culture and media, but post-revolutionary Iran at large. It is groundbreaking in identifying and presenting in a concise volume important processes that have taken place within the Islamic Republic's revolutionary project and its dynamic mediascape—especially since the 2009 protests."—Nahid Siamdoust, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Iran Reframed is a courageous journey into the contradictions within the ideological apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran....Bajoghli's book is essential reading for anyone interested in media warfare in the twenty-first century and understanding the nuances of Iranian politics."—Alexander L. Fattal, American Anthropologist"Empathetic and provocative at the same time, this is a compelling book for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it exists today."—Adil Bhat, Dawn"[Iran Reframed] offers a deep insight into Iran's state media apparatus....for anyone wanting to better understand the overarching social dynamics in Iran, this book is recommended reading."—Daniel Walter, QantaraTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Generational Changes 2. Cracks in the Official Story 3. Insiders, Outsiders, and Belonging 4. New Strategies 5. Producing Nationalism 6. Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisEgypt has undergone significant economic liberalization under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, USAID, and the European Commission. Yet after more than four decades of economic reform, the Egyptian economy still fails to meet popular expectations for inclusive growth, better standards of living, and high-quality employment. While many analysts point to cronyism and corruption, Amr Adly finds the root causes of this stagnation in the underlying social and political conditions of economic development. Cleft Capitalism offers a new explanation for why market-based development can fail to meet expectations: small businesses in Egypt are not growing into medium and larger businesses. The practical outcome of this missing middle syndrome is the continuous erosion of the economic and social privileges once enjoyed by the middle classes and unionized labor, without creating enough winners from market making. This in turn set the stage for alienation, discontent, and, finally, revolt. With this book, Adly uncovers both an institutional explanation for Egypt's failed market making, and sheds light on the key factors of arrested economic development across the Global South.Trade Review"Cleft Capitalism is a highly original analysis of what Amr Adly calls Egypt's 'successful transition to failed capitalism.' Based on extensive and sound research, it represents an important rethinking of the trajectory of Egypt's political economy since 1974 and a bold challenge to Washington Consensus economic policy orthodoxy." -- Joel Beinin * Stanford University *"Amr Adly elaborates a novel explanation for underperforming economies of the Global South. Richly detailed, theoretically insightful, Cleft Capitalism is essential reading for anyone interested in the Egyptian, Middle Eastern, and other political economies." -- Robert Springborg * Naval Postgraduate School *"Cleft Capitalism offers a lucid, rich, and new understanding of the course of Egyptian economic development. With his sophisticated understanding of Egyptian politics and society and refined economic analysis, Amr Adly not only helps us understand Egypt better, but offers a model of how to approach the contentious terrain of economic change in the developing world." -- Nathan J. Brown * George Washington University *"Adly puts forth compelling arguments and descriptions of Egypt's failed market making....Cleft Capitalism offers new theoretical insights and valuable empirical analysis of the course of Egypt's political economy and the causes of its economic predicaments since 1974." -- Housam Darwisheh * The Developing Economies *"[Cleft Capitalism] is more than an exemplary analysis of the situation of political economy in Egypt. It is also a significant contribution to wider debates on the possibilities and limits of market-based development in the Global South....an essential read to students, researchers, and policy-makers interested in the political economy of Egypt, the limits and potentials of structural adjustment policies, and the insights of economic sociology to the study of political economy." -- Hesham Shafik * Jadaliyya *"Cleft Capitalism is an ambitious book that aims to make broad academic contributions far beyond its specific focus on the contemporary social and political economy of Egypt....[It succeeds] both as an overview of the Egyptian economy and as a critique of the institutional economics orthodoxy. It is one of the best books that I have read about both subjects in recent years, and I recommend it highly." -- Mahmoud A. El-Gamal * Middle East Journal *"[Adly's] novel argument diverges from dominant political economy accounts, which focus on corruption and crony capitalism or the lack of formal property rights and the rule of law. For Adly, the answer lies in the 'missing middle' of small and medium enterprises, which have served an important role in capitalist development by scaling up to become important job creators in more successful developing economies, such as in South Korea. Adly traces the roots of the problem to historically specific institutional arrangements that emerged earlier in the 20th century and during the period of state-led development under Nasser and were consolidated under Sadat and Mubarak's tenures. Adly's book is grounded on impressive qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis and makes important contributions to the study of failed development in Egypt, with comparative implications for other developing countries in and beyond the Middle East and North Africa." -- Committee for the Roger Owen Book Award * sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsOne: Successful Transition to Failed Capitalism chapter abstractOver the course of four decades, the Egyptian economy underwent consistent and comprehensive economic liberalization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and deregulation. Yet the Egyptian economy today still experiences low growth, declining total investment rates, and high unemployment and underemployment. The private sector has never become globally competitive. The chapter traces this failure to establish an integrated market order. The problem of market integration in Egypt was not the absence of the Weberian spirit for exchange and the profit-making mentality among a majority of economically active people. Rather, it was the hard constraint of accessing capital. The 2011 uprising highlighted that these efforts at transformation failed not only economically but politically as well. Two: Beyond Cronyism chapter abstractStudies of Egypt's lackluster development performance have largely focused on the issue of crony capitalism, particularly the routes through which big business emerged after infitāḥ. It is undeniable that politics has played a significant, if not a central, role in the rise of big business in Egypt since the mid-1970s. This is hardly surprising, let alone unique. This literature on cronyism and rent seeking suffers from a blind spot in assessing the problematic nature of Egypt's capitalist transformation. Where large enterprises came from does not explain the lack of vibrancy and dynamism in the rest of the private sector. The issue with Egypt's private sector, as well as other cases of failed market transformation, seems to lie more with its inability to engender a robust stratum of small and medium-sized enterprises rather than the existence of large enterprises that are politically connected. Three: Egypt's Cleft Capitalism chapter abstractContrary to the expectations of neoclassical institutionalism, the weakness of formal property rights neither impeded the expansion of market exchange nor t deterred thousands of Egyptians from engaging with this expanding market since the mid-1970s. Alternative private economic orders have retained the capacity for sustained market creation and expansion, albeit imperfectly. This market expansion was not conducive to market integration, though. The resultant capitalist order was cleft. In order to grow, private enterprises must have access to inputs and market outlets that go beyond what is immediately available from their direct, private social capital. Throughout Egypt's capitalist transformation, access to capital, in particular, finance and land, remained quite restrained for the vast majority of private market actors. This was due to politico-historical factors that were continually perpetuated, eventually leading to the rise of institutional arrangements that were exclusionary for the broad base of private sector enterprises and entrepreneurs. Four: The Origins of Cleft Capitalism chapter abstractFor a vibrant and integrated capitalist order to emerge, capital should be made accessible to a majority of market actors. However, Egyptian SSEs have faced high administrative and economic barriers to financial and physical capital, a central mechanism through which cleft capitalism has been produced and reproduced over time. The problem of restricted access to capital has institutional and political origins. The rules, norms, and structures—-be they formal, informal, or a mix—that have governed the distribution of opportunities for accessing capital has produced three separate business subsystems—baladi, dandy, and crony—since infitāḥ in 1974. It was the predominance of a coalition of bureaucratic actors that maintained certain institutional arrangements for directly accessing land and bank credit. Five: How Cleft Capitalism Came About chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the historical and political factors that led to the production and reproduction of cleft capitalism since infitāḥ. It addresses the question of where the institutional condition of cleft capitalism came from. It examines the multiple political and economic factors since the mid-1970s that shaped the role of the state amid the process of market making and why they led to the development and perpetuation of cleft capitalism. It was the predominance of a coalition of bureaucratic actors that maintained certain institutional arrangements for directly accessing land and bank credit. However, this was neither uniform nor always strategically pursued, as it did not always result from top-down decisions by leadership of the executive where most formal power resided. Rather, there were many instances when bottom-up forces from within an incoherent and fragmented bureaucracy solidified the same institutional arrangements of a centralized and hierarchical system. Six: Egypt's Banking System: An Exclusive Club chapter abstractDespite waves of market-oriented reforms in Egypt, the overconcentration of credit, mainly extended to the state and a few large private sector firms, has persisted and failed to produce intermediate institutions that could open up channels of credit access for the broad base of SSEs. The chapter shows that the essential investment tool of debt financing has been made systematically unavailable to the broad base of these establishments because of an institutional and organizational framework that has been overly centralized and hierarchical. These institutional traits have ultimately raised the transaction costs for SSEs to an extent that has effectively excluded them from accessing credit, precluding any credible chance of scaling up and thus calcifying the institutional condition of cleft capitalism. Seven: Egypt's Desert Land: Abundant Yet Scarce chapter abstractDespite the virtual abundance of desert land, access to this land for productive uses has been quite restricted for most private sector enterprises. Indeed, entrepreneurs have traditionally underlined access to land, like finance, as a major barrier to growth—a consistent and constant theme since the launch of infitāḥ . Similar to the case of finance, centralized and hierarchical institutions dominated land management that excluded SSEs from accessing the physical capital needed to expand. Taken together, the lack of access to these crucial capital inputs has created and perpetuated the institutional condition of cleft capitalism that has robbed the Egyptian private sector of any ability to follow the paths taken by more successful market transformations. Eight: Baladi Capitalism chapter abstractThis chapter portrays a detailed and vivid picture of Egypt's baladi capitalism through exploring how SSEs function. Informed by extensive field research conducted in mid-2013, the chapter depicts a lively portrayal of how Egypt's private SSEs evolved and the diverse and complex modes of articulation between what is formal and informal and what is economic and social. Social networks, usually composed of family and friends, reduce the asymmetries of information between parties. Such networks are quite prevalent due to the weakness of formal contract enforcement and the high risks associated with impersonal transactions. Socialized and personalized transactions have contributed to the rise and constitution of a market since infitāḥ, defined as the space where price-driven exchange occurs. However, they couldn't substitute for the missing ingredient of access to capital that could have propelled Egypt's baladi capitalist subsystem into a robust and integrated private sector. Nine: Dandy Capitalism chapter abstractDespite economic liberalization and private sector development, designed to serve as the neoclassical solutions to Egypt's economic woes, entrenched levels of social marginalization and exclusion that were derived from earlier attempts at top-down modernization and colonial rule persisted after independence. Throughout most of Egypt's contemporary history, including the social reform eras in the 1950s and 1960s, state institutions maintained ties with only limited segments of society. This implied the absence of complementarity between social evolution that involved the vast majority of the people, on the one hand, and state attempts to deliver development, on the other. This overarching concept can be used to understand the historical lack of complementarity and intermediate institutions between capital-regulating organizations and SSEs, the missing-middle syndrome, rampant economic informality, and finally cleft capitalism as the general condition for underdevelopment throughout the past four decades of attempted market making.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, Alexandria, Egypt, was a bustling transimperial port city, under nominal Ottoman and unofficial British imperial rule. Thousands of European subjects lived, worked, and died there. And when they died, the machinery of empire had to negotiate for space, resources, and control with the nascent national state. Imperial Bodies shows how the mechanisms of death became a tool for exerting both imperial and national governance. Shana Minkin investigates how French and British power asserted itself in Egypt through local consular claims of belonging manifested within the mundane caring for dead bodies. European communities corralled imperial bodies through the bureaucracies and rituals of death—from hospitals, funerals, and cemeteries to autopsies and death registrations. As they did so, imperial consulates pushed against the workings of both the Egyptian state and each other, expanding their governments' material and performative power. Ultimately, this book reveals how European imperial powers did not so much claim Alexandria as their own, as they maneuvered, manipulated, and cajoled their empires into Egypt.Trade Review"Through her in-depth research on death as a historical actor, Shana Minkin reveals new dimensions of the interactions among empires, foreign forces, and the local Egyptian national governance in their struggle over resources, space, and land. Thus, Minkin offers the reader no less than an entirely new reading of the history of colonial Alexandria under British rule, and the reactions of its imperial subjects. Imperial Bodies is an outstanding accomplishment, innovative and insightful."—Israel Gershoni, Tel Aviv University"Shana Minkin's book is empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated, and lucidly written. This social history of death in Alexandria offers a unique perspective on the practices that defined the European imperial project."—Thomas Kselman, University of Notre Dame"Shana Minkin's work on imperial death studies greatly enriches a Middle East field too long concerned with only big actors and forces of colonialism. Those who found final rest far from home deeply troubled consular agents whose mandate came to include communities of the deceased in Egypt and elsewhere. Imperial Bodies represents local and global history at its very best."—Julia Clancy-Smith, University of Arizona"Imperial Bodies is most useful for students of empire, particularly those who work transnationally....[Minkin's] construction and use of an alternative archive—the bodies of imperial subjects—is inventive and instructive."—Christopher S. Rose, H-Empire"From six feet under the surface... Minkin persuasively revisits the history of Alexandria, Egypt, and empire... Even if Minkin follows individuals through sickness, memorialization, and burial, hers is not a morbid or gloomy account. The author compellingly reframes death as an interimperial and local affair, while also disinterring the underground connection of both imperial and Egyptian governance to matters of dying and death."—Lucia Carminati, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Minkin uses consular and other records to reveal a side of Alexandria that has long been buried (pun intended) in an ahistorical attention to cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and nationalism that was more often an expression of desire of particular classes or constituencies than grounded historical realties. There is perhaps nothing more material and grounded than a corpse, and the failure to explore the stories of the actual dead is an odd oversight for a discipline that depends all too morbidly on death! Thus, Minkin can be considered among the groundbreakers in the historiography of modern life."—Wilson Chacko Jacob, Journal of British Studies"The tight conceptual focus on end-of-life and the book's creative use of sources (mostly archival sources but also literary works and physical cemeteries) contribute to making Minkin's work a success. ... Minkin's book will be welcomed by a wide audience."—Hannah-Louise Clark, American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Imperial Bodies of Alexandria 1. Foreign Hospitals, Local Institutions 2. Mourning the Dead, Connecting the Living 3. A House for the Dead, a Home for the Living 4. Dying to be French, Dying to be British Conclusion: The Death of Empire

Read more less

Book SynopsisKirkuk is Iraq's most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Over the following decades, Kirkuk became the heart of Iraq's booming petroleum industry. City of Black Gold tells a story of oil, urbanization, and colonialism in Kirkuk—and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk's citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict. Arbella Bet-Shlimon reconstructs the twentieth-century history of Kirkuk to question the assumptions about the past underpinning today's ethnic divisions. In the early 1920s, when the Iraqi state was formed under British administration, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid. But as the oil industry fostered colonial power and Baghdad's influence over Kirkuk, intercommunal violence and competing claims to the city's history took hold. The ethnicities of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs in Kirkuk were formed throughout a century of urban development, interactions between communities, and political mobilization. Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.Trade Review"This remarkable study of Kirkuk uncovers the ways in which the city became—and did not become—part of the Iraqi state. Arbella Bet-Shlimon bravely covers silenced histories, as she encourages us to look at Iraqi history through its northern urban peripheries. A fascinating urban history." -- Orit Bashkin * University of Chicago *"Based on extensive primary research, City of Black Gold is essential for anyone interested in the modern history of Iraq and the roots of the standoff between the government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government. Written with care and sensitivity, Arbella Bet-Shlimon's history of Kirkuk is a delight to read." -- Joost Hiltermann, Middle East and North Africa Program Director * International Crisis Group *"City of Black Gold is a masterful account of Kirkuk. Blending smooth storytelling and sharp analysis, Arbella Bet-Shlimon challenges readers to rethink much of what passes as conventional wisdom about Iraq, and about power, oil, and ethnicity in the twentieth century. A wonderful book, richly documented, accessible, and creative." -- Toby C. Jones * Rutgers University *"This fine social history of the city of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, traces a century of political upheaval." -- John Waterbury * Foreign Affairs *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe book's introduction raises the fundamental questions that drive this project: How did the politicization of ethnicity in Kirkuk come about, and what did that process have to do with petroleum, urbanization, colonialism, and Iraqi nation building? It argues that, throughout the twentieth century, oil, urbanization, and colonialism shaped Kirkukis' identity formation and relationship to the state and that the divided city that these forces built gave rise to an ethnic conflict. The introduction explains that oil was the central mediating factor that affected how other forces transformed Kirkuk in the twentieth century. It explains the significance of the book's approach to this subject, including the difficulty of finding a research methodology when studying a city that is hard to access and whose archives have repeatedly been destroyed. This introduction situates the book among relevant scholarly conversations about identity formation, the politics of oil, urban history, and nation building. 1The Forging of Iraq chapter abstractThis chapter concerns the beginnings of Kirkuk's process of political reorientation after the British occupation following World War I severed the town's formal ties with Ottoman Istanbul. It argues that opposition to centralization under a Baghdad-based government, which took several different forms, was the single most important political trend in Kirkuk and its rural hinterland from 1918 to the early 1920s and was bolstered by the ambiguity of Kirkuk's status as a part of the disputed Mosul region. Anticolonial forces in Kirkuk nevertheless had to contend with the patronage networks built by the officials of the British Empire among some local notables, and the division between these two groups formed Kirkuk's most potent political fault line at a time when the distinctions among ethnolinguistic groups were not at all clear and had little to do with political interests. 2The British Mandate chapter abstractThis chapter explores how Mandate rule in Kirkuk produced a variety of relationships between urban notables, rural leaders, corresponding communities, and British and Iraqi local and central government authorities. It finds that these relations were unpredictable as long as Kirkuk was caught in the territorial dispute between the British Empire's Iraq Mandate and the Republic of Turkey. After a treaty cemented the Mosul region's status as part of Iraq in 1926, the Turkish-speaking urban elite of Kirkuk began to exhibit closer and more consistent ties with Baghdad, creating an emergent but still minor ethnic dispute with the Kurdish community, which was more inclined to oppose centralization. The League of Nations mediation process to resolve the "Mosul question" had assumed that "Kurds," "Turks," "Arabs," and "Christians" each had distinct interests as a group, thereby creating a rigid, ethnically based paradigm that structured regional politics moving forward. 3Oil and Urban Growth chapter abstractThis chapter begins by analyzing Kirkuk's growth from a provincial market town into an oil city after the discovery of oil by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in 1927, along with the changes in geography, society, and politics that this process engendered. For instance, Kirkuk began to see immigration by those seeking work with the oil company at an accelerating rate. According to Iraqi censuses, many of these immigrants were Kurds from rural areas close to Kirkuk. At the same time, however, Baghdad expanded its influence in the city through the growing prevalence of Arabic-language use in schools. The IPC maintained an isolated existence of segregation and, despite its enormous influence in the city, lacked productive relations with its labor force. Kirkuki oil workers were therefore amenable to organizing under the auspices of the ascendant Iraqi Communist Party. Urban political tensions culminated in a 1946 strike during which Kirkuk police killed many oil workers, a watershed moment that stimulated the oil company's active involvement in Kirkuk's evolving urban political arena. 4The Ideology of Urban Development chapter abstractThis chapter examines the development and housing projects that resulted directly from the strike and the violent British-ordered police crackdown in 1946, defining the trajectory of Kirkuk's urban politics until the revolution of 1958. It analyzes the ways that these projects became sites of interaction and competition for influence between the company, British authorities, and Kirkuki and Iraqi authorities at several levels, lending increasing significance to the local political domain. The Iraq Petroleum Company, British officials, and Iraqi officials sought to promote the values of capitalism among Kirkuki oil workers to counter the influence of communism. The chapter also examines how the presence of the oil industry and of development projects aimed at achieving "modernity" also defined Kirkuk's civic identity as the Iraqi "city of black gold," which Kirkukis, other Iraqis, and Westerners alike portrayed eagerly in various public discourses. 5The Intercommunal Fight chapter abstractThis chapter returns to the theme of the ethnicization of local politics. It begins with the Iraqi revolution of 1958, which brought the development projects of the previous decade to a halt, led to the decline of British influence, and instantly altered the axes around which local politics in Kirkuk revolved. Unlike in the monarchy era, Kirkukis' political interests aligned with their ethnic groups in the revolutionary era more than with any other single attribute, leading to intercommunal violence. The Turkmen and Kurdish communities sought to assert their control over the city and its institutions literally and symbolically, demonstrating that the Kirkuki civic identity that had emerged in recent years exacerbated fault lines that corresponded with ethnicity. The Kurdish nationalist movement, which was based in areas north and east of Kirkuk, actively and forthrightly claimed Kirkuk's oil and turned the Kirkuk province into a battleground for the first time. Baghdad met these efforts with a level of brutality that, up to that point, had been unprecedented in modern Kirkuk and its hinterland. 6Nationalization and Arabization chapter abstractThis chapter covers the changes that Kirkuk experienced in the era of Ba'th (Baath) Party rule between 1968 and the 1990s. After the nationalization of the oil industry in 1972, the company became yet another manifestation of Baghdad's ever-growing influence in Kirkuk. The Ba'th regime, which was Arab nationalist at its roots, used ethnicity—in Arabic, qawmiyya—as shorthand for loyalty to the state, regarding all non-Arabs as suspect. The Ba'th regime intensified the process of consolidating Arabs' position in Kirkuk through administrative reforms, resettlement, and gerrymandering. Many non-Arabs were forced to formally register as Arabs, an active attempt to combat competing ethnonationalisms as well as cultural pluralism. This logic of Arabization culminated in ethnic cleansing and the Anfal genocide against the Kurds, which was planned from Kirkuk. Conclusion chapter abstractThe book's conclusion describes events in Kirkuk from the 1990s to the present, including the era of the Iraq War and the 2017 Kurdistan independence referendum. It urges readers to consider what the preceding chapters tell us about Kirkuk, and similar places, today. The conclusion argues that it is time to think beyond ethnopolitics when trying to understand the problems and possibilities of a diverse, disputed city such as Kirkuk. It notes that, for instance, Kirkukis' political stances are not wholly predictable on the basis of ethnicity. It argues that the complex of cultures and institutions that accompany the oil industry are part of Kirkukis' lives and political stances regardless of their individual relationships to the industry. It concludes with a call for a frank reckoning with Kirkuk's history of conflict and the role of oil in that conflict as part of any process of reconciliation.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.Trade Review"Chiara De Cesari provides a creative and thoroughly researched account of the way space and the material reality of buildings have become an important, if also contradictory, site for Palestinian claims. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in cultural and architectural heritage, urban transformation, museums, or landscape—and how these are used to counter dispossession." -- Helga Tawil-Souri * New York University *"Chiara De Cesari boldly and creatively shows that politics does not always happen where we expect it to be. In this book, heritage emerges as a site of political mobilization, one in which Palestinian women do more than play a central part: They shape the idioms and create the very materiality in which the temporalities of struggle are woven through people's lives. Through the stories of activists, architects, and residents of Palestine, De Cesari makes a strong case for how Palestinian heritage can make claims and demands on the Israeli state." -- Ann Laura Stoler * The New School for Social Research *"This pathbreaking book links cultural heritage and the postcolonial condition in new and provocative ways. Chiara De Cesari's nuanced ethnography of Palestine reconfigures our understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and culture." -- John F. Collins * author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy *"De Cesari's rigorous analysis takes the reader through a web of complexities which show the different dynamics of heritage. A meticulous treatise indeed—the book makes for valuable reading, in particular when it comes to understanding the many layers of resistance against cultural dispossession and Israel's colonial violence." -- Ramona Wadi * The New Arab *"Chiara De Cesari's book on Palestine appears as a groundbreaking work that offers a different option for understanding how heritage is deployed in a proxy state, a political entity under siege, whose international sovereignty is still being renegotiated." -- Cheikh Lo * Journal of Folklore Research *"De Cesari argues convincingly that NGOs and museums are initiating processes of institutionalization and governance in the absence of a stable [Palestinian] state....This book provides an important opening for a critical discussion regarding the ways in which the word "Palestine" has not lost meaning." -- Rasmieyh R. Abdelnabi * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Chiara de Cesari's study is noteworthy for its acute analysis of the relations between cultural heritage and the nation-state, and for the thoroughness with which she examines this relationship in the case of Palestine." -- Rosemary Sayigh * Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies *"Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine is an illuminating study, useful for both a better understanding of life and struggles in Palestine, and for a broader discussion of the politics of heritage." -- Adi Kuntsman * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Stakes of Heritage and the Politics of Culture chapter abstractThe introduction opens with the story of the Palestinian heritage organization rehabilitating the occupied and colonized Old City of Hebron. This story encapsulates many facets of the book, particularly the relationship between heritage making and Palestinians laying claims to sovereignty (that is, resisting colonization) and instantiating provisional, improvised, resourceful forms of government. It lays out the key argument of the book that Palestinian heritage has transformed from a practice of resistance into a mode of "governing" the Palestinian landscape and society that is deeply connected to transnational regimes of development and a precarious if resourceful process of state building in the absence of a sovereign state. Finally, the introduction outlines the book's key theoretical concerns: how heritage functions in mutating colonial formations and as a form of anticolonial governmentality beyond the nation-state as well as the work of heritage as expanding transnational framework of practices and meanings. 1A Political History of Palestinian Heritage chapter abstractChapter 1 examines the history of heritage preservation in Palestine in the 20th century. It begins with the work of Palestinian orientalists and ethnographers under the British Mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, to analyze how they rework colonial science in the spirit of a nascent Palestinian cultural nationalism. It then focuses on the Folklore Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and particularly its connection to the national liberation movement and the women's movement as well as its practice of anticolonial resistance and activist preservation in the occupied territories. 2Government Through Heritage in Old Hebron chapter abstractChapter 2 discusses the project of historic conservation and urban revitalization in the Old City of Hebron, which remained under Israeli control after the Oslo Accords because of the presence of several Jewish settlements. The chapter explores informal governmentalities through heritage. Countering the settlers' takeover of the Old City, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee has restored and repopulated a large part of the city's dilapidated central quarters. But in order to sustain livelihoods in difficult conditions, it has begun to work on socioeconomic development through a broad set of interventions, adopting the language and practices of international development. Over the years, with the Palestinian Authority not being able to work in the occupied Old City, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee has come to function as a hybrid institution of local government. 3Heritage, NGOs, and State Making chapter abstractChapter 3 examines the state-building role of heritage NGOs and the complex relationship between these organizations and the heritage body of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It argues that the Palestinian heritage movement or "heritage by NGOs" helps create and sustain not only icons and rituals of cultural nationalism but also a national infrastructure of heritage preservation and a set of national institutions alternative to those of the PA, like inventories, heritage units, master plans, and laws. In addition to preserving Palestinian identity and reclaiming Palestinian lands, West Bank organizations wish to ameliorate the living conditions of historic districts' residents and villagers and so intervene in the spaces and habits of their everyday life. In so doing—and in the context of the PA's structural weakness—they experiment with a range of modes of planning and governance, and enact a form of resourceful statecraft from the margins of the state. 4Palestinian National Museums Post-Oslo chapter abstractPlacing heritage initiatives in the context of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank, Chapter 4 discusses the peculiar history of post-Oslo museums; if the Palestinian Authority has failed to create a major national museum—as a key institution of national representation—also due to a fundamental lack of objects and museum collections, Palestinian artists and cultural producers have instead experimented with different museum formats, creating virtual museums and nomadic museums in exile, thus producing creative national institutions in transnational spaces. These alternative museums walk a tightrope between establishing authority (as institutionality, as rules and regulations, as an authoritative museum voice) and challenging such authority to promote radical, democratic practices. Conclusion: Cultural Governmentality and Activist Statehood chapter abstractThe conclusion opens with an examination of the Islamic Movement and Palestinian activist preservation in Israel targeting the remains of the Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948 when the Israeli state was established. It compares this heritage work with the work of Palestinian NGOs in the West Bank, which have moved toward development and institution building, or a kind of activist statehood. The conclusion then makes an argument for the relevance of new forms of cultural governmentality and heritage-led development well beyond Palestine.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThere are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.Trade Review"With stunning analytic precision, intellectual grace, and captivating ethnography, Ayşe Parla takes on key debates about precarity and hope. If the migrant is the quintessential figure of our anxious times, this magnificent book is the essential guide to thinking more politically and profoundly about her predicament." -- Lila Abu-Lughod * Columbia University *"Boldness is required in writing a book on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of hope. It is Ayşe Parla's remarkable achievement to have developed in such context an insightful critique of this affective relation to the world. Her fine-grained ethnography offers a profound reflection on ethnonational communities and their imagined futures." -- Didier Fassin * Institute for Advanced Study *"One leaves this book with a profound understanding of hope as a tool of governmentality, a way of being in the world, and a political act. Ayşe Parla shows us how deeply connected law, politics, and emotions are in the precarious lives of migrants." -- Esra Özyürek * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Ayşe Parla's study is truly original and thought-provoking in its focus on the Bulgaristanlı immigrants, a group both welcomed as 'Turkish kin' and marked as different at the same time....Precarious Hope is a welcome and indeed, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the hopes for belonging that migrants have and how they manage the precariousness of legal recognition." -- Nikos Christofis * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *"It is Parla's insightful, grounded treatment of the unequal distribution of hope that represents the most productive through line inPrecarious Hope, one that might enrich often unproductive discussions surrounding hope and activism in unequal societies." -- Brian Van Wyck * H-Migration *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Shielding Hope chapter abstractThe introduction maps the contours of Turkey's migration regime, highlighting its peculiarities in terms of minimal regulation, its excessive reliance on circulars and exceptions, and its religious and racialized criteria for who qualifies as a migrant. It provides a historical overview of migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey since the twentieth century to situate the predicament of the post-1990 labor migrants. It thus presents the ways in which the deep-seated alliance between religious identity (Sunni-Islam) and ethnoracial identity (Turkishness) have defined the legal and affective structures of belonging in Turkey, which in turn, constitute the structural conditions of possibility on which the hope of contemporary Bulgaristanlı migrants rests. The chapter also outlines the theoretical approach taken to hope as a collective structure of feeling that is simultaneously conducive to perseverance and complicit in exclusionary acts. 1The Historical Production of Hope chapter abstractThis chapter probes the cultural significance and legal ramifications of the category of soydaş (racial kin) claimed by the Bulgaristanlı. It locates the status of being soydaş within the hierarchy of otherness produced by Turkey's citizenship regime. Presenting a historical account of migration policy toward soydaş since the founding of the Turkish nation-state, it explains the ebb and flow in the privileges granted to soydaş through a constellation of factors that include ethnonational appropriation, transpolitical instrumentalization, and labor market exploitation. The chapter demonstrates how the status of soydaş both enables legal and cultural access and also reinstates a distance from unmarked belonging. Such strategic but uneasy appropriations of identification as soydaş provide a window onto the hegemonic grammar of racialized citizenship in Turkey not from the point of view of those who are most marginalized but from the point of view of the relatively privileged. 2Entitled Hope chapter abstractThis chapter explores the political and affective economy of hope. It demonstrates how the hope for legalization is differentially distributed and embodied across different migrant groups. This chapter develops the notion of "entitled hope" to characterize the hope cultivated by the Bulgaristanlı migrants. Rather than hoping against the odds, entitled hope veers closer to expectation and draws on a different lineage of thinking about hope that locates its kernel in rationality and attainability. In its emphasis on hope as "structured expectation," this chapter presents ethnographic accounts of the expressions and performances of hope that Bulgaristanlı migrants enact and take for granted in their encounters with the law. Finally, even as this chapter attends to the affective aspects of the differential distribution of hope, it argues against an ontological or epistemological gap between affect and emotion. 3Precarious Hope chapter abstractIf the notion of entitled hope is intended to highlight expectation and likelihood, the notion of precarious hope that is elaborated in chapter 3 aims to capture the uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants. The chapter presents thick descriptions of precarity experienced by Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, and work in the exploitative market of domestic labor. Heeding the ever-present tension between privilege and precarity in the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants who are neither entirely exposed nor entirely protected in their legal and economic status, this chapter also attempts to demarcate the concept of precarity from vulnerability. 4Nostalgia as Hope chapter abstractAlthough ethnic affinity provides a certain protection from the marginalization and harassment routinely faced by other undocumented migrant women in Turkey, the Bulgaristanlı women's morality, too, can quickly become suspect if they are perceived as straying too far from expected gendered norms of dress, demeanor, or work habits. Bulgaristanlı women, in turn, counter the resentment of the class- and gender-based marginalization they suffer through recourse to post-communist nostalgia. Rather than reducing post-communist nostalgia to a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, chapter 4 explores the ways in which Bulgaristanlı migrants utilize post-communist nostalgia as a resource to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. Considering the temporalities of hope in their full range, the chapter also suggests that any residual attachments to the communist past are manufactured into hopes for a more secure future. Conclusion: Troubling Hope chapter abstractThe concluding chapter brings together the theoretical grounds and the ethnographic terrain covered in the book to posit hope as a criticizable category of analysis and experience. It challenges neat distinctions between goal-oriented hope and open-ended hope by foregrounding the struggles of migrants who hope for the reasonably expected rather than desire the wildly unexpected. It discusses the troubling implications for migrant activism of associating hope only with possibility at the expense of probability. The conclusion reiterates why it is not only crisis-laden hope that carries significance. Hope that is emboldened by a sense of entitlement but that nonetheless remains precarious speaks to a larger predicament in which increasing numbers of migrants and citizens grapple with a relentless anxiety that is barely held in balance by the production and collective cultivation of hope within structures of inequality. A Note on Method, or Hopeful Waiting in Lines chapter abstractThis short chapter describes the scope, duration, and sites of fieldwork as well as the different ethnographic methods deployed. It also discusses questions of categorization, positionality, and the relationship between ethnography and epistemology, especially as it pertains to research on emotions.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life—one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire tells his story, part biography and part global history, as his life and legacy afford a singular view on historical shifts of power and sovereignty, religion and politics. Wilson Chacko Jacob recasts the genealogy of modern sovereignty through the encounter between Islam and empire-states in the Indian Ocean world. Fadl's travels in worlds seen and unseen made for a life that was both unsettled and unsettling. And through his life at least two forms of sovereignty—God and empire—become apparent in intersecting global contexts of religion and modern state formation. While these changes are typically explained in terms of secularization of the state and the birth of rational modern man, the life and afterlives of Sayyid Fadl—which take us from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean worlds to twenty-first century cyberspace—offer a more open-ended global history of sovereignty and a more capacious conception of life.Trade Review"For God or Empire is a gripping global history of the Indian Ocean world, with striking theoretical implications. Wilson Chacko Jacob both recounts the story of modern state sovereignty and troubles it from the grounds of divine sovereignty that cannot be simply read as political theology. A brilliant critical historical inquiry into the present of state sovereignty, threaded with and opposed by life's other trajectories." -- Samera Esmeir * University of California, Berkeley *"Wilson Chacko Jacob joins the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds within a hitherto hidden global history to explore the making and movement of ideas. A forceful intellectual intervention in the way we understand sovereignty." -- Faisal Devji * University of Oxford *"[A] robust biographical rendering which also paints an inverted picture of the modern political subject....For God or Empire is a refreshing and vital theoretical intervention in the study of the Indian Ocean and for intellectual history more broadly." -- Taushif Kara * H-Diplo *"For God or Empire is at once an impressively scholarly, highly imaginative, and hugely challenging book....this is a very fine analysis, presenting an in-depth account of a remarkable man living through a turbulent historical era." -- Pnina Werbner * Pacific Affairs *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity. Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.Trade Review"The Lived Nile offers a creative and smart account of a river and a nation, fluidly braiding together a history of labor, disease, and political economy, brimming with keen insight and filled with unexpected turns." -- Gregg Mitman * University of Wisconsin-Madison *"The Lived Nile offers a highly original synthesis of environmental and political history. Jennifer Derr shows how the remaking of the Nile River in the colonial period remade the very bodies of the country's political subjects." -- Timothy Mitchell * Columbia University *"A brilliant book, The Lived Nile captures the complexities and unintended consequences of experts intervening in a river's flow—and the displaced and diseased bodies that result—in a most compelling story. This is history at its best." -- Beth Baron * author of The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood *"The Nile River has sustained Egypt's material economy for millennia, a role Derr argues has continued into the colonial era, though subject to external considerations. Egypt's integration into the British imperial economy as a producer of sugar and cotton, combined with the poverty of its landowning class, reshaped the material culture of the river. Highly recommended." -- S. L. Smith * CHOICE *"Jennifer Derr has written an innovative and well researched study....The book is concise, well organized, and a pleasure to read. It will interest medical historians and geographers as well as specialists in Egyptian and African history. The illustrations are well selected, and the bibliography is useful. With a massive new dam rising on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, the book could not be timelier." -- Nancy E. Gallagher * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *"Situated at the intersection of the history of science, the history of medicine, and the history of the body, as well as environmental history and the history of technology, The Lived Nile stands out for the way it brings science and technology studies into conversation with the social and political history of the Middle East. This is an important undertaking, and a great deal of work still remains to be done before our field truly reflects what a global phenomenon the practice of science became in the modern world. Derr's book offers a timely contribution in this regard, bringing archival depth and conceptual rigor to her study of a part of the world that deserves far more attention among science studies scholars. This, in addition to its empirical richness and analytical rigor, should make it required reading for scholars interested in the global history of science, the relationship between science and capitalism, and the intersection between knowledge, the environment, and the state." -- Lukas Rieppel * Brown University, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: A River, Remade: Making Subjects on the Perennial Nile chapter abstractThe Introduction describes Egypt's colonial economy and outlines the book's main areas of intervention. The chapter describes the forms of agricultural production on which Egypt's colonial economy rested, arguing that while cotton was Egypt's top-ranking export, perennial irrigation facilitated the production of other crops, specifically sugarcane and maize, that also shaped the conditions of rural life. It then argues that bodily experiences of colonial economy included new encounters with disease, the experience of which was central to the production of the subject. This chapter next makes an argument that the experience of authority in the countryside was geographically variable and constituted by an assemblage of actors. Finally, the Introduction explores the nature of expert knowledge, arguing for the significance of acts of performance in constituting this knowledge. 1Nile Articulations: Decolonizing the History of Irrigation Engineering chapter abstractChapter 1 revisits the work of irrigation engineering and the construction of the perennial Nile River in the nineteenth century. This chapter chronicles the emergence of the profession and training of state engineers under Egypt's strong governor Mehmed Ali. It then compares these engineers to those in the British Empire. Finally, this chapter examines the processes through which British engineers learned Nile irrigation while working to establish themselves as colonial experts. The historiography of British irrigation engineering in Egypt has begun from the notion that British engineers possessed great skill. This chapter challenges this notion by situating these engineers within the historical context of nineteenth-century Egypt and revisiting their work in Egypt and the performative strategies they deployed to establish their knowledge. 2The Dammed Nile: The Thirty-Year Project to Build Khazan Aswan chapter abstractChapter 2 chronicles the construction of the first modern dam on the Nile River and the two subsequent projects to heighten it. The chapter charts the material processes through which the dam was constructed and threatened as well as the forms of political economic aspiration and erasure that were attached to the structure during its first three decades of existence. It argues that during the British colonial period and that of the interwar-period Egyptian regime, the dam helped to support a particular geography of capital production. It also lent the perennial Nile a degree of permanency and shaped the conditions of possibility for the production of expertise moving forward. This chapter also traces the progressive displacement of historical Nubia during the first three decades of the twentieth century. 3Beyond the Frontier: Negotiating the Geography of Authority in Egypt's South chapter abstractChapter 3 explores the histories of the areas of central and southern Egypt that were perennially irrigated, focusing on the production of sugarcane in Egypt. Beginning in the 1860s, Khedive Ismail established a sugarcane industry on his estates, the Daira Sanieh. Following the construction of Khazan Aswan, cotton moved into central Egypt, pushing sugarcane south. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Egyptian Sugar Company, controlled by the same colonial capitalists who helped build the dam and profited from the production of cotton, controlled large swathes of southern Egypt. "Beyond the Frontier" argues that the history of central and southern Egypt demonstrates the geographically variable nature of colonial authority in the Egyptian countryside. It also describes everyday contestations over authority and the violence that marked labor and daily life in these regions. 4Cruel Summer: Environmental Labors and the Scales of Subject Making chapter abstractChapter 4 follows perennial irrigation into the bodies of laborers and cultivators in the countryside. The introduction and extension of perennial irrigation produced new agricultural ecologies and modes of environmental engagement, in particular labor. One effect of these changes was a dramatic uptick in the prevalence of the disease pellagra and infection with the parasites schistosomiasis and hookworm. The majority of the population in perennially irrigated regions suffered from at least one—and often more than one—of these diseases. Just as the bodies of many rural Egyptians were transformed, practitioners in Egypt formed colonial medical projects based on a racialized understanding of bodies afflicted by the diseases of perennial irrigation. They posited disease as normative and formulated ideas of the Egyptian epidemic as ancient, eliding the role of colonial economy in fueling disease. 5Treated Subjects: Irrigating the Veins of the Nation chapter abstractChapter 5 explores the history of the project to treat hookworm and schistosomiasis in Egypt. In the period preceding World War I, British occupation authorities organized a limited project to survey and treat hookworm. When the program resumed after the war, it was paired with that for schistosomiasis. Under the interwar-period regime, treatment programs expanded throughout the countryside, treating millions of Egyptians for parasitic disease. Efforts to treat disease were complemented by those of the Rockefeller Foundation to stem its spread through sanitation programs. During the decades of the interwar period, the ecologies of disease associated with the perennial Nile helped to shape the terms of medical expertise and gave Egyptian scientists and physicians an entrée into a field of tropical medicine that continued to be dominated by racial hierarchies. Conclusion: The Afterlives of the Perennial Subject chapter abstractThe Conclusion summarizes the book's primary contributions to the literature. First, it outlines the role of perennial irrigation and the behaviors associated with it in fueling disease and the significance of symptoms in producing new normative habitations of the body. It then describes the role of treatment programs in producing national (physical) subjects. Second, the Conclusion describes the manner in which authority was constituted as a geographically and temporally variable assemblage in the countryside during Egypt's colonial economy. Finally, it discusses the significance for materiality in the production and practice of expertise and that of acts of performance in establishing expertise as authority among engineers and medical practitioners. The Conclusion then follows the constructions of the perennial subject into the period that followed the end of Egypt's colonial economy, exploring the afterlives of the environment of Egypt's colonial economy.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 1943, Lebanon gained its formal political independence from France; only after two more decades did the country finally establish a national central bank. Inaugurated on April 1, 1964, the Banque du Liban (BDL) was billed by Lebanese authorities as the nation's primary symbol of economic sovereignty and as the last step towards full independence. In the local press, it was described as a means of projecting state power and enhancing national pride. Yet the history of its founding—stretching from its Ottoman origins in mid-nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth—tells a different, more complex story. Banking on the State reveals how the financial foundations of Lebanon were shaped by the history of the standardization of economic practices and financial regimes within the decolonizing world. The system of central banking that emerged was the product of a complex interaction of war, economic policies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests. It served rather than challenged the interests of an oligarchy of local bankers. As Hicham Safieddine shows, the set of arrangements that governed the central bank thus was dictated by dynamics of political power and financial profit more than market forces, national interest or economic sovereignty.Trade Review"Banking on the State is a brilliant exploration of finance and banking as sites of state formation, sovereignty, regional alliances, and national subjectivities. By revealing the institutional origins of bank power in Lebanon, Hicham Safieddine rewrites the history of a misunderstood place. He challenges us to rethink sectarianism, exceptionalism, and civil strife." -- Sherene Seikaly * University of California, Santa Barbara *"Banking on the State makes a critical contribution to emerging research on Lebanon's political economy. Hicham Safieddine takes on critical questions and provides illuminating new insights, sure to help shift debates on Lebanon." -- Bassam Haddad * George Mason University *"A profoundly rich and highly readable account of Lebanon's financial foundations. Hicham Safieddine tells a riveting story of how Lebanon's banking system came to be the way it is—tracing the complex interplay of private finance and public policy, and the global (and regional) forces that so powerfully shaped the emergence of state institutions in Lebanon. A stunning book that upturns much of the conventional wisdom about Lebanese politics and economics, while also pushing new conceptual boundaries in how we think about the entwined histories of central banks, financial markets, and state sovereignty." -- Adam Hanieh * author of Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Contemporary Political Economy of the Middle East *"As some in Lebanon may prepare to celebrate the country's first century (1920–2020), this study of its financial foundations is not only a brilliant rewriting of history but also timely and prescient." -- Clement M. Henry * Middle East Journal *"Banking on the State is an innovative and groundbreaking contribution to the historiography of Lebanon. It is a treasure for researchers and students interested in the political, social, or economic history of Lebanon as well as financial history and post-colonial state building more broadly." –Ziad Abu-Rish, International Journal of Middle East Studies"While economic histories have explored the banking sector's centrality to Lebanon's political economy, scholars have not historicized the financial system's institutional foundations or analyzed bankers as a social group. In that light, Hicham Safieddine's groundbreaking monograph, Banking on the State, could not be more timely." -- Oain Lawson * Arab Studies Quarterly *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Introduction: Illusions of Financial Independence chapter abstractThe introduction highlights the fact that although insightful studies of colonizing projects and postcolonial Arab state formation in a late and post-Ottoman context have covered the realms of education, military, law, civic space, and, later, the economy, Lebanese finance has rarely if ever been studied. This book addresses that lacuna. It explores the role of central banking in the making of Middle Eastern states both at the level of challenging dominant ideologies of political economy, like Michel Chiha's laissez-faire paradigm, and at the level of rethinking institution-building in relation to private lobbying groups like the Association of Banks in Lebanon and government regulatory structures like the central bank. The introduction offers an alternative reading of Lebanon's political economy that shies away from the fetishized invocation of sectarianism as a primary explanatory variable of historical change. 2The Long Monetary Mandate chapter abstractChapter 2 traces the evolution of central banking in Lebanon first under the Ottoman Imperial bank (BIO) and later under French occupation. The BIO's successor, the Banque de Syrie et du Liban (BSL), became the primary institutional guardian of a long French monetary mandate over Lebanon and Syria. Colonial authority guaranteed BSL legitimacy and its privileged position within an emerging national space. In return, BSL policies reproduced the dominance of French capital in the money market. More broadly, mandatory financial regulations, including BSL policies, played a central role in the formation of a new monetary space stretching from Lebanon to Iraq that underpinned the emergence of what is best described as heteronomous national economies. 3Central Bank Reform: Ideas and Institutions chapter abstractThe conflict over Lebanon's financial regulatory regime and economic orientation was not only of interests, but also of ideas. Chapter 3 explores the role of a group of "money doctors" at the International Monetary Fund and the American University of Beirut who tried to argue for economic reform and banking regulation after World War II. They challenged the dominant paradigm of laissez-faire espoused by followers of Michel Chiha in public fora like the Cénacle libanais and acted as emissaries of global currents of thought, namely, a modified version of economic institutionalism as propounded by the U.S. economist Wesley Mitchell. The chapter examines the ideal central bank prototypes that they believed "underdeveloped" countries like Lebanon should adopt. 4Barons of Banking: The Untouchables chapter abstractChapter 4 recounts the conflict within the bankers' ranks and vis-à-vis state technocrats and government ministers over the form and extent of banking regulation during the post–World War II post–World War II "merchant republic" era." The chapter examines failed projects of setting up development banks and traces the transformation of the banking community into an organized and powerful lobby thanks to the efforts led by the Eddé brothers, Raymond and Pierre. The former introduced banking secrecy legislation. The latter spearheaded the formation of the association of banks in Lebanon (ABL) in 1959, the first of its kind in the Arab world. The ABL managed to prevent central banking reform from tampering with the laissez-faire system at the basis of its power and prestige. 5Banque du Liban: A Façade of Economic Sovereignty: chapter abstractChapter 5 analyzes the making of the central bank in relation to the social reform project of Lebanese President Fuad Chehab (in office 1958–64), which was inspired by contemporary trends of state-led management of national economies. It is a comparative examination of the provisions of the 1964 Law of Money and Credit, which acted as the primary legal framework of Lebanon's financial regulatory system and monetary policy. The law laid out the statutes establishing the BDL and outlining its monetary policy mandate and management structure. Placed in the context of Arab financial reform, the chapter shows how the BDL under the direction of the former BIO official Joseph Oughourlian retained a degree of managerial autonomy vis-à-vis the government and the banks. Such autonomy that reflected Chehab's philosophy of planned laissez-faire. 6Suits and Shadows: The Intra Affair chapter abstractChapter 6 investigates the crash of one the region's top banks, Intra, which became a subject of conspiracy theories. The crisis took place two years after the BDL's inauguration and exposed the fragility of the financial system. It reflected the degree to which the Lebanese state lacked economic sovereignty and robust financial control. The chapter shows how the collapse of Intra, founded by the Palestinian-Lebanese businessman Yusif Beidas, was the product of structural transformation of the world's political economy combined with contingent historical developments and conspiratorial actions. Regionally, the outflow of Arab capital away from Beirut was intertwined with Arab Cold War political rivalries between Cairo and Riyadh. Locally, the structural limitations of the newly founded central banking system combined with the decision by Lebanese governing elites to sink Intra in order to save their market share and the laissez-faire system sustaining it. 7Financial Regime Change: The Last Refuge of Laissez-faire chapter abstractThe Intra crisis was itself a turning point in shaping the regulatory role of the BDL. The chapter traces the supranational policy networks that impacted the decision-making process. Aided by American experts like Roger Tamraz and Eugene Black, legal restructuring of the sector took place. Reforms included a temporary ban on entry to the banking sector, which led to international capital taking over local shares, as well as the introduction of a deposit insurance scheme. These new measures led to the emergence of banker-bureaucrats and banker-technocrats like Elias Sarkis, who was appointed BDL governor, and Salim Hoss, the first head of the Banking Control Commission. Both, among others, oversaw construction of a new financial regulatory regime that institutionalized and protected rather than overhauled laissez-faire well after the civil war that broke out in 1975, the closing point of the book. 8Conclusion: Sovereign Debt, Sovereign Banks chapter abstractBy the end of the civil war, Lebanon had become internationally synonymous with a failed state and endemic sectarian violence. State institutions including the military, the judiciary, the presidency, parliament, and public education were seen as weak, corrupt, partisan, or powerless. The conclusions show how, by contrast, the central bank remained largely resilient in the face of war, significantly autonomous from government intervention, and relatively immune to sectarian manipulation. Thanks to debt-dependent postwar reconstruction projects implemented by Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and financial engineering policies designed by the BDL's governor, Riad Salameh, Lebanese banks were able to secure a steady source and high level of profit via sovereign lending. Throughout Hariri's era and following his assassination in 2005, the BDL and the big banks remained key decision-makers in managing the debt, the currency, and the money market.

Read more less

Book SynopsisKate Millett was already an icon of American feminism when she went to Iran in 1979. She arrived just weeks after the Iranian Revolution, to join Iranian women in marking International Women's Day. Intended as a day of celebration, the event turned into a week of protests. Millett, armed with film equipment and a cassette deck to record everything around her, found herself in the middle of demonstrations for women's rights and against the mandatory veil. Listening to the revolutionary soundscape of Millett's audio tapes, Negar Mottahedeh offers a new interpretive guide to Revolutionary Iran, its slogans, habits, and women's movement—a movement that, many claim, Millett never came to understand. Published with the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the women's protests that followed on its heels, Whisper Tapes re-introduces Millett's historic visit to Iran and lays out the nature of her encounter with the Iranian women's movement.Trade Review"Lyrical, intelligent, and passionately written,Whisper Tapes reignites a long dormant conversation about the urgency of global feminism. This book is intensely relevant as we continue to assess the aftermath of revolutions throughout the Middle East, and the ways they have been fueled by women's rage on the one hand and unfulfilled hope for gender equity on the other." -- Shilyh Warren * University of Texas at Dallas *"Whisper Tapes is a fascinating book that illuminates the muddled state of affairs that unfolded in Iran at the celebration of International Women's Day in 1979. In offering a deeply contingent history, Negar Mottahedeh beautifully shows Kate Millett's simultaneous closeness to and distance from the events surrounding her." -- Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi * Princeton University *"By embedding her analysis in responsible histories of Iran and its place on the international stage, Mottahedeh masterfully deconstructs the biases of American feminism and how they have influenced Millett's understanding of the experiences of Iranian women in a postrevolutionary society. Lyrical in style and poetic in meaning, Whisper Tapes challenges readers to adopt an intersectional view of Iranian feminist movements while adding layers and dimensionality to Millett's preexisting literature."––Aisha Jitan, The Middle East Journal"Mottahedeh's illuminating study complements [Kate] Millett's work and offers a more nuanced reading of a historic moment." -- Lucy Popescu * Times Literary Supplement *

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia. With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.Trade Review"This utterly brilliant book will be a classic. Sa'ed Atshan's comprehensive study of queer Palestinian activism provides a rich understanding of the complex intersections of selfhood, activism, and belonging. By demonstrating the limits of binarisms of East/West and self/other through detailed empirical analysis and powerful theoretical interventions, Atshan has given us a landmark work valuable to Middle East studies, queer studies, and anthropology in the broadest sense."—Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine, author of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia "Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique is a breath of fresh air! In the academic climate in which 'radical' has become synonymous with crude schisms between West and East, authentic and inauthentic, pure and sellout, this book provides a much-needed nuanced account of Queer Palestine. Sa'ed Atshan carefully historicizes the local terrain and rightly problematizes how US-based scholarship has turned the critique of empire into an empire of critique. This is a brilliant call for academic self-reflection and a brave rejection of so-called radical myths of cultural authenticity."—Gil Z. Hochberg, Columbia University "Sa'ed Atshan brilliantly weaves together ethnography and personal experience in the most thoughtful, engaging, and emotionally captivating ways. His sophisticated work captures the nexus of a scholar-activist, offering an authoritative account of the challenges and trajectory of the Palestinian LGBTQ movement. A tour de force and a remarkable book for both its theoretical and empirical contributions."—Amaney A. Jamal, Princeton University "This powerful and prophetic book shows that the struggle for justice and freedom against empire and homophobia are indivisible. Sa'ed Atshan's text is a major intellectual force for good."—Cornel West, Harvard University "In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Sa'ed Atshan provides a brilliant theorization of an excessive mode of political critique that strives for the high ground yet contributes to the calcification of social justice movements. Through a nuanced ethnography that foregrounds the plurality of queer experience in Israel and Palestine and the enormous complexity of the global Palestinian solidarity movement, Atshan demonstrates how an intellectual stance that combines a conviction of the moral superiority of one's political judgments with deep suspicion concerning others' complicity in relations of domination and the likely oppressive consequences of prescriptions for social transformation engenders discursive disenfranchisement, loss of key intellectual distinctions, neglect of pragmatic constraints, demoralization of activists, and the truncation of transnational queer solidarity. This deeply insightful book makes vital contributions to Queer Studies, Middle East Studies, Social Movement Studies, and an understanding of the dynamics of social justice praxis."—Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University "Atshan's book, an autoethnography of queer Palestine, is methodologically impeccable, incorporating academic work and personal positioning. He advances a philosophy of critique centered on the everyday material lives of people, that is both complex and masterfully written. He makes a bold and thought-provoking argument—one that speaks to social justice activists as well as academics."—2020 Lee Ann Fujii Book Award Committee, International Studies Association "[A] timely and urgent account....Along with a succinct presentation of the immense challenges faced by the LGBTQ-identifying Palestinians, Atshan highlights Palestinian agency, ingenuity, and resilience."—Joshua Donova, New Books Network "[Atshan] immaculately illustrates the development of movements along with the challenges they face by both conservative Palestinians and Arabs at large and by the repressive occupation. This work is pioneering and fills a significant gap within Middle East Studies."—Lana Shehadeh, Arab Studies Quarterly "The goal of Atshan's sensitive 'critique of critique' is fostering a 'transforming activism with loving energy' that helps the Palestinian LGBTQ movement start to grow again and reach its full potential. His long-term hope is 'that Israelis and Palestinians, straight and queer, can all live together as equals.' My hope is that all Friends will seek to find ways to help achieve this healing vision."—Steve Chase, Friends Journal "Atshan's work, in describing the empire of critique surrounding the queer Palestinian experience, demonstrates the highly politicised nature of certain rights and their potential to be weaponised in order to subvert the gaze from other issues. Furthermore, through his analysis of the heterogeneity of narratives surrounding this liberation movement, he reminds us that the voices of those that exist at these intersections of oppressions should and must be the loudest."—Iona Cable, Human Rights Pulse "Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique is a much-needed contribution to queer studies, Middle East studies, and scholarship on social movements and a must-read for those who are committed to the difficult politics of solidarity."—Evren Savci, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies "This is a most timely and admirably courageous book that challenges the seeming gap between queer activism and anthropology...Atshan shows that anthropology has the potential to support local activist struggles against homophobia and imperialism by rigorously engaging with, rather than dismissing, the experiences and views of these activists—their simultaneous engagement with multiple axes of oppression."—2021 Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee, Association for Queer Anthropology "Atshan makes a major contribution to the study of social movements generally and the queer Palestinian movement specifically. Atshan conceptually explores resistance and identity in the context of Israeli and Palestinian conflict. He offers an empirically rich and compelling account, where readers are let into the everyday life of the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement."—Sara Salman, Contemporary Sociology "The nature of life under colonisation and occupation, in Atshan's view, means that no one, not even 'the most radical activists and academics', can lay claim to the moral high ground. Everyone is implicated in some way. It's better to edge forward in modest ways."—Tareq Baconi, London Review of Books "[Atshan's] work fills gaps and addresses the silences and deliberate erasures in Palestine studies, Middle East studies, Middle East anthropology, queer theories, and peace and conflict studies, showing how 'queer liberation cannot be realized while colonial subjugation persists,' because these struggles are 'inextricably linked' (p. 222). Scholars and students engaged in Israel/Palestine and settler colonial struggles will benefit from this auto/ethnographic text of subjectivities on the ground."—Bernardita M. Yunis (Varas), International Journal of Communication "Atshan's work is candid, self-critical, and unexpectedly inspiring."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs "[Atshan's] book is the culmination, at least for now, of his years-long effort to persuade his activist community to simultaneously oppose Israeli rule and Palestinian homophobia, and not privilege the one over the other... Atshan's book is a trenchant clarion call, harnessed to the words of the iconic African American poet Audre Lorde: 'there is no hierarchy of oppressions.'"—Abe Silberstein, The Tel Aviv Review of Books Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: "there is no hierarchy of oppressions" chapter abstractThis introductory chapter foregrounds Audre Lorde's words that "there is no hierarchy of oppressions." It extends this thesis to the central question at the heart of this book, which is how transnational progressive social movements are able (or not) to balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis at once. The focus here is on the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, revealing its original aim to empower queer Palestinians to achieve national and sexual freedom. The chapter defines the critical concepts that help account for the rise of this movement in Palestine and globally. These concepts include the empire of critique, radical purists, discursive disenfranchisement, movement plateau, pinkwashing, pinkwatching, ethnocracy, homophobia, Zionism, ethnoheteronormativity, and the white gaze. This chapter also contextualizes this project within the intellectual genealogy of which it is a part. Chapter 1: LGBTQ Palestinians and the Politics of the Ordinary chapter abstractChapter 1 traces the rise of the LGBTQ Palestinian movement in Israel/Palestine, also known as Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories or as historic Palestine. The first section delineates an ethnographic approach to social movement theory as the conceptual framework through which to understand this movement. The next section outlines the heterogeneity of queer Palestinian subjects, and the following section provides an overview of Palestinian homophobia. I then account for the emergence of the LGBTQ movement in Palestine and follow that with a discussion of queer Palestinian epistemologies and a section on the rise of radical purists in the movement. I conclude with examples of queer Palestinian subjectivities. I argue that queer Palestinian life and resistance derives its power from ordinary acts in extraordinary contexts under ethnoheteronormativity. This chapter furthers the case for attention to affect and more pluralism and inclusivity within the movement. Chapter 2: Global Solidarity and the Politics of Pinkwashing chapter abstractChapter 2 applies conceptions of victims and saviors to the debates on pinkwashing and pinkwatching. It explicates four examples of pinkwashing. I then provide an overview of homophobia and LGBTQ rights in contemporary Israel, recognizing the elision of Israeli homophobia and elevation of Israeli queer empowerment in pinkwashing discourse. The final section of this chapter offers an analysis of hegemonic critiques of the use of the terms pinkwashing and pinkwatching in the contexts of (a) the charge of singling out Israel for criticism, (b) the invocation of the presence of queer Palestinians in Israel, and (c) debates surrounding the salience of the Israeli occupation. It is in the interplay between pinkwashing and pinkwatching that the queer Palestinian movement has catalyzed global solidarity. Chapter 3: Transnational Activism and the Politics of Boycotts chapter abstractThe first section of chapter 3 traces how the conflict over boycotts maps onto successive Tel Aviv Pride parades. It examines queer Palestinian calls to boycott Tel Aviv Pride, decisions to participate in the parade by queer antioccupation activists, and the emergence of resistance to the Israeli state by mainstream LGBTQ organizations in Israel. The chapter then focuses on two cities that emerged as early epicenters of the pinkwatching and boycott debates. The next section examines the politics of boundary policing as they played out on multiple fronts. The chapter then turns to a critical moment in the summer of 2017 when conflict between pinkwashers and pinkwatchers came to a head and surged into the national media spotlight. This chapter demonstrates that we are equipped, from social theory and peace and conflict studies, with conceptual tools to transcend the present impasse animating boycotts in the context of queer Palestinian transnational activism. Chapter 4: Media, Film, and the Politics of Representation chapter abstractChapter 4 examines the relationship between the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, representations of queer Palestinians in film and journalism, and the significant mistrust of the global mainstream media that has arisen among movement leaders. The chapter opens with a description of how the mainstream Western press tends to prioritize the most sensational stories about queer Palestinians. The second half of the chapter outlines the movement's critique of pinkwashing films produced by Israelis and internationals and the movement's attendant calls to boycott those films. This chapter delineates examples of cinematic tropes that clearly reinforce pinkwashing as well as others that are more nuanced. It also analyzes films that feature queer love between Israelis and Palestinians. In addition, I discuss a number of queer Palestinian films, highlighting their importance and controversy. The chapter concludes with the story of an as-yet-unreleased documentary on the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine. Chapter 5: Critique of Empire and the Politics of Academia chapter abstractChapter 5 examines two theoretical frameworks elaborated by Western-based scholars—the Gay International by Joseph Massad and homonationalism by Jasbir Puar—as they have been applied to the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement. I reveal the debilitating effects that these academic critiques have had on the Queer Palestine movement and the possibility for academics and activists to formulate a new mode of scholarly engagement aimed at supporting queer social movements in Palestine and across the Middle East. As in previous chapters, I compare contributions that are corrosive, placing activists in the cross-fire between left- and right-wing criticisms of their efforts, to those that raise difficult intellectual, ethical, and practical questions while protecting from paralysis those who struggle for justice. Conclusion: "we were never meant to survive" chapter abstractJust as the introduction foregrounded words of Audre Lorde, this concluding chapter does so as well, with attention to Lorde's call for racialized queer subjects to speak in the face of attempts to undermine their survival. The conclusion conceptualizes how scholars and activists can distinguish between critique and criticism. Drawing on Jose Muñoz's notions of queer futurity and utopia, I outline my vision and road map for the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement. This is done with an eye to transcending the empire of critique and the movement's current plateau so it can become a more democratic and pluralistic movement that can resume growing.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people. A City in Fragments tells the modern history of a city overwhelmed by its religious and symbolic significance. Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem to consider the graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera that transformed the city over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these urban texts became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, the affinities of Arabic and Hebrew were forgotten and these sister-languages found themselves locked in a bitter war. Looking at the writing of—and literally on—Jerusalem, Wallach offers a creative and expansive history of the city, a fresh take on modern urban texts, and a new reading of the Israel/Palestine conflict through its material culture.Trade Review"In this astonishing and delightful book, Yair Wallach deftly weaves together original theoretical insights, untapped documentary and material evidence, and fascinating stories firmly embedded in Jerusalem's landscape. Our understanding of the city's history will forever be changed by this sensitive and lyrical description of the city—sacred and profane, spiritual and material, Arab and Jewish—and the fragmentary voices and lives of those who built it."—Michelle Campos, author of Ottoman Brothers"A City in Fragments is a brilliant, erudite examination of Jerusalem's Ottoman and colonial modernity through texts. Yair Wallach has a keen sense of transforming anecdotal narratives into a captivating history, at times hilarious and always revealing. He takes us on an anti-nostalgic journey of silent witnesses, literally leaving no stone unturned, physically or symbolically."—Salim Tamari, editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly"Extensively researched, thoughtfully conceptualized, and elegantly designed, Yair Wallach tells a compelling and sophisticated story that goes beyond contested language politics and the triumph of modern understandings of the power of writing. His reconstruction of a world remade by everything from postmarks and stationery to nameplates and graffiti illuminates the diverging experiences and shared predicaments of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian city-dwellers in an age of colonialism and nationalism."—David Henkin, author of City Reading"[An] astounding account of how and why stone inscriptions were replaced by street signs and name plates....While narrating the fragmentation of urban textuality...the book's own text is anything but fragmentary. Conveying an erudite theoretical understanding of modernity through the story of Jerusalem makes the text wonderfully harmonious."—Dotan Halevy, Tel Aviv Review of Books"Wallach's work is a refreshing effort, where urban text takes on its own agency in the context of the emerging Arab-Zionist conflict. Against the dozens of publications that will fill another shelf by the end of the year under the topic of Jerusalem, this is certainly one that scholars and the wider audience must be engaged with."—Roberto Mazza, Jerusalem QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Stone: Arabic in the Age of Ottomanism 2. Dog: The Zionification of Hebrew 3. Gold: Text and Value 4. Paper: Banknotes and the Colonial Dictionary 5. Ceramic: The British Street-Naming Campaign 6. Wall: Hebrew Graffiti on the Western Wall 7. Cloth: The Banners of Nabi Musa 8. Cardboard: Visiting Cards and Identification Papers Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes. Though technically foreigners, these Muslim colonial subjects often blurred the lines between pilgrims and migrants. Not quite Ottoman, and not quite foreign, Central Asians became the sultan's spiritual subjects. Their status was continually negotiated by Ottoman statesmen as attempts to exclude foreign Muslim nationals from the body politic were compromised by a changing international legal order and the caliphate's ecumenical claims. Spiritual Subjects examines the paradoxes of nationality reform and pan-Islamic politics in late Ottoman history. Lâle Can unravels how imperial belonging was wrapped up in deeply symbolic instantiations of religion, as well as prosaic acts and experiences that paved the way to integration into Ottoman communities. A complex system of belonging emerged—one where it was possible for a Muslim to be both, by law, a foreigner and a subject of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. This panoramic story informs broader transregional and global developments, with important implications for how we make sense of subjecthood in the last Muslim empire and the legacy of religion in the Turkish Republic. Trade Review"Spiritual Subjects is a beautifully and imaginatively crafted history of the hajj as a social, cultural, political, and spiritual phenomenon. Lâle Can humanizes the Central Asian pilgrims, telling their stories with the same grace and veneration that they showed in the course of their spiritual journey. A remarkable work that critically reexamines legal and cultural questions of Central Asian Muslim belonging to Ottoman imperial and Turkish national communities."—Christine Philliou, University of California, Berkeley"In this beautifully written book, Lâle Can offers us a striking new vision of the late Ottoman Empire and its relationship with pilgrims from Central Asia. Part study of Ottoman transformation, part social history of travel and the hajj, Spiritual Subjects will reshape our understanding of Islam in the late Ottoman order."—Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College"Spiritual Subjects offers a powerful message. Outlining the history of the Central Asian Ottoman-period Hajj, this book narrates a tale that has previously been known only in partial relief. The story Lâle Can tells here deftly opens up a fascinating new world to readers."—Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University"Can's ability to weave first-person voice with historical analysis is effective, even moving, and she does so without detracting from the deep erudition and archival foundations of the work. Here Spiritual Subjects welds governmental questions of imperial citizenship international law and the Ottoman Empire's nationalization reforms, as well as grassroots questions of Sufi social and pietistic networks, in a seamless and riveting narrative."—Faiz Ahmed, Iranian Studies"Lâle Can's Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire is a meticulously researched and beautifully crafted book on the Central Asian hajj and Ottoman management of religious mobility."—Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Jadaliyya"Spiritual Subjects is a fascinating story of movement, faith, and integration that acknowledges the geopolitical concerns and considerations of imperial rivalry at the end of empire but pushes that to the background in order to bring to life the experiences of what Can calls 'ordinary' people."—Mustafa Tuna, Journal of Islamic Studies"Spiritual Subjects is not only an important study with a new and fascinating perspective on our understanding of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hajj but also a fundamental reading for Ottomanist scholars who wish to better understand a global perspective of Istanbul at the end of empire."—Tyler Kynn, The Middle Ground Journal"Can's well-crafted study encourages us to see the humanity in the juxtapositions of pilgrims and a state and society that struggled to accommodate them in a time, not unlike our own, when foreign travelers were frequently depicted as vectors of threat and disease instead of the diverse set of individuals, motivations, and aspirations they inevitably include."—Benjamin J. Fortna, American Historical Review"Spiritual Subjects is a masterful study of deep learning and analytical sophistication. It bridges Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, Islamic, and global history subfields with grace, style, and creativity, presenting novel and important insights on a strikingly wide and diverse set of themes."—Robert D. Crews, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of Contents1. Rewriting the Road to Mecca 2. Sufi Lodges as Sites of Transimperial Connection 3. Extraterritoriality and the Question of Protection 4. Petitioning the Sultan 5. From Pilgrims to Migrants and De Facto Ottomans Conclusion: A Return to Sultantepe

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.Trade Review"In this beautifully written and extraordinarily rich book, Narges Bajoghli demonstrates a deep anxiety within the Iranian regime about how to transmit the ideology of the Revolution forty years on. With Iran Reframed, we come to understand the contradictions and frustrations behind the regime's justifications of its past, present, and imagined future."—Sherine F. Hamdy, author of Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt"Iran Reframed is incomparable. A must-read on Iran's media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative."—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran"Iran Reframed offers marvelously original insight into one of the world's most misunderstood countries. Narges Bajoghli reflects on the success and failure of revolutions, the meaning of ideology, youth and aging, and the ways politics seeks to address deep human longings."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"[A] lively book that offers great insight into the mindset and approach of the officials who try to keep the Islamic Revolution, and the regime it produced, alive by producing promotional material, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq War, and rap-filled music videos extolling the nation and its heroes. Highly recommended."—R. P. Mathee, CHOICE"[Bajoghli] skilfully breaks the myth of singular Iranian political Islam through an engaging storytelling style that encourages readers' dialogic imagination rather than presumed categories."—Younes Saramifar, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies"Iran Reframed is an important book not just in the study of post-revolutionary Iranian culture and media, but post-revolutionary Iran at large. It is groundbreaking in identifying and presenting in a concise volume important processes that have taken place within the Islamic Republic's revolutionary project and its dynamic mediascape—especially since the 2009 protests."—Nahid Siamdoust, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Iran Reframed is a courageous journey into the contradictions within the ideological apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran....Bajoghli's book is essential reading for anyone interested in media warfare in the twenty-first century and understanding the nuances of Iranian politics."—Alexander L. Fattal, American Anthropologist"Empathetic and provocative at the same time, this is a compelling book for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it exists today."—Adil Bhat, Dawn"[Iran Reframed] offers a deep insight into Iran's state media apparatus....for anyone wanting to better understand the overarching social dynamics in Iran, this book is recommended reading."—Daniel Walter, QantaraTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Generational Changes 2. Cracks in the Official Story 3. Insiders, Outsiders, and Belonging 4. New Strategies 5. Producing Nationalism 6. Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Arab-Israeli conflict constituted a serious problem for the American Left in the 1960s: pro-Palestinian activists hailed the Palestinian struggle against Israel as part of a fundamental restructuring of the global imperialist order, while pro-Israeli leftists held a less revolutionary worldview that understood Israel as a paragon of democratic socialist virtue. This intra-left debate was in part doctrinal, in part generational. But further woven into this split were sometimes agonizing questions of identity. Jews were disproportionately well-represented in the Movement, and their personal and communal lives could deeply affect their stances vis-à-vis the Middle East. The Movement and the Middle East offers the first assessment of the controversial and ultimately debilitating role of the Arab-Israeli conflict among left-wing activists during a turbulent period of American history. Michael R. Fischbach draws on a deep well of original sources—from personal interviews to declassified FBI and CIA documents—to present a story of the left-wing responses to the question of Palestine and Israel. He shows how, as the 1970s wore on, the cleavages emerging within the American Left widened, weakening the Movement and leaving a lasting impact that still affects progressive American politics today.Trade Review"Michael R. Fischbach boldly takes us into the vexed heart of debates on the American Left, exploding after the Six-Day War of 1967, over the Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. Fischbach ably navigates the moral passion, ideological wrangling, and exquisite agony of the entire conflict. His bracing message is of the perils of intransigence and the enduring ability of the Israel-Palestine debate to further divide an already weakened American Left."—Jeremy Varon, The New School, author of Bringing the War Home"In an engaging narrative, Michael Fischbach makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of the shifting positions, alliances, and tensions among American leftist groups on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1960s and 1970s. The Movement and the Middle East will have a great impact on contemporary activism, illuminating the growing support for Palestinian liberation over the decades."—Pamela Pennock, University of Michigan–Dearborn"Fischbach's timely and invaluable account...offers insight on the debates the Movement grappled with, and for anyone interested in U.S. Middle East policy, the history and politics of the American Left or the Arab-Israeli conflict, The Movement and the Middle East is a must-have for their library. Fischbach's wide-ranging analysis opens the door for other scholars to fill in the gaps of this incredibly fascinating story, which would be a welcome addition in the years to come."—Sami Tayeb, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"Michael Fischbach describes in impressively researched detail how virtually every political formation of the Left came to define itself in part by its position on Israel's siege and occupation of historic Palestine....His book is both a fine act of scholarship and a useful intervention in the battle for Palestinian freedom."—Bill V. Mullen, Journal of Palestine Studies"Fischbach's book...contributes to a better understanding of the complex nature of Israel's place in the American popular and political imagination. It is then a necessary text to include in any study of America's relationships with Israel and the Palestinians."—Brent E. Sasley, The Middle East Journal"While making a strong case for the claim that the Arab-Israeli conflict played an important role in the breakup of the American left, The Movement and the Middle East also does a good job of explaining how it led us to where we are today."—Michael Teague, Al Jadid"Professor Fischbach has done a service by gathering a wealth of information that future researchers of the American Left cannot ignore and that will enrich the analyses of works to come."—Yehudah Mirsky, American Jewish History"[The Movement and the Middle East]'s best quality is its narration of particular moments in radical America's encounter with the Arab-Israeli conflict."—Matthew Shannon, Diplomatic History

Read more less

Book SynopsisFor centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation. Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms. Trade Review"Few questions are more vexed in the study of early modern Asia, with evidence more evanescent, than how people identified before nationalism. Drawing on dozens of Persian texts, Mana Kia scrutinizes their conceptions of place, movement, memory, lineage, origins, and onomastics to denaturalize the nationalist ties between land and language. Persianate Selves is an invaluable vade mecum for navigating the transregional Persianate past." -- Nile Green * editor of The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca *"Persianate Selves disturbs our national imaginaries and challenges the way we write Persianate history. Instead of dynastic, ethnic, and blood bound categories, we encounter kindred voices who embody Persianate adab and reveal multiple experiences of place. Whether one contests or agrees, we will all have to engage with the different terms of analysis Mana Kia offers in this pioneering work." -- Kathryn Babayan * University of Michigan *"Persianate Selves traverses a now-vanished cosmopolitan world and suggests a fascinating new approach to conceptualizing a shared cultural space. This engaging book is sure to generate considerable discussion among scholars interested in the intellectual cultures of the world before the nationalist divide." -- Muzaffar Alam * University of Chicago *"Besides its scholarly contribution, Persianate Selves is an indispensable and highly recommended book for world leaders, policymakers and anyone interested in curing their monological ways of thinking about Islamic pasts." -- Aqsa Ijaz * Dawn *"In dislodging protonationalist categories in the understanding of affiliation, belonging, and selfhood, Kia offers sharp analytic tools for rethinking what it meant to be Persian before the rise of nationalism." -- Alireza Doostdar * Critical Inquiry *"Dissecting notions of home, landscape, kinship and memory, Kia provides us with a radically new framework for understanding Persianate culture. ... An excellent scholarly study worthy of close study for anyone looking to make sense of our past and present." -- Usman Butt * The New Arab *"Mana Kia's book is a rich and multilayered contribution to the scholarship that addresses questions of cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the possibilities of selves and collectives, the relevance of place and origin in the language ideologies, and the cultural and linguistic meanings people endow to physical spaces. ... The book itself is a beautiful ode to symbiosis, lineage and learning in the making of a cultural self." -- Irena Grigoryan * Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity *"Kia's subtle reconstructions of eighteenth-century Persian ways of belonging should provoke anyone engaged with the textual legacies of adab to read with eyes unblinkered by nationalism." -- Prashant Keshavmurthy * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Persianate Selves... is novel in its use of Derridean deconstruction to distill shared forms of belonging and affiliation during the political disarray of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kia is part of a growing and important chorus of scholars who are questioning primordialist conceptualizations of identity by challenging widely held assumptions that Persian is a language that has always belonged to Iran or that its use in India was a foreign import, out of place and unnatural. More broadly, Kia's work holds a mirror up to historians of precolonial contexts, encouraging us to think more carefully about the fundamental conceptual and descriptive language that we use to describe how people inhabited those worlds." -- Naveena Naqvi * History and Theory *

Read more less

Book SynopsisLos Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration, in particular, to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA's Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.Trade Review"Arab Routes charts a radical new history of the early Syrian community in Southern California, revealing its fascinating cross-border, multilocal, and multiethnic networks and coalitions across the US, Latin America, and the Arab world. Drawing on a rich repertoire of archives, cultural texts, and oral histories, Sarah Gualtieri complicates and revises our understanding of Arab immigration to the Americas. An expansive, cutting-edge, and much-needed book."—Carol W.N. Fadda, Syracuse University, author of Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging"This beautifully written study explores the ties between Latino/a and Syrian communities in California. Sarah Gualtieri upends standard narratives about Arabs in the United States, showing how multiple migrations and lasting ties to Latin America forged an Arab Latinidad. A wonderful and riveting book that will reshape binary understandings of US–Middle East relations."—Melani McAlister, George Washington University, author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945"In this ingenious study, Sarah Gualtieri maps hemispheric immigration histories that redress the erasure of Syrians from California history and complicate our understandings of Mexicanidad. Rigorous and creative, Arab Routes will transform how we conceptualize immigration, race, gender, and the histories and boundaries of Arab and Latin America."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism"Through recounting the personal stories of migrants and analyzing an expansive archive of census records, articles, letters, etc., author Sarah Gualtieri counters the narrative that Middle Eastern migrants are recent arrivals from a conflict-ridden region. Instead, she provides a new story where Syrian Americans are deeply woven into the history of California."—Rafael Hernández, The Middle East Journal"[Arab Routes] sits among the most important books in Middle East migration studies; in its critical rigor, it is also an essential and indispensable contribution to comparative US ethnic studies.the book will irrevocably transform the study of Arab and Middle Eastern American migration and racialization for years to come."—Neda Maghbouleh, Mashriq & Mahjar"Gualtieri has produced a significant accomplishment: providing a necessary intervention in the scholarship on migration, American ethnicity, and Arab American history, while ensuring the book is accessible to a popular audience."—Pamela E. Pencock, The American Historical Review"Arab Routes 'pivots the [Arab American studies] canon west' (p.127). More importantly, though, it locates Arab American histories more firmly in transnational, South-South, and critical ethnic studies conversations where—as many of us argue—they have always been."—Amira Jarmakani, Pacific Historical Review"Arab Routes is not only a must-read for those interested in mahjar history and transnationalism but is a shining example of how the marriage of critical ethnic studies and migration history (by prioritizing movement over settlement) can produce more nuanced studies that take into account multiple registers of identity"—Reem Bailony, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Arab Amairka 1. The Syrian Pacific 2. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon 3. Meeting at the Mahrajan 4. Fragments of the Past, Identities of the Present 5. Palimpsests in Iconic California Conclusion: Mestizaje in Arab American Families

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Arab-Israeli conflict constituted a serious problem for the American Left in the 1960s: pro-Palestinian activists hailed the Palestinian struggle against Israel as part of a fundamental restructuring of the global imperialist order, while pro-Israeli leftists held a less revolutionary worldview that understood Israel as a paragon of democratic socialist virtue. This intra-left debate was in part doctrinal, in part generational. But further woven into this split were sometimes agonizing questions of identity. Jews were disproportionately well-represented in the Movement, and their personal and communal lives could deeply affect their stances vis-à-vis the Middle East. The Movement and the Middle East offers the first assessment of the controversial and ultimately debilitating role of the Arab-Israeli conflict among left-wing activists during a turbulent period of American history. Michael R. Fischbach draws on a deep well of original sources—from personal interviews to declassified FBI and CIA documents—to present a story of the left-wing responses to the question of Palestine and Israel. He shows how, as the 1970s wore on, the cleavages emerging within the American Left widened, weakening the Movement and leaving a lasting impact that still affects progressive American politics today.Trade Review"Michael R. Fischbach boldly takes us into the vexed heart of debates on the American Left, exploding after the Six-Day War of 1967, over the Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. Fischbach ably navigates the moral passion, ideological wrangling, and exquisite agony of the entire conflict. His bracing message is of the perils of intransigence and the enduring ability of the Israel-Palestine debate to further divide an already weakened American Left."—Jeremy Varon, The New School, author of Bringing the War Home"In an engaging narrative, Michael Fischbach makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of the shifting positions, alliances, and tensions among American leftist groups on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1960s and 1970s. The Movement and the Middle East will have a great impact on contemporary activism, illuminating the growing support for Palestinian liberation over the decades."—Pamela Pennock, University of Michigan–Dearborn"Fischbach's timely and invaluable account...offers insight on the debates the Movement grappled with, and for anyone interested in U.S. Middle East policy, the history and politics of the American Left or the Arab-Israeli conflict, The Movement and the Middle East is a must-have for their library. Fischbach's wide-ranging analysis opens the door for other scholars to fill in the gaps of this incredibly fascinating story, which would be a welcome addition in the years to come."—Sami Tayeb, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"Michael Fischbach describes in impressively researched detail how virtually every political formation of the Left came to define itself in part by its position on Israel's siege and occupation of historic Palestine....His book is both a fine act of scholarship and a useful intervention in the battle for Palestinian freedom."—Bill V. Mullen, Journal of Palestine Studies"Fischbach's book...contributes to a better understanding of the complex nature of Israel's place in the American popular and political imagination. It is then a necessary text to include in any study of America's relationships with Israel and the Palestinians."—Brent E. Sasley, The Middle East Journal"While making a strong case for the claim that the Arab-Israeli conflict played an important role in the breakup of the American left, The Movement and the Middle East also does a good job of explaining how it led us to where we are today."—Michael Teague, Al Jadid"Professor Fischbach has done a service by gathering a wealth of information that future researchers of the American Left cannot ignore and that will enrich the analyses of works to come."—Yehudah Mirsky, American Jewish History"[The Movement and the Middle East]'s best quality is its narration of particular moments in radical America's encounter with the Arab-Israeli conflict."—Matthew Shannon, Diplomatic History

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people. A City in Fragments tells the modern history of a city overwhelmed by its religious and symbolic significance. Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem to consider the graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera that transformed the city over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these urban texts became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, the affinities of Arabic and Hebrew were forgotten and these sister-languages found themselves locked in a bitter war. Looking at the writing of—and literally on—Jerusalem, Wallach offers a creative and expansive history of the city, a fresh take on modern urban texts, and a new reading of the Israel/Palestine conflict through its material culture.Trade Review"In this astonishing and delightful book, Yair Wallach deftly weaves together original theoretical insights, untapped documentary and material evidence, and fascinating stories firmly embedded in Jerusalem's landscape. Our understanding of the city's history will forever be changed by this sensitive and lyrical description of the city—sacred and profane, spiritual and material, Arab and Jewish—and the fragmentary voices and lives of those who built it."—Michelle Campos, author of Ottoman Brothers"A City in Fragments is a brilliant, erudite examination of Jerusalem's Ottoman and colonial modernity through texts. Yair Wallach has a keen sense of transforming anecdotal narratives into a captivating history, at times hilarious and always revealing. He takes us on an anti-nostalgic journey of silent witnesses, literally leaving no stone unturned, physically or symbolically."—Salim Tamari, editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly"Extensively researched, thoughtfully conceptualized, and elegantly designed, Yair Wallach tells a compelling and sophisticated story that goes beyond contested language politics and the triumph of modern understandings of the power of writing. His reconstruction of a world remade by everything from postmarks and stationery to nameplates and graffiti illuminates the diverging experiences and shared predicaments of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian city-dwellers in an age of colonialism and nationalism."—David Henkin, author of City Reading"[An] astounding account of how and why stone inscriptions were replaced by street signs and name plates....While narrating the fragmentation of urban textuality...the book's own text is anything but fragmentary. Conveying an erudite theoretical understanding of modernity through the story of Jerusalem makes the text wonderfully harmonious."—Dotan Halevy, Tel Aviv Review of Books"Wallach's work is a refreshing effort, where urban text takes on its own agency in the context of the emerging Arab-Zionist conflict. Against the dozens of publications that will fill another shelf by the end of the year under the topic of Jerusalem, this is certainly one that scholars and the wider audience must be engaged with."—Roberto Mazza, Jerusalem QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Stone: Arabic in the Age of Ottomanism 2. Dog: The Zionification of Hebrew 3. Gold: Text and Value 4. Paper: Banknotes and the Colonial Dictionary 5. Ceramic: The British Street-Naming Campaign 6. Wall: Hebrew Graffiti on the Western Wall 7. Cloth: The Banners of Nabi Musa 8. Cardboard: Visiting Cards and Identification Papers Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes. Though technically foreigners, these Muslim colonial subjects often blurred the lines between pilgrims and migrants. Not quite Ottoman, and not quite foreign, Central Asians became the sultan's spiritual subjects. Their status was continually negotiated by Ottoman statesmen as attempts to exclude foreign Muslim nationals from the body politic were compromised by a changing international legal order and the caliphate's ecumenical claims. Spiritual Subjects examines the paradoxes of nationality reform and pan-Islamic politics in late Ottoman history. Lâle Can unravels how imperial belonging was wrapped up in deeply symbolic instantiations of religion, as well as prosaic acts and experiences that paved the way to integration into Ottoman communities. A complex system of belonging emerged—one where it was possible for a Muslim to be both, by law, a foreigner and a subject of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. This panoramic story informs broader transregional and global developments, with important implications for how we make sense of subjecthood in the last Muslim empire and the legacy of religion in the Turkish Republic. Trade Review"Spiritual Subjects is a beautifully and imaginatively crafted history of the hajj as a social, cultural, political, and spiritual phenomenon. Lâle Can humanizes the Central Asian pilgrims, telling their stories with the same grace and veneration that they showed in the course of their spiritual journey. A remarkable work that critically reexamines legal and cultural questions of Central Asian Muslim belonging to Ottoman imperial and Turkish national communities."—Christine Philliou, University of California, Berkeley"In this beautifully written book, Lâle Can offers us a striking new vision of the late Ottoman Empire and its relationship with pilgrims from Central Asia. Part study of Ottoman transformation, part social history of travel and the hajj, Spiritual Subjects will reshape our understanding of Islam in the late Ottoman order."—Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College"Spiritual Subjects offers a powerful message. Outlining the history of the Central Asian Ottoman-period Hajj, this book narrates a tale that has previously been known only in partial relief. The story Lâle Can tells here deftly opens up a fascinating new world to readers."—Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University"Can's ability to weave first-person voice with historical analysis is effective, even moving, and she does so without detracting from the deep erudition and archival foundations of the work. Here Spiritual Subjects welds governmental questions of imperial citizenship international law and the Ottoman Empire's nationalization reforms, as well as grassroots questions of Sufi social and pietistic networks, in a seamless and riveting narrative."—Faiz Ahmed, Iranian Studies"Lâle Can's Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire is a meticulously researched and beautifully crafted book on the Central Asian hajj and Ottoman management of religious mobility."—Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Jadaliyya"Spiritual Subjects is a fascinating story of movement, faith, and integration that acknowledges the geopolitical concerns and considerations of imperial rivalry at the end of empire but pushes that to the background in order to bring to life the experiences of what Can calls 'ordinary' people."—Mustafa Tuna, Journal of Islamic Studies"Spiritual Subjects is not only an important study with a new and fascinating perspective on our understanding of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hajj but also a fundamental reading for Ottomanist scholars who wish to better understand a global perspective of Istanbul at the end of empire."—Tyler Kynn, The Middle Ground Journal"Can's well-crafted study encourages us to see the humanity in the juxtapositions of pilgrims and a state and society that struggled to accommodate them in a time, not unlike our own, when foreign travelers were frequently depicted as vectors of threat and disease instead of the diverse set of individuals, motivations, and aspirations they inevitably include."—Benjamin J. Fortna, American Historical Review"Spiritual Subjects is a masterful study of deep learning and analytical sophistication. It bridges Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, Islamic, and global history subfields with grace, style, and creativity, presenting novel and important insights on a strikingly wide and diverse set of themes."—Robert D. Crews, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of Contents1. Rewriting the Road to Mecca 2. Sufi Lodges as Sites of Transimperial Connection 3. Extraterritoriality and the Question of Protection 4. Petitioning the Sultan 5. From Pilgrims to Migrants and De Facto Ottomans Conclusion: A Return to Sultantepe

Read more less

Book SynopsisWithin the broad contours of Islamic traditions, Muslims are enjoined to fast during the month of Ramadan, they are invited to a disciplined practice of prayer, and they are offered the Quran as the divine revelation in the most beautiful verbal form. But what happens if Muslims choose not to fast, or give up prayer, or if the Quran's beauty seems inaccessible? When Muslims do not take up the path of piety, what happens to their relationships with more devout Muslims who are neighbors, friends, and kin? Between Muslims provides an ethnographic account of Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who turn away from devotional piety yet remain intimately engaged with Islamic traditions and with other Muslims. Andrew Bush offers a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, rejecting simple stereotypes about ethnic or sectarian identities. Integrating textual analysis of poetry, sermons, and Islamic history into accounts of everyday life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims illuminates the interplay of attraction and aversion to Islam among ordinary Muslims.Trade Review"A finely nuanced study about the impossibility of sequestering what is religious from what is not. In exemplary fashion, Andrew Bush shows us how the categories with which we work—religion, atheism, or secularism—are insufficient to understand the simultaneously sacred and profane world of everyday life."—Faisal Devji, Oxford University"Andrew Bush has written a remarkable book that makes highly original contributions to the anthropology of religion as well as Kurdish studies. There is no other book quite like this. Approaching Kurdish society through its poetics, he has grasped important insights into the ambiguities of everyday ethics underlying the social reality of contemporary Kurdistan."—Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University"Written with a scholar's rigor and a poet's grace, Between Muslims depicts textures of Islamic tradition rarely discussed in the literature. Fiercely independent in its approach to theorizing Muslim life, this deeply-layered monograph is a must-read for scholars in anthropology, religious studies, and beyond."—Noah Salomon, Carleton College"A refreshing departure from the focus on nationalist identity in studies of Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims is a beautifully written and original work on the dynamics of Islamic traditions. Andrew Bush subtly explores how 'fractures of difference' are lived in everyday intimate relationships."—Sara Pursley, New York University"[G]roundbreaking and innovative... Between Muslims holds up as an accessible and eloquent account of social dynamics in contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan."—Edith Szanto, Journal of the American Academy of Religion"A nuanced reflection on how Muslims inhabit lukewarm attitudes toward piety in contexts suffused with piety. [Between Muslims] is also an elegant exploration of Kurdish poetry and the ways it animates contemporary Kurds' self-expression."—Susan MacDougall, Ethnos"Between Muslims is a major contribution to scholarshipon the importance of multiple ways of being Islamic."—Jeremy F. Walton, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association"This beautifully written book explores a number of contradictions among those who have 'turned away from piety' and yet do not renounce Islam, but seek to know the 'beloved' in Iraqi Kurdistan. Through an insightful analysis of mystical poetry, Bush additionally demonstrates how the pious and those who have turned away from piety negotiate desire, understand apostasy, and relate to each other across different ranges of piety through patience and acts of 'holding back.'"—The Association of Middle East Anthropology Book Award Committee"The unique positionality of his subjects allows Bush to offer a valuable modus vivendi to the great 'text vs. lived experience' debate in the academy: his approach necessarily requires an engagement with text, but not as objects which naturally unfold according to their own purposes (as is often the case in our deliberations about Islam) but rather as objects continuously transformed in the process of being made meaningful to an individual's experience of the world, which itself cannot be extricated from its relationship with others. This refreshinglyunmodern emphasis on relationality (instead of isolated self-determining subjects) permeates the entirety of his study, focused as it is on the life-worlds that emergebetweenMuslims."—Rushain Abbasi, MarginaliaTable of ContentsIntroduction: Fieldwork in Kurdistan: Islamic Traditions, Ordinary Relationships, and a Paradox 1. Quran and Zoroaster: Attraction and Authority in Muslim Ethics 2. Christians, Kafirs, and Nationalists in Kurdish Poetry 3. Mystical Desire, Ordinary Desire: Love, Friendship, and Kinship 4. Separating Faith and Kufir in an Islamic Society 5. Pleasure Beyond Piety: Religious Difference in Domestic Space Epilogue: "Dear Reader!"

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Ottoman Empire enforced imperial rule through its management of diversity. For centuries, non-Muslim religious institutions, such as the Armenian Church, were charged with guaranteeing their flocks' loyalty to the sultan. Rather than being passive subjects, Armenian elites, both the clergy and laity, strategically wove the institutions of the Armenian Church, and thus the Armenian community itself, into the fabric of imperial society. In so doing, Armenian elites became powerful brokers between factions in Ottoman politics—until the politics of nineteenth-century reform changed these relationships. In Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire, Richard E. Antaramian presents a revisionist account of Ottoman reform, relating the contention within the Armenian community to broader imperial politics. Reform afforded Armenians the opportunity to recast themselves as partners of the state, rather than as brokers among factions. And in the course of pursuing such programs, they transformed the community's role in imperial society. As the Ottoman reform program changed how religious difference could be employed in a Muslim empire, Armenian clergymen found themselves enmeshed in high-stakes political and social contests that would have deadly consequences.Trade Review"Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire eschews conventional accounts of nationalism and secularism, and is fully conversant with revisionist writings on the Tanzimat. Armenian reformers, Richard Antaramian persuasively argues, were more Ottoman than the Ottomans in embracing reform. Ironically, this left them vulnerable, as shown in this vivid account." -- Molly Greene * Princeton University *"Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire challenges and enriches our understanding of Ottoman governance on the cusp of the age of nationalism. Richard Antaramian provides a much-needed corrective to a historiography that often presents 'Armenian' and 'Ottoman' as mutually exclusive categories. An empirically rich work." -- İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu * Northwestern University *"Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire is an exemplar of archive-powered study that is successful in depicting the Armenian nation in its own rights and struggles." -- Emrah Sahin * Journal of Church and State *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction chapter abstractThe introduction lays out the book's principal overarching argument: the Ottoman reform programs that commenced in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth centralized the state by denying different political claimants their share of sovereignty. The empire is better understood not as a spoke-and-hub-without-the-wheel that kept geographically delineated peripheries apart from one another but rather as a tapestry predicated on dense overlapping networks through which sovereignty was both exercised and shared. The reorganization of imperial governance bid to transform that dense networked world into a top-down/center-periphery model atop which the central government would preside. The reform of non-Muslim communities transformed them from spaces—woven into the imperial tapestry through their religious institutions—into millets that were challenged to pull those religious institutions out of the informal and semiformal relationships that underwrote the shared and networked world of imperial governance. One: The Constitution chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the Armenian Constitution, a document originally introduced in 1860 that delineated how the Armenian community would participate in Ottoman imperial governance. The Constitution, like other reform initiatives that targeted non-Muslims in the middle of the Ottoman nineteenth century, is typically presented as something that spurred the rise of lay elites engaged in class struggle, which led to the secularization of the community and its subsequent nationalization. Chapter 1 instead presents the Constitution as fundamental to the shifting organization of Ottoman imperial governance that reset the partnership between the Armenian community and the state. In particular, it politicized the Armenian Church by making it an agent of state centralization. Armenian clergymen thus found themselves forced to choose sides in a struggle between a centralizing bureaucracy and the elites it sought to dislodge. Two: The Ottoman Diocese chapter abstractChapter 2 advances a framework called nodal governance. The fiscal restructuring of the eighteenth century produced a networked world of Ottoman imperial governance in which multiple forces in imperial society shared power and the benefits of imperial rule. The institutions of the Armenian Church acted as nodes in this setting, conduits through which Armenian financial capital flowed to help suture the empire as a polity. This extent to which Armenian institutions were embedded in this world is brought into relief by the efforts of the reformers to reorganize the community as an empire-wide diocese. These efforts effectively challenged the community to withdraw its institutions from the networked world of imperial governance and integrate them into the imperial bureaucracy, thus committing Armenian reformers to use their own ecclesiastics to aid the introduction of a center-periphery binary in Ottoman governance. Three: Peripheralization chapter abstractChapter 3 argues that the ideology of the Tanzimat was not Ottomanism but rather legal centralism. The introduction of the millet system in the nineteenth century therefore belonged to an effort to eradicate a pluralist legal order of things that privileged a number of actors throughout the Ottoman Empire, include high-ranking members of the Armenian clergy who had benefited from nodal governance and the connections it had afforded them to regional power brokers and Armenian financial capital. Those high-ranking clergymen thus blended a number of methods to reject the centralization of the state and the community and the loss of connections that this would entail. These methods included the invocation of ecclesiastical tradition and networking strategies—namely, brokerage and closure. The conflict between clergymen in the context of reform politics transformed network structures, leaving the Armenian community peripheralized in imperial governance and society. Four: Ottomanism chapter abstractChapter 4 addresses the question of Ottomanism. Rather than an ideology, the chapter argues that Ottomanism is best understood as a repertoire of action or cultural tool kit. Historical scholarship on Ottoman reform has comfortably framed the centralization policies as a contest between the imperial state based in Istanbul and provincial actors who resisted its implementation. This has led historians to overlook the important fact that provincial Armenian reformers on the ground, particularly those among the clergy, fought on the front lines of state centralization. Unlike their metropolitan counterparts, these clergymen were steeped in the culture of the Church and the provinces and blended those resources with the new politics of empire to pursue centralization as part of a cultural toolbox that bridged center and periphery. State-building and centralization thus became key elements of Ottoman Armenian political thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. Five: A Catastrophic Success chapter abstractThe book's concluding chapter covers the final years of Bishop Mkrtich Khirmian's public life in the Ottoman Empire, which included a term as patriarch of Constantinople (r. 1869–1873) and ended with internal exile to Jerusalem in 1885. The sixteen-year arc covered in this chapter explains how Armenian reformers found themselves the victims of their own success. Khrimian and other provincial reformers not only enthusiastically participated in the reform programs, they successfully cut the threads that connected their community to other forces in imperial society. However, this precluded their ability to communicate with other sectors of that society. Reform initiatives that had won the approval of the government a few years prior were now viewed as subversive and seditious. It was the Ottoman state, which began punishing reformers, that ended the partnership with the Armenian community. Armenian politics, however, would remain oriented toward Istanbul. Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion describes the dilapidated state in which the Armenian community was left as a result of imperial reform. The introduction of the millet system resulted in not only the peripheralization of Armenian in imperial governance or the loss of their ability to communicate with other sectors of imperial society but also the surrender of their social capital and claim to imperial sovereignty. An impoverished Armenian community could only look on in despair as the establishment of new connections and relationships to carry on the work of imperial governance excluded them. Cut from the imperial tapestry, Armenian reformers found themselves under siege, with prominent clergymen either killed or imprisoned. The state understood any Armenian effort to reform imperial society as a challenge to the new status quo and power-sharing arrangements, and thus responded with increasing brutality; these culminated as widespread massacres of Armenians in the 1890s.

Read more less

Book SynopsisArgentina lies at the heart of the American hemisphere's history of global migration booms of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century: by 1910, one of every three Argentine residents was an immigrant—twice the demographic impact that the United States experienced in the boom period. In this context, some one hundred and forty thousand Ottoman Syrians came to Argentina prior to World War I, and over the following decades Middle Eastern communities, institutions, and businesses dotted the landscape of Argentina from bustling Buenos Aires to Argentina's most remote frontiers. Argentina in the Global Middle East connects modern Latin American and Middle Eastern history through their shared links to global migration systems. By following the mobile lives of individuals with roots in the Levantine Middle East, Lily Pearl Balloffet sheds light on the intersections of ethnicity, migrant–homeland ties, and international relations. Ranging from the nineteenth century boom in transoceanic migration to twenty-first century dynamics of large-scale migration and displacement in the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, this book considers key themes such as cultural production, philanthropy, anti-imperial activism, and financial networks over the course of several generations of this diasporic community. Balloffet's study situates this transregional history of Argentina and the Middle East within a larger story of South-South alliances, solidarities, and exchanges.Trade Review"A highly original and revealing exploration of the Syrian-Lebanese experience in Argentina, this multi-layered inquiry into the circulation and interplay of migrants, networks, and material culture at various spatial scales makes this book a model for migration and diaspora studies in general."—José C. Moya, Barnard College, Columbia University"Lily Balloffet's work is not only a timely intervention in the social history of Middle Eastern diaspora and Argentina, but also sets an ambitious new course for migration studies. This fascinating study reveals the complexity of transnational identity formation and urges us to rethink our understandings of human mobility and borders."—Jessica Stites Mor, University of British Columbia"The Global South has a deep and concrete history, and every reader will find clues to its origins in this book. Balloffet's is the best study I've seen of transport infrastructures, mobile people, and mobile ideas quite literally creating a new geopolitical space."—Donna Gabaccia, University of Toronto"Within the broader literature on migration and diaspora histories on the Middle East, Balloffet's study, Argentina in the Global Middle East, is the first of its kind. In charting the history of Middle Eastern migration to Argentina starting in the late 19th century, and the subsequent formation of a thriving diaspora community with enduring significance to Argentina, Latin America, and the Middle East to this day, Balloffet offers an excellent and creative example of the richness of writing transnational historical narratives."—Nadim Bawalsa, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Lily Pearl Balloffet's detailed and multifaceted historical account of Middle Eastern migration to Argentina is a welcome addition to the literature on global migration. ... [T]he book is a model for scholars interested in broadening the scope of Global South studies."—Emilio A. Parrado, Middle Ground Journal"Argentina in the Global Middle East is an insightful interdisciplinary study that models the reconceptualization of migrant histories along the lines of a movement through space that is 'continuous and connective'. More specifically, this book contributes to the shift beyond traditional frameworks focused on the one-way trajectory from sending country to receiving country, and instead centers on how the movement back and forth between those two points and within the receiving country are ongoing and constitutive of human experience."—Christina Civantos, Mashriq & MaharTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction: Transregional Migration and Mobility 1. Imagining Nation and Migration 2. From Mesopotamia to Patagonia 3. Art in Motion, Motion in Art 4. Moving Money, Mobilizing Networks 5. South-South Visions in the Cold War 6. Enduring Ties Epilogue: Somos Sur

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history—as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind—was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise K. Burton follows the field expeditions and hospital surveys that scrutinized the bodies of tribal nomads and religious minorities. These studies, geneticists claim, not only detect the living descendants of biblical civilizations but also reveal the deeper past of human evolution. Genetic Crossroads is an unprecedented history of human genetics in the Middle East, from its roots in colonial anthropology and medicine to recent genome sequencing projects. It illuminates how scientists from Turkey to Yemen, Egypt to Iran, transformed genetic data into territorial claims and national origin myths. Burton shows why such nationalist appropriations of genetics are not local or temporary aberrations, but rather the enduring foundations of international scientific interest in Middle Eastern populations to this day.Trade Review"Genetic Crossroads is a shining example of how to write multi-scalar, multi-sited, and multi-lingual histories of science. Few scholars are able to balance the contradictory pulls of the global and the local; Elise Burton shows how they can be effectively braided together without sacrificing critique, complexity, or context."—Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania"Deeply researched and powerfully written, Genetic Crossroads is one of the most original books I have read in a decade. Burton's unique history of Middle Eastern genetics is a fascinating study of genetic nationalism and the global hierarchies of such scientific inquiry, and a must-read for historians of all fields."—Eve M Troutt Powell, University of Pennsylvania"Drawing on sources in four Middle Eastern languages and from underused Western archives, Elise Burton explains why the Middle East was so pivotal for global genetics. Exemplifying how to integrate area studies and global history, Genetic Crossroads is a true tour de force."—Cyrus Schayegh, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva"Genetic Crossroads exposes how technical and scientific projects about human ethnicity underpinned nationalist ideologies across the twentieth century. Burton introduces a novel angle to established debates, showing how scientific researchers nourished racial mythologies, and how those mythologies drove the researchers themselves. She draws disparate literatures into a single intervention, extending isolated national stories through her integrative original research. The book is remarkable for its breadth of coverage in time, space, and language; every reader will find something that engages their area of curiosity or expertise."—Committee for the Nikki Keddie Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association"Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity by Elise Burton, is a sweeping history of 'genetic nationalism' in the 20th century covering Iran, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and other Arab countries."—Usman Butt, Middle East Monitor"It is difficult to do justice to this exceptional endeavor. The advantages of the integrative thematic approach adopted by Burton are numerous. Most importantly, it allows the book to be both deeply contextual on some significant levels, and yet driven by a strong argument, by strong structuring hypotheses. Its implied periodization is derived from this combination of context and content. It makes room for sophisticated many-layered comparisons, for complex plot. The book affords both a generalized perspective and delves into great detail on specific issues."—Snait B. Gissis, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences"Genetic Crossroadsis a brilliant book that will surely become a milestone in the study of the global science of human genetics. In putting to use her dual expertise in Middle Eastern studies and the history of science, Burton provides an unprecedented perspective on themes, such as race and ancestry, that are re-dimensioned and relocated in their relevance to others."—Isis: A Journal of the History of Science SocietyTable of ContentsIntroduction: An Uneasy Inheritance 1. Drastic Measurements 2. Truth Serum 3. The Traffic in Blood 4. Sickling Sociologies 5. Genes Against Beans 6. Collection Agents 7. Domesticating Diversity Conclusion: Genomes Without Borders?

Read more less

Book SynopsisAs the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.Trade Review"With considerable skill, Ziad Fahmy listens to listeners in a place and time wholly underexplored by historians of the senses. In the process, he offers us an important and trenchant interpretation of the sensory definition of modernity." -- Mark Smith * University of South Carolina *"Street Sounds brings the boisterous soundscape of modernizing Egypt to life. Ziad Fahmy has an ear for the noise of history in motion—street hawkers, calls to prayer, braying donkeys, wagon wheels, claxons and screeching tires, recorded song, and the ever-present buzz of electricity. He allows us to hear an Egypt we might otherwise discount." -- Joel Gordon * University of Arkansas *"In this fascinating and highly original study, Ziad Fahmy takes sound seriously as both a primary source and a qualitatively distinct phenomenon of modernity. Street Sounds apprehends sonic and scopic regimes as interrelated aspects of a larger sensorium, thereby pioneering a new and extraordinarily rich form of Middle Eastern cultural history." -- Walter Armbrust * University of Oxford *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: Historicizing Sounds and Soundscapes chapter abstractIn the Introduction I briefly examine the importance of the field of sound studies and the need for historians of the Middle East to engage with the sounds of the past. I discuss the importance of "listening" to the sources, in order to mine the archives for sonic events. Finally, Street Sounds proposes that by taking into account the changing sounds of the past, and by examining how people dealt with their daily sounded environment, we can be brought closer to a more embodied microlevel analysis of mundane street life. This is especially true in a period of rapid sonic transition, which exemplified the infrastructural and technological transformations during the first half of the twentieth century. 1Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life chapter abstractInspired in part by Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, in Chapter 1, I describe life in early- to mid-twentieth-century Cairo from a pedestrian's perspective. "Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life" is devoted to the sounds of pedestrians and commuters as I analyze the ways that they used, occupied, and walked through those public spaces to commute, work, sell, and shop, and to entertain and be entertained. The first part of the chapter examines some of the social implications of embodied noises, from jingling anklets and bracelets to footsteps, as ordinary Cairenes were negotiating their way through a rapidly changing city. The second half of the chapter focuses on the calls of street hawkers, entertainers, and merchants who relied on their voices to advertise their goods and services. 2Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies chapter abstractChapter 2, "Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies," examines both the Egyptian government's attempts at regulating and silencing public spaces and the class implications of these policies. New anti-begging and anti-homelessness discourses invoked fears of an imminent breakdown of public order and even public health. In this chapter, I also document the interrelated and ever-present class bias in the Egyptian press, especially with regard to its coverage of the urban streets, street hawkers, and the itinerant poor. 3Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles chapter abstractChapter 3, "Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles," examines the modernization of Egypt's urban infrastructure, especially roads and tramways. The changing sounds and the social impact of growing urban traffic is carefully examined, with an emphasis on the introduction of tramways and motor vehicles. The chapter also documents and elaborates on the sonic impact of new urban spaces from large city squares to bustling transportation hubs. The problems of dramatically increased motor traffic and early attempts at regulating car horn noise are especially investigated. 4The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife chapter abstractChapter 4, "The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife," begins by examining the professional lighting of Egyptian cities by private gas utilities and the introduction of electricity and electric lighting. The sonic implication of electricity was of course enormous as it not only allowed the eventual proliferation of radios, loudspeakers, and tramways, but just as importantly brought the electric lights that forever changed the sounds of the Egyptian night. The growth of a regularly boisterous nightlife and the establishment of newer places of public leisure, from amusement parks to cabarets and movie theaters catering to diverse audiences, are closely examined. 5The Sounds of Weddings and Funerals: From Brass Bands to Wails and Ululations chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the evolving street sounds of traditional Egyptian weddings and funerals, which involved elaborate street processions and a variety of auditory and visual displays. It examines the changing roles of street music, singing, loud funerary grieving, and other important verbal and nonverbal vocalizations. The chapter concludes by examining some of the attacks directed against many of the embodied and auditory aspects of these traditional ceremonies by the government and by both secular and Islamic modernists. The one point all the "modernizing" camps agreed on was their belief in the general ignorance of the vast majority of the population and the urgent need for education, reform, and uplift. The chapter also addresses how many of these vulgarizing discourses played a role in the class distinction of Egypt's growing middle classes as they self-consciously attempted to define and separate themselves from the masses through sensory differentiation. 6Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music, and Loudspeakers chapter abstractIn Chapter 6, "Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music and Loudspeakers," I examine the Egyptian state's appropriation of large religious and secular celebrations and festivals. The chapter centers exclusively on the official sounds and spectacles performed and sponsored by the Egyptian state in an ongoing effort to legitimize its secular and religious authority in the eyes and ears of the masses. As I demonstrate in this chapter, drums, cannons, and twenty-one gun salutes are as important as uniforms, flags, and propaganda posters. I will particularly focus on the state's use of music, microphones, and radio speeches broadcast over loudspeakers during parades, festivals, and other large public gatherings. Conclusion: Conclusion: Class Distinction and Remembering Lost Sounds chapter abstractThe Conclusion briefly summaries some of the key arguments of the book and delves into the interrelationship between memory, class, nationalism, and the senses. It discusses the contradiction between an apparent nostalgia for street sounds of the past and a simultaneous vulgarization of contemporary street sounds.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEgypt has undergone significant economic liberalization under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, USAID, and the European Commission. Yet after more than four decades of economic reform, the Egyptian economy still fails to meet popular expectations for inclusive growth, better standards of living, and high-quality employment. While many analysts point to cronyism and corruption, Amr Adly finds the root causes of this stagnation in the underlying social and political conditions of economic development. Cleft Capitalism offers a new explanation for why market-based development can fail to meet expectations: small businesses in Egypt are not growing into medium and larger businesses. The practical outcome of this missing middle syndrome is the continuous erosion of the economic and social privileges once enjoyed by the middle classes and unionized labor, without creating enough winners from market making. This in turn set the stage for alienation, discontent, and, finally, revolt. With this book, Adly uncovers both an institutional explanation for Egypt's failed market making, and sheds light on the key factors of arrested economic development across the Global South.Trade Review"Cleft Capitalism is a highly original analysis of what Amr Adly calls Egypt's 'successful transition to failed capitalism.' Based on extensive and sound research, it represents an important rethinking of the trajectory of Egypt's political economy since 1974 and a bold challenge to Washington Consensus economic policy orthodoxy." -- Joel Beinin * Stanford University *"Amr Adly elaborates a novel explanation for underperforming economies of the Global South. Richly detailed, theoretically insightful, Cleft Capitalism is essential reading for anyone interested in the Egyptian, Middle Eastern, and other political economies." -- Robert Springborg * Naval Postgraduate School *"Cleft Capitalism offers a lucid, rich, and new understanding of the course of Egyptian economic development. With his sophisticated understanding of Egyptian politics and society and refined economic analysis, Amr Adly not only helps us understand Egypt better, but offers a model of how to approach the contentious terrain of economic change in the developing world." -- Nathan J. Brown * George Washington University *"Adly puts forth compelling arguments and descriptions of Egypt's failed market making....Cleft Capitalism offers new theoretical insights and valuable empirical analysis of the course of Egypt's political economy and the causes of its economic predicaments since 1974." -- Housam Darwisheh * The Developing Economies *"[Cleft Capitalism] is more than an exemplary analysis of the situation of political economy in Egypt. It is also a significant contribution to wider debates on the possibilities and limits of market-based development in the Global South....an essential read to students, researchers, and policy-makers interested in the political economy of Egypt, the limits and potentials of structural adjustment policies, and the insights of economic sociology to the study of political economy." -- Hesham Shafik * Jadaliyya *"Cleft Capitalism is an ambitious book that aims to make broad academic contributions far beyond its specific focus on the contemporary social and political economy of Egypt....[It succeeds] both as an overview of the Egyptian economy and as a critique of the institutional economics orthodoxy. It is one of the best books that I have read about both subjects in recent years, and I recommend it highly." -- Mahmoud A. El-Gamal * Middle East Journal *"[Adly's] novel argument diverges from dominant political economy accounts, which focus on corruption and crony capitalism or the lack of formal property rights and the rule of law. For Adly, the answer lies in the 'missing middle' of small and medium enterprises, which have served an important role in capitalist development by scaling up to become important job creators in more successful developing economies, such as in South Korea. Adly traces the roots of the problem to historically specific institutional arrangements that emerged earlier in the 20th century and during the period of state-led development under Nasser and were consolidated under Sadat and Mubarak's tenures. Adly's book is grounded on impressive qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis and makes important contributions to the study of failed development in Egypt, with comparative implications for other developing countries in and beyond the Middle East and North Africa." -- Committee for the Roger Owen Book Award * sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsOne: Successful Transition to Failed Capitalism chapter abstractOver the course of four decades, the Egyptian economy underwent consistent and comprehensive economic liberalization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and deregulation. Yet the Egyptian economy today still experiences low growth, declining total investment rates, and high unemployment and underemployment. The private sector has never become globally competitive. The chapter traces this failure to establish an integrated market order. The problem of market integration in Egypt was not the absence of the Weberian spirit for exchange and the profit-making mentality among a majority of economically active people. Rather, it was the hard constraint of accessing capital. The 2011 uprising highlighted that these efforts at transformation failed not only economically but politically as well. Two: Beyond Cronyism chapter abstractStudies of Egypt's lackluster development performance have largely focused on the issue of crony capitalism, particularly the routes through which big business emerged after infitāḥ. It is undeniable that politics has played a significant, if not a central, role in the rise of big business in Egypt since the mid-1970s. This is hardly surprising, let alone unique. This literature on cronyism and rent seeking suffers from a blind spot in assessing the problematic nature of Egypt's capitalist transformation. Where large enterprises came from does not explain the lack of vibrancy and dynamism in the rest of the private sector. The issue with Egypt's private sector, as well as other cases of failed market transformation, seems to lie more with its inability to engender a robust stratum of small and medium-sized enterprises rather than the existence of large enterprises that are politically connected. Three: Egypt's Cleft Capitalism chapter abstractContrary to the expectations of neoclassical institutionalism, the weakness of formal property rights neither impeded the expansion of market exchange nor t deterred thousands of Egyptians from engaging with this expanding market since the mid-1970s. Alternative private economic orders have retained the capacity for sustained market creation and expansion, albeit imperfectly. This market expansion was not conducive to market integration, though. The resultant capitalist order was cleft. In order to grow, private enterprises must have access to inputs and market outlets that go beyond what is immediately available from their direct, private social capital. Throughout Egypt's capitalist transformation, access to capital, in particular, finance and land, remained quite restrained for the vast majority of private market actors. This was due to politico-historical factors that were continually perpetuated, eventually leading to the rise of institutional arrangements that were exclusionary for the broad base of private sector enterprises and entrepreneurs. Four: The Origins of Cleft Capitalism chapter abstractFor a vibrant and integrated capitalist order to emerge, capital should be made accessible to a majority of market actors. However, Egyptian SSEs have faced high administrative and economic barriers to financial and physical capital, a central mechanism through which cleft capitalism has been produced and reproduced over time. The problem of restricted access to capital has institutional and political origins. The rules, norms, and structures—-be they formal, informal, or a mix—that have governed the distribution of opportunities for accessing capital has produced three separate business subsystems—baladi, dandy, and crony—since infitāḥ in 1974. It was the predominance of a coalition of bureaucratic actors that maintained certain institutional arrangements for directly accessing land and bank credit. Five: How Cleft Capitalism Came About chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the historical and political factors that led to the production and reproduction of cleft capitalism since infitāḥ. It addresses the question of where the institutional condition of cleft capitalism came from. It examines the multiple political and economic factors since the mid-1970s that shaped the role of the state amid the process of market making and why they led to the development and perpetuation of cleft capitalism. It was the predominance of a coalition of bureaucratic actors that maintained certain institutional arrangements for directly accessing land and bank credit. However, this was neither uniform nor always strategically pursued, as it did not always result from top-down decisions by leadership of the executive where most formal power resided. Rather, there were many instances when bottom-up forces from within an incoherent and fragmented bureaucracy solidified the same institutional arrangements of a centralized and hierarchical system. Six: Egypt's Banking System: An Exclusive Club chapter abstractDespite waves of market-oriented reforms in Egypt, the overconcentration of credit, mainly extended to the state and a few large private sector firms, has persisted and failed to produce intermediate institutions that could open up channels of credit access for the broad base of SSEs. The chapter shows that the essential investment tool of debt financing has been made systematically unavailable to the broad base of these establishments because of an institutional and organizational framework that has been overly centralized and hierarchical. These institutional traits have ultimately raised the transaction costs for SSEs to an extent that has effectively excluded them from accessing credit, precluding any credible chance of scaling up and thus calcifying the institutional condition of cleft capitalism. Seven: Egypt's Desert Land: Abundant Yet Scarce chapter abstractDespite the virtual abundance of desert land, access to this land for productive uses has been quite restricted for most private sector enterprises. Indeed, entrepreneurs have traditionally underlined access to land, like finance, as a major barrier to growth—a consistent and constant theme since the launch of infitāḥ . Similar to the case of finance, centralized and hierarchical institutions dominated land management that excluded SSEs from accessing the physical capital needed to expand. Taken together, the lack of access to these crucial capital inputs has created and perpetuated the institutional condition of cleft capitalism that has robbed the Egyptian private sector of any ability to follow the paths taken by more successful market transformations. Eight: Baladi Capitalism chapter abstractThis chapter portrays a detailed and vivid picture of Egypt's baladi capitalism through exploring how SSEs function. Informed by extensive field research conducted in mid-2013, the chapter depicts a lively portrayal of how Egypt's private SSEs evolved and the diverse and complex modes of articulation between what is formal and informal and what is economic and social. Social networks, usually composed of family and friends, reduce the asymmetries of information between parties. Such networks are quite prevalent due to the weakness of formal contract enforcement and the high risks associated with impersonal transactions. Socialized and personalized transactions have contributed to the rise and constitution of a market since infitāḥ, defined as the space where price-driven exchange occurs. However, they couldn't substitute for the missing ingredient of access to capital that could have propelled Egypt's baladi capitalist subsystem into a robust and integrated private sector. Nine: Dandy Capitalism chapter abstractDespite economic liberalization and private sector development, designed to serve as the neoclassical solutions to Egypt's economic woes, entrenched levels of social marginalization and exclusion that were derived from earlier attempts at top-down modernization and colonial rule persisted after independence. Throughout most of Egypt's contemporary history, including the social reform eras in the 1950s and 1960s, state institutions maintained ties with only limited segments of society. This implied the absence of complementarity between social evolution that involved the vast majority of the people, on the one hand, and state attempts to deliver development, on the other. This overarching concept can be used to understand the historical lack of complementarity and intermediate institutions between capital-regulating organizations and SSEs, the missing-middle syndrome, rampant economic informality, and finally cleft capitalism as the general condition for underdevelopment throughout the past four decades of attempted market making.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe inside story of political protest in Saudi Arabia—on the ground, in the suburbs, and in the face of increasing state repression. Graveyard of Clerics takes up two global phenomena intimately linked in Saudi Arabia: urban sprawl and religious activism. Saudi suburbia emerged after World War II as citizens fled crowded inner cities. Developed to encourage a society of docile, isolated citizens, suburbs instead opened new spaces for political action. Religious activists in particular turned homes, schools, mosques, and summer camps into resources for mobilization. With the support of suburban grassroots networks, activists won local elections and found opportunities to protest government actions—until they faced a new wave of repression under the current Saudi leadership. Pascal Menoret spent four years in Saudi Arabia in the places where today's Islamic activism first emerged. With this book, he tells the stories of the people actively countering the Saudi state and highlights how people can organize and protest even amid increasingly intense police repression. This book changes the way we look at religious activism in Saudi Arabia. It also offers a cautionary tale: the ongoing repression by Saudi elites—achieved often with the complicity of the international community—is shutting down grassroots political movements with significant consequences for the country and the world.Trade Review"A distinguished ethnographer, Pascal Menoret excavates the Islamic Awakening in Saudi Arabia with great empathy and understanding. Once again, he demonstrates his ability to penetrate a world often associated with radicalism, bigotry, intolerance and violence, bringing us face to face with the men of the movement, and their rise and demise in the Saudi state." -- Madawi al-Rasheed * London School of Economics, author of Salman's Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia *"Pascal Menoret is an intrepid field researcher who gained unique access to communities in Saudi Arabia either closed to or ignored by other Western scholars. His insights into how the physical geography of Riyadh has shaped the development of its various social mobilizations are provocative and enlightening. This book is a fascinating read." -- F. Gregory Gause III * Texas A&M University, author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf *"There is no doubt that this study will be invaluable to anyone interested in Middle East studies with a focus on Islamic activism, youth recruitment and mobilization, spatial politics and the intersection of urban planning, activism, and state repression. This original work is a much-needed intervention that advocates for the urgency and need for activism that 'may resurface when the conditions are ripe'" -- Jonas Elbousty * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Part I: The Islamic Awakening chapter abstractThe Islamic Awakening is a political movement created in schools, colleges, and mosques by educators, preachers, and clerics. This part looks at how everyday Saudis become activists, and what type of repression they encounter when organizing and protesting in public. 2Part II: Saudi Suburbia chapter abstractThe Islamic Awakening emerged in the sprawling landscape of the Saudi suburbs, created in the 1960s and 1970s by princes and developers with the help of European urban planners. This part looks at the making of Saudi suburbia and examines the victory of Islamic Awakening candidates in the municipal elections of 2005. 3Part III: Awareness Groups and Summer Camps chapter abstractThe electoral victory of 2005 was the result of the mobilization of myriads of Islamic Awakening groups in local mosques, schools, and summer camps. This part analyzes the everyday structures of the Awakening: a high school Islamic group and the annual summer camps of the movement. It looks at how political repression targets everyday Islamic activism. 4Part IV: Leaving Islamic Activism Behind chapter abstractAs a result of the increased crackdown on Islamic movements, young activists have either tried to reform the Islamic Awakening from within or taken their distances with the movement. This part looks at the consequences of repression on individual mobilization, and analyzes the current state of the Islamic movement in Saudi Arabia.

Read more less