Showing papers in "Arab Studies Journal in 2014"

A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia

Abstract: A MOST MASCULINE STATE: GENDER, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN SAUDI ARABIA Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) $78.79 (cloth), $26.99 (paper)A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia will become an essential reference for discussions of what the author Madawi Al-Rasheed calls "the globalized question of Saudi women" (26). Saudi women are subject to economic marginalization and strict rules that regulate their everyday lives. While Western media focus on the ban on driving, this book explores the "deep-rooted exclusion" of women in the Saudi kingdom (1). Male guardians determine and control women's mobility, education, employment, and health just as the state makes their subordination possible at the legal, social, political, and economic levels.Al-Rasheed identifies her book as a project exploring "the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion" in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere (3). The ban on independent associations and organizations has also played a major role in denying Saudi women a chance to press collectively for social transforma- tion (2). The status quo is, however, changing with the expansion of com- munication technology that allows Saudi women to be present and active in the public sphere. Their voices are no longer unheard as they challenge ociety "through daring voices, critical texts, and real mobilization" (2).Acknowledging pioneering texts in the study of gender in Saudi Arabia, including work by Soraya Altorki, Saddeka Arebi, Eleanor Doumato, and Amelie Le Renard, and drawing upon the work of feminist scholars Deniz Kandiyoti, Suad Joseph, Mounira Charrad, and Sylvia Walby, Al-Rasheed looks to fill a gap in the growing literature by placing gender in Saudi Arabia in relation to the state and religious nationalism. She formulates the concept of "religious nationalism" in conversation with and against Joseph Massad's and Partha Chatterjee's theories of nationalism, which, she argues, "fail to account for the imaging of Saudi Arabia" (9). Unlike Jordan, for example, which was "invented" by forging a nationalism based on Bedouin culture, "the Saudi nation articulated an identity by claiming to apply the Sharia in all aspects of life and submitting to a universal Islamic ethos" (14). Citing the work of Beth Baron and Mervat Hatem, she also contrasts the case of the Saudi kingdom with that of Egypt, where anticolonial nationalism allowed women to benefit in certain legal aspects while "projecting gender relations as a function of greater political projects" (17). In the Saudi kingdom, religious nationalism involved breaking the military and political autonomy of the tribes, even as it drew upon the tribal ethos to keep "women in a patriar- chal relationship under the authority of male relatives" (5). By looking at both secular and religious nationalisms in the region and their relation to modernity, mostly through the prism of their discourses of women's rights, Al-Rasheed shows how "in both cases, women are turned into symbols, representing anything but themselves" (17).In the Saudi kingdom, a limited women's presence indicates the nation's obedience to Islamic law. Al-Rasheed surveys a number of Saudi fatwas on women in the 1980s whose restrictive interpretations of Islam, she shows, were used by the state to further limit women's visibility in the public space. The religious 'ulama' have also emphasized women's "emotionality" to deem them incapable of serving in state positions and public offices. This narra- tive was further used to make the subordination of Saudi women possible in legal, social, and religious terms. In order to control their appearance and mobility, women's bodies were referred to as sources of fitna (which the author translates as "chaos" rather than "temptation").According to Al-Rasheed, Saudi women face a "double exclusion"- "one in the general economy and one in the domestic sphere" (23). …

Intifada 3.0? Cyber colonialism and Palestinian resistance

Abstract: Following in the footsteps of international organizations, including the United Nations, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the International Telecommunications Union, on 2 May 2013, Google replaced the words "Palestinian Territories" with "Palestine" on all of its sites and products. Israeli deputy foreign minister Ze'ev Elkin immediately sent a letter to Google's CEO urging him to reconsider the decision that "in essence recogniz[es] the existence of a Palestinian state."1 It was not the first time that an Israeli official took issue with "Palestine" emerging as a recognized entity in the virtual world. In 1998, for example, Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, personally lobbied the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) against its decision to award Palestinians an international telephone code. He claimed, in terms echoed fifteen years later in the Google com- motion, that Palestine is "not a territorial or geopolitical entity," and that the "insistence upon the illegitimate use of the term 'Palestine' is liable to unfairly prejudice the outcome of . . . negotiations [at the time]."2Palestine "exists" on Google and increasingly in various other "virtual" ways. But are "Palestine" on Google or the acquisition of the google.ps domain name in 2009 examples of political resistance on the internet? For Palestinian politicians, virtual presence has historical significance. Consider, for example, the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology's (MTIT) suggestion that "ICTs [information and communica- tions technology] contribute directly to the national goal of establishing and building an independent state."3 Within that context, Sabri Saydam, adviser to Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas and a former MTIT minister himself, posited Google's 2013 move as "a step towards...libera- tion."4 For Israeli politicians, as quoted above, the emergence of (a virtual) "Palestine" poses ideological and practical dangers. Both camps ascribe power to the internet. Their only disagreement is over the ends to which the internet is a means: The internet is a threat to the existence of the state of Israel or a step toward a future state. At heart, however, both views are a form of technological determinism. They remove the internet from human, historical, and geopolitical contexts, and posit it as agent of political, social, or economic change. We contend that neither position is valid.Besides overlooking power relations and on-the-ground dynamics, a technological determinist view is inherently ahistorical. It neither con- textualizes technological change itself nor the rhetoric around it. In the Palestinian case, the belief that new technologies hold within them positive liberatory powers is not new. In the early 1990s, for example, the internet hype came under the guise of connecting Palestinians, regardless of geo- graphic location (in Israel, in the occupied territories, in refugee camps in Lebanon, and farther away in the diaspora), to each other and the world. And as the politicians' statements evidence, the internet emerged for some as an instrument of economic development under the framework of state- building within the occupied territories. At the end of the second intifada in the mid-2000s, scholars, politicians, and investors were still speaking of technology's political promise, now under the framework of user-generated content (web 2.0).5 In tech jargon, web 1.0 indicates one-to-many consump- tion, whereby most users simply download content. Web 2.0 connotes user-created websites, self-publishing platforms, and the many-to-many interactions available through participatory and social networks. The enthusiasm for online activism raises questions about whether new forms of Palestinian political activism are possible thanks to the convergence of physical and virtual worlds, for example through participatory (blogs, wiki), social (Facebook), and geospatial (Foursquare) spaces. …

Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect

Abstract: Rather than considering protest art as singularly revolutionary, disruptive,or unsettling to established power structures per se, this article and the contributions in the special issue explore the complex relation between cultural politics, aesthetics, affect, and resistance. Many of the articles contextualize the ambivalent and nuanced relationship between works of art, culture, and resistance within wider, constantly shifting, multiple, hegemonic discourses, and power structures. These contributions cast a skeptical eye on the notion of resistance. They complicate our understanding of how political and economic contingencies,colonialism, neoliberal market-driven policies, and global and local discourses can work to normalize, appropriate, co-opt, and commodify protest art and resistance. Moreover, they shed light on the transformative potential of art that focuses on the ordinary, or activates affective ties by disrupting hegemonic imaginaries and sensibilities.

Jerusalem's Separation Wall and Global Message Board: Graffiti, Murals and the art of Sumud

Abstract: All this graffiti that you see on the wall, even when it's not political, is not an act of adjustment. It's an act of resistance!Shopkeeper from East Jerusalem, 9 February 2011Israel's "security fence" ( geder ha-hafrada) or Palestine's "apartheid wall" (jidar al-fasl al-'unsuri)1 currently covers 708 kilometers, annexes 9.4 percent of the West Bank, integrates eighty Israeli settlements, and separates about fifty-five thousand Palestinian Jerusalemites from their kin in East Jerusalem. The barrier's construction continues to provoke a wide range of resistance discourses, international protests, and solidarity campaigns.2 A plethora of scholarship and media coverage has sought to challenge the wall's legality,3 highlighting its associated human rights violations through the obstruction of access to jobs, public services, education, and family. Other reports turn attention to the effects of dispossession and territorial fragmentation on Palestinian communities and a future Palestinian state.4 Academic critiques have firmly situated the wall within broader theories of state power, violence, and securitization. Such studies employ Foucauldian concepts of "biopower" or "biopolitics" as a means of understanding population control. They also draw on Agamben's notion of the dystopic "state of exception," in which a sovereign power invokes the need for security to justify the suspension of law, political rights, and, ultimately, "bare life" itself.5While Palestinian popular resistance to the wall has taken multiple forms and engaged various strategies, it is largely characterized by local responses to the wall's incremental progress. Such responses have included mass protests, weekly marches, sit-ins obstructing Israeli bulldozers, the dismantling of sections of the barrier, formal legal petitions, and advocacy campaigns. Against the backdrop of a weakened Palestinian Authority (PA) and continuing Fatah-Hamas infighting, this "Intifada of the Fence"6 has relied on the formation of local popular committees, the involvement of Israeli left-wing activists-mainly Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) and Ta'ayush-and the coordination of the grassroots Palestinian Anti- Apartheid Wall Campaign (AAWC or "Stop the Wall").7 The AAWC has emerged as one of the leading catalysts for wall resistance, facilitating the work of fifty-four popular committees, and coordinating national action days and weekly demonstrations in villages such as Bil'in, Ni'lin, Budrus, and al-Ma'sara.8While these acts of resistance are helping to forge new spaces and patterns for civil disobedience and activist partnerships, their impact on Palestinian Jerusalemite communities already cut off by the wall is far less clear.9 In what ways do such popular campaigns inspire, overlap with, or at times replace local activism? The failure to physically divert or stop the wall's construction around East Jerusalem has arguably increased "creative resistance strategies" such as putting graffiti, protest art, and commercial advertising on the wall. These oppositional practices employ the wall as both a site of public contention and as a space to be reclaimed through text, image, and discursive narrative. Indeed, the wall has emerged as a dynamic canvas for multilayered local and international visual art, expressing marginalized voices, political criticism, social protest, and global solidarity through graf- fiti tags, slogans, murals, and posters. Through such diverse interventions, protesters invoke humor, hope, and irony in order to help Palestinians adapt and survive.10 It is important, however, to question whether such practices may inadvertently reify the wall's presence and permanence, and equally, whether they encourage Western graffiti artists and international peace activ- ists to further the physical and discursive colonization of Palestinian space.In this article, I will examine the relevance and efficacy of wall protest art as an expression of everyday resistance or sumud within Palestinian Jerusalemite society. …

Debating Lebanon's Power-Sharing Model: An Opportunity or an Impasse for Democratization Studies in the Middle East?

Abstract: In spite of its small size, Lebanon is a divided state that is home to eighteen different ethno-religious groups.1 Its political system operates through a power-sharing arrangement organized along state-recognized sectarian lines. The arrangement purports to guarantee political representation and group autonomy in the realms of personal status, education, and cultural affairs to the major Christian and Muslim constituent communities. Two pacts underlie the provisions that regulate Lebanon's multi-sectarian balance of power. The unwritten 1943 National Pact allowed for the creation of a grand coalition government whereby a Maronite Christian would assume the presidency, a Sunni Muslim would be prime minister, and a Shi'i Muslim would hold the post of speaker of parliament. Communities were to be proportionally represented in the cabinet, and a six-to-five Christian-Muslim ratio was adopted for the legislature. The Ta'if Accords, which ended Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war (1975-90), put the National Pact into writing, while altering some of the power-sharing arrangements that had been previously established.2In democracy studies, debate over Lebanon's political model has never been a straightforward affair. Discussion of the country's "sectarian system of politics"3 is characterized by a dialectic whereby scholars herald the arrangement as a "democratic miracle" that carries the seeds of its own destruction. Social scientists have long sought to determine whether the democratic design of Lebanon's political system is suitable for such a divided society or whether it is instead a recipe for instability. The resulting debate has confined the dominant scholarly work on Lebanese politics to a set of binary conclusions assessing the merits and demerits of the "sectarian system." This narrow focus tends to unfairly exclude the Lebanese case from broader debates about democratization.4Scholars' use of the consociational model as an explanatory framework for Lebanon's political system has contributed to the entrenchment of the identified binaries in democracy studies, as the system has come to be framed within a power-sharing paradigm that borrows heavily from conso- ciational theory. There remains an incongruity between the consociational model as a normative paradigm and its embodiment as political practice in the Lebanese case.5 On one hand, consociational theory is too contested to disentangle what would be critical approaches to Lebanon's political system from what are polarized arguments of a normative nature. On the other, consociational theory fails to capture Lebanon's political realities.This article, therefore, argues for a shift in perspective, extricating democratization research on Lebanon from the grip of the consociational approach and its attendant binary conclusions. Suggestions for future work consist of approaches that conceptualize power sharing as a transformative process rather than as a final state. The article also recommends integrating scholarship on the production of sectarianism in Lebanon within the con- sociational literature on Lebanon's political system.Problematizing Lebanon''s Power-Sharing ModelWhile power sharing is a broad term that scholars understand as referring to the range of methods designed to manage conflicts in divided socie- ties,6 Lebanon's power-sharing method is specifically associated with the consociational democracy typology.7 Within the broad spectrum of studies of power sharing, consociational democracy is understood as one specific method of establishing political rule in religiously and/or ethnically divided societies. Commonly called "power-sharing democracy,"8 and at times subsumed within the larger field of "consociationalism,"9 consociational democracy is the practice of sharing and dividing power among sizable groups. It organizes political relationships according to constitutional provisions, institutionalized representation, proportionality, and group autonomy. …

Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948

Abstract: LAND OF PROGRESS: PALESTINE IN THE AGE OF COLONIAL DEVELOPMENT, 1905-1948 Jacob Norris Oxford: Oxford Universit y Press, 2013 (256 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations) $125.00 (cloth)The dominant view of British policy in Mandate Palestine has long been that it gave preference to the Zionists. Certainly, with regard to the first decade of British civilian rule, 1920 to 1930, there is virtual consensus around Britain's pro-Zionist bias. Jacob Norris both agrees and disagrees with this view in his excellent new book, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948, in which he sets out to remind us of a critical yet neglected aspect of Britain's moment in the Middle East.Norris's central claim is that British pro-Zionism flowed not from a commitment to Jewish nationalism, but from an ideology of colonial development and a view of the Jews as that ideology's most able agents in Palestine. According to Norris, this ideology was designed by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain at the turn of the century, and soon came to dominate British policy with respect to its non-Western sphere of influence. Norris characterizes Chamberlain's "constructive imperialism" as a "kind of neo-mercantilist attempt to achieve economic self-sufficiency within the British imperial sphere" (7).Acting on Chamberlain's vision, a group of "new imperialists" redi- rected Britain's imperial focus to the search for untapped economic potential within its domain. By actualizing such potential, stagnant backwaters would be transformed into productive lands of progress. In the Middle East, both Palestine and Mesopotamia were identified as possessing exploitable mineral wealth and agricultural potential. Palestine, moreover, was designated as a future staging post for Mediterranean trade.Norris carefully outlines the historical antecedents of British develop- mentalism in Palestine and beyond. Relying mainly on secondary material, he shows that the Ottomans shared in the same ideology of development and anticipated many of the undertakings that the British later carried out. But while the Ottoman Empire embraced a sort of multicultural pluralism, bal- ancing the granting of business licenses among the communities, the British singled out the Jews and made them central to their developmental vision.European Jews, in the British imagination, were ideally suited to the task of developing Palestine for cultural, commercial, and racial reasons. Being "white but not quite," they would provide, in the words of Mark Sykes, "the bridge between Asia and Europe" (81). The economic development that these Jews stood to generate would, so the logic went, trickle down to the rest of the population, in Palestine and then the region.The vision effectively translated into pro-Zionism. Norris notes, for instance, that most of the promoters of the Balfour Declaration in govern- ment circles-for example, Mark Sykes, Robert Cecil, Ronald Graham, Leo Amery, and William Ormsby-Gore-were counted among the new imperi- alists. But their Zionist affinities were incidental to the ideology of colonial development, whose logic was not particular to Palestine. The Jews were not the only non-white group encouraged to migrate within the British sphere of influence for the sake of colonial development; nor was Palestine the only destination for such migration. To name but two of Norris's examples, in the post-World War I period there were advanced plans to settle both Maltese and Indians in Mesopotamia. And in 1903 Joseph Chamberlain himself sought to encourage the Zionists to settle a territory in British- controlled eastern Africa.The two chapters in Land of Progress that contain the most original research examine two cases: the construction of the Haifa port and the grant of a concession to extract the mineral deposits of the Dead Sea. In other words, one case relates to Palestine's imperial role as a regional trading hub, while the other relates to the development of Palestine's untapped natural resources. …

The "Hidden Transcript" of Resistance in Moroccan Tazmamart Prison Writings

Abstract: This death made us realize the seriousness of the situation. We were sentenced to die from hunger, cold, vermin, and illness without succor, mercy, or any other resources except our faith, youth, and our ability to endure and fill time.1IntroductionThis article analyzes the "hidden transcript"2 of resistance in Moroccan prison writings through an examination of the memoirs of two Moroccan army officers,3 Ahmed Marzouki and Aziz BineBine. Both men spent eighteen years in the enforced disappearance camp of Tazmamart for executing military orders from their superiors during the failed coup d'etat of 1971. Because the Moroccan state denied their whereabouts and jailed them in a prison that operated outside the purview of the Ministry of Justice, the inmates of Tazmamart prison meet Amnesty International 's definition of victims of enforced disappearance.4 I argue that instead of crushing their will, weakening their endurance, or turning them into malleable uncritical beings, imprisonment and disappearance in the prisons of the makhzen-the Moroccan regime-endowed these two men with a greater consciousness of the oppressive nature of the Moroccan regime and to resist prison authority, if subtly. Throughout the reconstructed narratives of the period of their forcible disappearance (1973-91), the captives never yielded to prison discipline willingly, and never internalized the fear the Moroccan regime strove to instill in them. Instead, they employed a myriad of resistance and coping strategies to subvert prison authority and create spaces where they reconnected with freedom, even while they were in total confinement and isolation. Additionally, I will show that the publication of their prison memoirs, and those of other political prisoners from the "years of lead" (1956-99), pushed the boundaries of fear and contributed to the emergence of a culture of defiance in the wider Moroccan society. The state apparatus had indeed the means to obliterate people and make them disappear but, as Tazmamart narratives show, it was not able to overcome the detainees' refusal to submit to an abject death.Drawing on Irving Goffman's analysis of the functions of "total insti- tutions"5 and Michel Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,6 this article explores how Tazmamart captives resisted prison conditions, discipline, docility, and authority through their writings. James Scott's notion of "hidden transcript," which describes "discourse that takes place "offstage" beyond direct observation by powerholders,"7 is especially useful in revealing "the disguised, low-profile, undeclared resistance"8 that took place in Tazmamart during the "years of lead." By applying Scott's theory to Marzouki's prison memoir, Tazmamart Cell 10,9 and BineBine's Tazmamort: Eighteen Years in the Jail of Hassan II, which portray the detention experiences of the two authors in the secret detention camp of Tazmamart in the period between 1973 and 1991, I will elucidate these everyday forms of resistance to discipline and prison authority, and demonstrate how survival was part and parcel of resisting this authority, while recognizing its cultural and political implications for the larger Moroccan society.Contextualizing the "Years of Lead" and the Birth of Tazmamart (1956-99)10The "years of lead," otherwise known as the "dark years" or the "years of ember and lead,"11 refer to the period between Morocco's independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999, a period during which state terror reigned over Morocco and muzzled the entire society politically and intellectually. Mass and systematic violations of human rights, including long-term forced disappearance of political dissidents and army officers, characterized the lawlessness and total impunity with which the state security apparatus operated. The former political detainee, Noureddine Saoudi12 described the "years of lead" as:a long dark period of our Moroccan contemporary history, during which serious violations of human rights were committed by a regime that, despite a multipartite facade, pursued a policy of systematic and violent repression of any opposition, with all its corollaries of arbitrariness and barbarity of another age. …

Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt in Egypt

Abstract: IMAGINED EMPIRES: A HISTORY OF REVOLT IN EGYPT Zeinab Abul-Magd Berkeley: Universit y of California Press, 2013 (ix + 201 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $29.95 (paper)In Imagined Empires, Zeinab Abul-Magd develops an extended case study of hegemony, resistance, and environmental upheaval in the Upper Egyptian province of Qina in order to explore the limits of empire over the course of five centuries. In 154 pages, the author nimbly introduces Qina and its rebellious population as a foil to the discursive and institutional projects of five "world empires" in Egypt: the Ottomans (1517-1798), the Napoleonic invasion (1798-1801), the reign of the Ottoman governor Mehmed Ali Pasha (1805-48), the spread of free trade capitalism under British "informal empire" (1848-82), and British colonialism after 1882. A short epilogue discusses Qina province's experience with American "postmodern" empire since the Cold War and the lead-up to the Egyptian revolution of 2011.Abul-Magd's five vignettes of imperial "failure" in Qina province showcase five very different types of imperial encounter linked by a common narrative arc. Imperial discourses of hegemony, unification, and efficiency are rendered hollow as each of these empires "confidently went south," generating "environmental destruction while altering established systems of land and river management and leaving behind sweeping epidemic diseases" (2-3). Imperial ambitions in Upper Egypt unraveled as armies and state officials confronted "massive subaltern revolts championed by peasants, women, laborers, and ever-ruthless bandits" (3). The recurring themes of environmental disturbance and subaltern revolt help to ground this longue-duree study of empire in the tangible experience of a people and place marginalized in the historical narrative.Chapter one offers a fascinating and overdue discussion of the "inde- pendent state" of Upper Egypt under the rule of the Hawwara Arabs during the late Mamluk and Ottoman periods. In contrast to the imperial power arrangements that would follow, Abul-Magd describes the emergence in the mid-eighteenth century of a "republic . . . based on a new social contract between the Hawwara and the subaltern classes of the south" under the authority of Shaykh al-'Arab Hammam ibn Yusuf (29). Interference from political elites in Cairo upset this idyllic state when they attempted to unite Lower and Upper Egypt in the 1780s, resulting in the arrival of an "'imperial' plague" and sparking widespread rebellion by Arab tribes and Coptic peas- ants (38). Chapter two, on the French invasion of Egypt (1798-1801), argues that "military misfortune was not the reason behind the rapid failure of the French Empire. Rather, it was a crisis of images" (44). French republican self-images of embarking on an efficient mission civilatrice evaporated as Arab peasants formed alliances with their dispossessed Mamluk overlords in "a holy war of Jihad," while Qina's Coptic administrators dominated "a knowledge/power battle" in which they "controlled information as well as revenue" critical to the effective management of empire (56, 62).Chapters three, four, and five constitute the core of the study, recounting Qina's fitful and reluctant nineteenth-century integration into a central- izing Egyptian nation-state and, concurrently, into a globalizing capitalist economy. Chapter three argues that Upper Egypt was the "'first colony'" in the "short-lived empire" of the Ottoman governor Mehmed Ali Pasha (71). Treating this episode as an example of contested "internal colonialism" akin to the British in Ireland, Abul-Magd seeks to overturn a triumphalist national narrative that views Mehmed Ali as the benevolent founder of modern Egypt. From 1820 to 1824, Qina was the site of "the only massive rebellions that Egypt witnessed" during the pasha's forty-three years of harsh rule, prompting him to implement direct plantation agriculture and expand the capillary reach of the modernizing state (78). …

Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook

Abstract: POPULAR CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA: A POSTCOLONIAL OUTLOOK Edited by Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman New York: Routledge, 2013 (x v + 284 pages, bibliographica l references, index) $125.0 0 (cloth)The edited volume Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook sets out to address a perceived lack in the scholarship on the region. Editors Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines in the hope of amending what they contend is a consistent tendency within the field, both in the West and the Middle East, to downplay the significance of popular culture. Broad in geographical and disciplinary scope, the volume places literary and film scholars, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists, among others, in conver- sation about the production and position of popular culture in the Middle East within the contemporary moment. This enterprise is all the more sig- nificant given the monumental events that continue to unfold in the region; in a post-September 11 world, and in light of the revolutionary movements taking place in the Arab world, the chapters of this book raise fundamental questions about the role of popular culture as a vehicle for the expression of possibilities of social and political change and also as a form of resistance to prevalent stereotypes about the region and its people.Drawing upon the work of pioneering scholars in the study of popular culture in the Middle East, such as Rebecca Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Andrew Hammond, and Walter Armburst, the writers in this collection extend and expand the existing discussion about the significance of popular forms of expression and their position within the cultural sphere. Above all, it is the work of Stuart Hall that underpins this intellectual project. In their attempt to bridge the gap between "high" and "low" culture, El Hamamsy and Soliman argue for what they call "border crossing," an "approach to the study of culture that has at its core a conception of cultural production as a fluid process." They further explain, "Rather than a view of mainstream and popular culture that sees both and the relations between them as fixed, this is an outlook that perceives these forms of cultural production as more malleable and flexible" (3). "Mainstream" here refers to the dominant form of cultural production, that which is seen as high, elite, and canonical, in opposi- tion to popular culture, which is seen as less intellectual, less substantial, and more commercial. With Hall's work in mind, the editors understand popular culture as produced within a context shaped by processes of "containment" and "resistance," in which power structures marginalize certain cultural forms. For El Hamamsy and Soliman, there exists an ongoing struggle between the forces of "high" and "popular" culture over which one is to occupy a position of prominence. This struggle cannot be divorced from the larger political, social, and economic issues that influence what is privileged and what is marginalized. Here is their take, for example, on Egyptian singer Sha'ban 'Abd al-Rahim's position within the cultural sphere:What is perceived by many as Shaaban Abdel Rahim's crudeness and vulgarity have made of him the butt of censure by the elite, disregarding his immense popularity among the majority-of mostly underprivileged- Egyptians. However, it is easy to see in him a popular cultural icon who is of the masses and speaks their language. The song is an embodiment of the power dynamic between dominant and subordinate cultures, especially the latter's constant attempts to gain a foothold on the cultural map. (7)Within this collection, the different kinds of music, literature, dance, graffiti art, and film are thus read, both explicitly and implicitly, as different examples of resistance. What makes these chapters so compelling is the way the authors present diverse artistic practices as resistance against both dominant mainstream culture and different kinds of social, political, and ideological injustices. …

"My Struggle Embraces Every Struggle" : Palestinians in Israel and Solidarity with Afro-Asian Liberation Movements

Abstract: Before he was an internationally acclaimed poet, Mahmoud Darwish spent his twenties as an editor and columnist for al-Ittihad and al-Jadid, the Arabic-language publications of the Israeli Communist Party. In February 1962 he reported on the second Afro-Asian Writers Association Conference in Cairo, where writers from sixty countries gathered to discuss how they could forge a sense of solidarity based on their geographical and historical ties. Darwish articulated the impetus for the conference by noting that in the years immediately preceding it, "The East has stood on its feet and unleashed its energy, which has changed the face of humanity's history and cleansed it of imperialism's filth . . . . In this solidarity the writers of Asia and Africa have found a path towards unifying their shared forces."1 While Darwish's account vividly conveyed his excitement about the conference, one thing was missing: Darwish himself. As a Palestinian living in Israel, Darwish could not attend the conference, due both to Israel's ban on travel to Arab countries and to the Arab boycott of Israel. Nonetheless, Darwish's enthusiasm for the conference clearly reflected a broader, yet frequently overlooked, aspect of Palestinian discourse in Israel. Despite their physical and geographical isolation, Palestinian activists and intellectuals repeat- edly sought to affirm their solidarity with global decolonizing movements and liberation struggles. In doing so, they subtly contested elements of the Zionist narrative that portrayed Israel itself as part of the decolonizing world.Until recently, much of the scholarship on the pre-1967 Palestinian minority in Israel has characterized it as politically quiescent and isolated, in contrast to the more robust political assertiveness of later generations of activists.2 More recent studies have challenged this picture of quiescence, highlighting early acts of resistance despite the dominance of the Israeli military regime.3 Additional work has also shed new light on what Ghassan Kanafani in 1966 termed the "resistance literature in occupied Palestine," showing how poetry festivals and Arabic literary journals provided impor- tant outlets for poetic expressions of nationalist sentiment and opposition to Israeli policies during the pre-1967 period.4 These studies, however, focus primarily on state-minority interactions and tend to locate the Palestinian community squarely within the confines of the nation-state. A few scholars have noted the consumption of Arab media by Palestinians in Israel as well as Palestinian activists' pan-Arab orientation.5 Yet there has been less attention to how Palestinian cultural producers in Israel situated themselves within the broader context of Afro-Asian decolonization movements and their concomitant global solidarity programs. As a result, the Palestinian minority has yet to be fully integrated into broader studies of Arab intel- lectual and cultural history, particularly during the pre-1967 period when scholars assumed they were cut off from the wider region.This article addresses this gap by examining how Palestinian activists and intellectuals in Israel articulated their solidarity with Afro-Asian libera- tion struggles. Because of numerous political and ideological constraints that hindered their ability to organize sustained, large-scale and contentious collective action,6 they relied upon cultural production to express their solidarity with these movements. Through a content analysis of two of the most popular and influential Arabic-language publications in Israel during this period-the semi-weekly newspaper al-Ittihad (The Union) and the monthly cultural journal al-Jadid (The New)-I argue that between 1960 (the Year of Africa7) and 1967 (the June War), Palestinian contributors to these publications utilized three overlapping solidarity discourses. These discourses aimed to connect Palestinians in Israel to the major anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles that animated the Afro-Asian world during this period, most notably those of Algeria, Congo, and Vietnam. …

Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco

Abstract: IMAGINED MUSEUMS: ART AND MODERNITY IN POSTCOLONIAL MOROCCO Katarzyna Pieprzak Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (x xix + 177 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations) $75.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper)"I am not interested in national museums of the Third World. Memory that is useless is useless to preserve," Ali Amahan, the former museum director of Morocco, declares in the opening pages of Katarzyna Pieprzak's study of Moroccan museums (xiii). In his definitive assertion, Amahan expresses a sentiment that echoes throughout the following pages, and beautifully sum- marizes some of the fundamental issues at the crux of this book. Imagined Museums explores the relationship between museums and the nation, and the place and "usefulness" of memory within these formulations, as well as the processes through which the designation of art, and subsequently value, is bestowed upon objects. Pieprzak demonstrates the ways in which museums, in their evolving forms, play a central role in a number of overlap- ping discourses of modernity in Morocco. Imagined Museums is therefore not only an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on modern and contemporary artistic practices and institutions in the region, but it is also a particularly timely one as museums (and their contents) in the contemporary Arab world continue to be sites of controversy and con- flict, from the looting of the National Museum of Iraq during the US-led invasion in 2003, to the ransacking of the Egyptian Museum and its use as a site for torture during the 2011 uprisings, to the ongoing campaign by Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists, for workers' rights and the boycott of academic and cultural institutions building on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, including the Louvre and the Guggenheim.While based primarily on research conducted between 2000 and 2004 and focusing on Arabic and French postcolonial press, letters, and memoirs, Pieprzak's work also draws on sources from outside the traditional archive such as travel narratives, visitors' comments, and blogs. She reads this vast array of material through a number of disciplinary lenses including com- parative literature, museum studies, African studies, and anthropology. Demonstrating the exciting potential of interdisciplinary work, she weaves discussions of museums in Morocco into a larger conversation about the role of museums in the non-Western world, particularly in postcolonial contexts, and demonstrates how art is used "to access the right to participate equally on local and world stages" (xxi).Imagined Museums is divided into two somewhat separate but dia- logical sections. The first three chapters focus on a number of institutional manifestations of the museum in Morocco over the last century, beginning with its earliest incarnation, the Batha Museum, established in 1915 in a nineteenth-century palace in Fez by Prosper Ricard, the director of the Protectorate Fine Arts Administration. Under the protectorate, museums were primarily concerned with collecting examples of local crafts such as weaving, ceramics, and woodwork while working toward the "restora- tion of [these] artisanal techniques" (6). Museums in Morocco differed significantly from their European counterparts, established during the Enlightenment. "They were never founded to instill a sense of community or nation in the Moroccan public at large" but instead "functioned more as a closed laboratory of conservation for the education of a specific group of people: primarily administrators, academics, and 're-educated' artisans" (15). Concerned with "purity" and "authenticity," the administration created a "canon of prototypes" that ultimately served new and expanding sections of the economy and the craft and tourism industries. This focus on "authentic" models meant, however, that any kind of contemporary experimentation was excluded. After liberation, the Moroccan state inherited these institu- tions and there were high hopes among artists for the establishment of a modern art museum. …

Refractions of Civil Society in Turkey

Abstract: REFRACTIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN TURKEY Daniella Kuzmanovic New York: Palgrave Macmi llan, 2012 (x iv + 211 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations) $85.00 (cloth)In Refractions of Civil Society in Turkey, Daniella Kuzmanovic offers an ethnographic engagement with both the concept of and practices associated with civil society in contemporary Turkey. She situates her project within a broad literature on the rise of civil society organizations (CSOs) globally since the end of the Cold War, frequently referring to the anthropological work of John and Jean Comaroff. She also addresses a more particular field of ethnographic work in Turkey focusing on relations between citizens and the state and exemplified by the work of Yael Navaro-Yashin, Jenny White, and Esra Ozyurek. Adopting Navaro-Yashin's argument that the binary of state and civil society is more an abstraction than a clear analytical catego- rization, Kuzmanovic holds that ethnographic investigation should focus on the way civil society activists conceive of their work. To this end, she draws on the field of existential anthropology and particularly the work of Michael Jackson, which endeavors to show how practices such as activism contribute to the making of "autonomous, agentic subjects" (30). She returns to this theme throughout the book as she grapples with the overarching questions of what civil society is and how it functions in the Turkish milieu.Kuzmanovic performed approximately seventy interviews throughout 2005 and 2006 with a variety of interlocutors, including representatives of twenty-seven CSOs from across Turkey's sociopolitical spectrum. She also attended numerous seminars, worked with some of the organizations she studied, and collected publicity materials. Her analysis is supported with transcribed interviews, field-note excerpts, and occasional illustrations."Sincerity" (samimiyet) is, for Kuzmanovic, the key term for under- standing how civil society is discussed in Turkey. Activists wish to appear sincere, while often questioning the sincerity of others. Kuzmanovic's task is to "map" the social territory of this clearly subjective and relational term and to assess the work it performs. The sociopolitical context plays a major role in how the sincerity of a CSO is perceived, and Kuzmanovic highlights three cleavages that characterize this context: (1) the secular/religious divide, (2) differences on how Turkey should integrate and interact with the outside world, and (3) the divide between leftists, on the one hand, and the often cooperating forces of right-wing nationalists and the Turkish state, on the other. Activists and the CSOs they work with are judged both by the public and by other CSOs in terms of their perceived position vis-a-vis these cleav- ages, with "sincerity" functioning as a kind of catch-all term that validates such judgments. These positions can sometimes literally be mapped within Turkey. CSOs in Ankara, for instance, are frequently perceived as more secu- larist and state-focused, while those in Istanbul are more likely to be seen as coming from a variety of political perspectives, including Islamist, and may have stronger ties to the international community. But sincerity can also be assessed with reference to a number of other factors. For the individual activist, life experiences such as having spent time in prison for a cause or having been excluded from school for wearing an Islamic headscarf can increase one's credibility, as can being a volunteer rather than a paid worker. Even the type of organization one works for often has implications, with some (usually conservative) activists seeing religious foundations (vakiflar) as particularly sincere, while networks (orgutler) are often associated with questionable activities, including terrorism, in part because the term orgut has come to function as shorthand for a decentralized organization with a revolutionary mindset, whether this is actually the case or not. …

Aren't We Human? Normalizing Palestinian Performances

Abstract: You see, there are two models of Arab governance. The old Nasserite model, which Hamas still practices, where leaders say: "Judge me by how I resist Israel or America." ...The new model, pioneered in the West Bank by Abbas and Fayyad is: "Judge me by how I perform- how I generate investment and employment, deliver services and pick up the garbage. First we build transparent and effective political and security institutions. Then we declare a state. That is what the Zionists did, and it sure worked for them."Thomas L. Friedman, "The Ballgame and the Sideshow," The New York Times, 5 June 2010Writing in support of the "two-state solution," Thomas Friedman contrasts what he calls two forms of Arab governance visibly present in the occupied Palestinian territories. The first is based on resistance to colonial, impe- rial powers; the second on establishing neoliberal economic and security institutions. As the resistance model directs itself to local Arab populations, the neoliberal model largely speaks to Western-dominated governing and institutional bodies. Both models gain legitimacy from how their audiences judge them, in effect, from how they perform. Regardless of Friedman's ideo- logical positioning, his articulation is revealing in that it grounds Palestinian political practices in a logic of performance.Advocating for the neoliberal model, Friedman praises the performance of the US-funded and trained Palestinian National Security Force (NSF) under the direction of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. With the aim of reforming Palestinian security forces to be in alliance with the Israeli military regime, the United States sees the NSF as a step forward to implementing the road map, which the Quartet (the US, UN Secretariat, European Union and Russia) issued in April 2003 in support of the two-state solution.1 Its full title, "A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli Palestinian Conflict," articulates a framework based not on end goals but on ongoing assessments. The road map serves as a clear example of the workings of a larger socio-political context that defines international legitimacy and political solutions as "performance-based."In this article, I explore how Palestinian cultural production in the occupied territories is embedded within this context of performance-based politics, which in turn shapes artists' and scholars' understandings of how aesthetic performances can function as resistance. I draw on Friedman's articulation, and the underlining logic, of the road map to focus on the ques- tion of spectatorship-who are Palestinian cultural productions addressing and according to what criteria are they being evaluated? I focus on The Gaza Mono-Logues theater project, which its organizers shaped as a rights-based advocacy campaign, in order to highlight the relationship between specta- torship and a politics of recognition. The need to be recognized as human, I show, is connected with the ways performance, normalization, and resistance are entwined. Addressing "the world" as anticipated spectator becomes a logic of both resistance and performance. The notion of "cultural resistance" thus becomes a part of the underlying logic of performance-based politics.Performance-Based PoliticsWhile more than a decade has passed since the United States drafted the road map, it continues to serve as a model for subsequent "peace negotia- tions" and policies that have been implemented on the ground in Palestine. Although never realized, its underlying logic remains pervasive. The docu- ment's staying power is evident in the Palestinian Authority's (PA) official state-building discourse and practice,2 the discourse around the declara- tion of 2014 as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,3 and most explicitly in the Palestinian Accountability Act passed by the US Congress in March 2013.4 The short text of the road map suc- cinctly summarizes key elements in dynamics of power, normalization, and performance in contemporary Palestine. …

On Delusion, Art, and Urban Desires in Palestine Today: An Interview with Yazid Anani

Abstract: Yazid Anani is an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and the Masters Program in Urban Planning and Landscape at Birzeit University. He obtained his PhD in spatial planning from TU Dortmund University in Germany in 2006. Anani chaired the Academic Council of the International Academy of Art Palestine in 2010-12. He has actively collaborated in several collectives and projects, including "Decolonizing Architecture" and "Ramallah Syndrome." In addition to curating or co-curating "Urban Cafes" and "Palestinian Cities-Visual Contention," he has also co-curated the second, third, and fourth editions of Cities Exhibition. His writings on cultural and visual politics, traveling theory, contemporary art practices, transnationalism, and international cultural aid have appeared in various journals and edited volumes. He was a 2012-13 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.Hanan Toukan was a Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 2009-12, where she taught and lectured in the Department of Politics and International Studies and the Center for Media and Film Studies. She obtained her PhD from SOAS, University of London, in 2011. Toukan's research focuses on the role of international cultural funding institutions in the Middle East, global and local practices and discourses on culture and the arts, and traveling theoretical conceptions and enactments of what "the political" holds in cultural production. She was a 2012-13 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.IntroductionOver the course of their year together as postdoctoral fellows at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Anani and Toukan held an ongoing dialogue about Palestinian art, the politics of its local and international production processes, and meaning making in the different spatial, temporal, and transnational contexts in which it circulates. This interview revolves around one particular project, Cities Exhibition, which Anani has been co-curating since its second edition in Ramallah in 2008.Their conversations stem from their contention that Ramallah, the professed capital of the future Palestinian state, has become an ideal envi- ronment for the post-Oslo, new urban middle class that embodies what Sharon Zukin has called a "universal yearning for cappuccino culture."1 This evolving social structure is a core manifestation of a universal, yet specific, profit-oriented culture that instills a narrow imagination of the "good life" and serves to distance the middle class in Ramallah from its long history of surviving Israeli occupation. A new, neoliberal, urban environment has emerged that allows the urban middle class to experience what David Harvey has described as "the most fundamental of human desires."2 That is, the notion of freedom is linked to the capacity to consume. It is this link that makes neoliberalism as a way of life possible.3 It is this link, too, that has fostered a delusion of freedom in the occupied territories but most specifically Ramallah, where people live under Israeli colonialism, on the one hand, and with hallucinations of a postcolonial condition, on the other.4 The delusion lying at the heart of the prevalent "cappuccino culture" manifests in the context of an ongoing Israeli occupation and confiscation of Palestinian land. In Palestine, moreover, the middlemen of the Palestinian Authority (PA), in agreement with international peace diplomacy efforts, manage these violent colonial realities. The PA operates as a quasi-state whose ultimate mission is to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation aimed at building the elusive future state.The post-Oslo regime has adopted a model of economic practices in which "Palestinian wellbeing" is best served through liberating entre- preneurial freedoms in an institutional framework that hinges on private property rights, free trade, and free markets. …

Colonial Copyright: Intellectual Property in Mandate Palestine

Abstract: COLONIAL COPYRIGHT: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN MANDATE PALESTINE Michael D. Birnhack Oxford: Oxford Universit y Press, 2012 (x vi + 336 pages, bibliography, index) $99.75 (cloth)Even scholarly readers may assume that a book on copyright law sounds most like a means of coping with insomnia. Michael Birnhack, however, has written a surprisingly engaging study that sets Mandate Palestine's encounters with British-imposed copyright law in the context of international concordances on copyright and late nineteenth-century imperial extensions of metropolitan copyright laws. He highlights how British officials used European concepts of creative work and authorship to justify colonialism's "civilizing mission" and denigrate local understandings of creative works, including how they were produced and by whom, and how to protect them. He then turns to Palestine as a case study, examining how both Jewish immigrants and local Arab Palestinians received British copyright law: first ignoring it but then employing it to assert the existence of a creative field in each community, with standards of production and authorship that fit British conceptions of the creative field. This densely researched, complex study engages with sociolegal studies as well as social history, while offering a highly readable account of the complexities of the subject.Colonial Copyright also fits nicely within the social history turn in Mandate Palestine studies evident since the early 2000s. Birnhack's argu- ments about the development of parallel but discrete, nonoverlapping or even intersecting Arab Palestinian and Yishuv "cultural fields"-complete with careful overviews (particularly for the latter) of their literary, performing arts, news, and broadcasting arenas-could comprise a worthy study on their own. He similarly weaves in a careful analysis of the business and com- mercial aspects of copyright law and its enforcement through fees and fines, connecting it with labor and other economic histories of the Mandate era. At the same time, by examining copyright law as a normative process, he also engages with governmental Mandate studies. Birnhack is well versed in the classic and current literature in these subfields, but in combining them he is indeed taking the interdisciplinary approach advocated by sociolegal studies, tracing the history of law not as an autonomous entity but as a social force that shapes and is shaped by other social forces. In doing so, he follows Assaf Likhovski, whose 2006 Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) took a similar approach, and whose more recent work engages the same issues of legal transplanta- tion that Birnhack foregrounds.Birnhack's study draws upon archival research conducted across several countries, including the BBC Written Archives and those of the Performing Rights Society in London, as well as the British National Archives; the Jerusalem City Archive, the Israel State Archive, and the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem; and assorted archives in Tel Aviv. He has consulted Mandate-era periodicals, primarily Hebrew- and English-language Zionist newspapers-although he has not made a systematic study but rather used a sampling of years-along with numerous Mandate-era government publications. This research represents a prodigious investment of time and resources and is joined by extensive secondary source support. This archival investment is all the more striking as Birnhack 's overarching argument is not about Mandate Palestine. His contention is that the exportation of a colonial power's copyright law to its colonies-a "legal transplantation"- must be understood not as the legal equivalent of an organ transplantation, with its connotations of a one-time surgical procedure with little role for the recipient other than to benefit, but as a "dialectic, interactive process" in which locals' reception of the law matters as much as colonial authorities' imposition of it (239). …

Shiism and Politics in the Middle East

Abstract: SHIISM AND POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Laurence Loueer, translated by John King Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) $78.79 (cloth), $26.99 (paper)As the debate about a rising "Shi'i crescent" continues, Laurence Louer's new book, Shiism and Politics in the Middle East, searches for common elements in Arab Shi'i movements, while taking into account the unique national context in which each movement operates. A research fellow at Sciences-Po in Paris, Louer examines Shi'i political movements in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and post-Saddam Iraq and their ties to Shi'i clerical institutions and religious networks. She records 2005 as a critical year for researchers: in Iraq, elections brought Shi'i political parties to power, and sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunnis escalated; in Lebanon, the assas- sination of Rafiq al-Hariri strengthened Hizballah; and in Iran, the election of Ahmadinejad appeared to usher in a more provocative foreign policy.Engaging the literature on secularization, transnational political movements, and Shi'i politics, Louer argues against unnamed analysts who suggest that there has been a resurgence in the transnational and regional character of Shi'i political movements since 2005, possibly steered by Iran. The Shi'i crescent concept was made famous by King 'Abdallah II of Jordan in December 2004, when he expressed fears that Shi'i groups and governments stretching from Iran to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon would destabilize the balance of power in the region (see Robin Wright and Peter Baker, "Iraq, Jordan See Threat to Election from Iran," Washington Post, 8 December 2004). His comments helped spark a debate about the nature and scope of a revival of Shi'i political consciousness in the region, the extent of transnational connections between Shi'i groups, whether Iran supports Arab Shi'i groups as part of a strategy to expand its regional power, and the degree to which Iran's connections to these groups are practical versus ideological in nature. Vali Nasr significantly shaped the debate in his 2006 bestseller The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: Norton), in which he argues that the Shi'a's rise to political importance in Iraq has revived Sunni-Shi'i sectarian consciousness and conflict in the region, setting in motion a chain reaction that will result in "greater Shia power and more manifest cultural and religious ties across the crescent from Lebanon to Pakistan" (20, 271, 179). Although Nasr clarifies that the "Shia revival . . . [does] not mean pan-Shiism or a unitary Shia language of power, but anchoring Shia interests in national identities," he notes that Shi'i movements look to the militant Hizballah or democratic Sistani models for inspiration, and that Iran and Shi'i groups see each other as potential strategic partners (233-34). Meanwhile, leaders from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as some from Washington, have described Iran as more actively manipulating Shi'i groups to undermine Arab states.Louer, by contrast, avoids putting the Iranian state at the center of her study. Rather than focus on Shi'i identity or Iranian government support and foreign policy, Louer examines the individual movements, Shi'i clerical institutions, and their transnational connections. She is thus able to look at these movements from the bottom up, instead of imposing an overarching construct on them. Whereas her previous work, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (2008) was tailored to academics and based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Shiism and Politics in the Middle East relies on historical analysis and her previous research and is geared toward a more general audience. She reviews the history of the Shi'i clerical system and traces the development of Shi'i political movements during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by focusing on the al- Da'wa and Shirazi networks, which spread from Iraq and Iran throughout the Gulf. …

The Contemporary Syrian Novel in Translation

Abstract: THE CONTEMPORARY SYRIAN NOVEL IN TRANSLATION Cinnamon Samar Yazbek Translated by Emily Danby London: Haus Publishing, 2012 (226 pages) $16.95 (paper)In Praise of Hatred Khaled Khalifa Translated by Leri Price London: Transworld Publishers, 2012 (x v i + 299 pages) $25.99 (cloth)The Silence and the Roar Nihad Sirees Translated by Ma x Weiss London: Pushkin Press, 2013 (160 pages) $13.95 (paper)Writing Love Khalil Sweileh Translated by A lexa Firat Cairo: The American Universit y in Cairo Press, 2012 (192 pages) $16.95 (paper)It has become something of a commonplace to lament the lack of adequate translations of Syrian literature into English. The brisk new Anglophone market for the art and culture of the so-called Arab Spring, however, has not left the contemporary Syrian novel out in the cold. While Syrian giants of the second half of the twentieth century like the playwright Sa'adallah Wannus and novelists Salim Barakat and Haydar Haydar remain undertranslated, if not unavailable, in English, the post-2000 Syrian novel is witnessing some- thing of a boom in translation. In turn, publishing houses and readers are cultivating certain assumptions about what kinds of revolutionary insights the Syrian novel of the past decade can provide for foreign readers. The marketing and reception of Syrian literature and cultural production in English since 2011 have upheld the premise that contemporary artworks can shed much-needed light on the political, social, and psychological contours of an uprising that continues to inspire and confound observers in Europe and the United States. And at least three of the four novels discussed in this review (Khalid Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred, Samar Yazbek's Cinnamon, and Nihad Sirees's The Silence and the Roar), which tackle social, political, and religious questions and belong to what could be loosely termed pre-2011 opposition literature, may do just that. Nevertheless, the novels discussed in this review were all published between 2004 and 2008, and their links to our contemporary moment are not always direct. It would be reductive, then, to posit an uncritical equivalence between these novels and the texts that emerged from the revolution, such as Yazbek's nonfictional Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (trans. Max Weiss [London: Haus, 2012]), which have received a warm welcome in English translation. We might ask, in other words: How can we read translations of the prerevo- lutionary Syrian novel today, in the years following a national uprising that began far from the circles of elite culture, without reducing these works of literature to prescient foreshadowings of our present day?Doubleday's translation of In Praise of Hatred, first published in Arabic in 2006, is a welcome and expected piece from Khaled Khalifa, Syria's best- known contemporary novelist. Khalifa's distinctive narrative technique, which twists and curves across time and space at dizzying speeds, forms a vital aspect of the novel, and Leri Price has done excellent work capturing its ambitious style. The novel was shortlisted for the prestigious Arabic Booker Prize in 2008 and is now in its sixth Arabic edition. It is a dense and sophisticated literary rendering of a young Sunni woman's embrace of sectarian hatred in the 1980s, a period in which Syrian society was caught in the crosshairs of the conflict between the Hafiz al-Asad government and the Muslim Brotherhood. This woman, the unnamed narrator for much of the novel, is from an aristocratic Aleppan family whose glory days are long gone, and the somber, occasionally morbid tone that pervades the novel is Khalifa's nod to a writer he cites as an influence, William Faulkner. The narrator is eventually imprisoned for her Brotherhood affiliations, and Khalifa shines in the prison section, "The Scent of Spices," which depicts the narrator's descent into absolute hatred, the collapse of her conscious- ness, and her eventual rejection of extremism in the all-female world of her prison cell. …

Technology and National Identity in Turkey: Mobile Communications and the Evolution of a Post-Ottoman Nation

Abstract: TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN TURKEY: MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS AND THE EVOLUTION OF A POST-OTTOMAN NATION Burcce CCelik London: I. B. Tauris, 2011 (v ii + 209 pages, bibliography, index) $100.0 0 (cloth)In contrast to the scholarship on the Ottoman Empire, recent studies of modern Turkey have been overwhelmingly concerned with a relatively narrow set of topics: national identity and minority rights, Islam and secu- larism, civil-military or state-society relations, and modernity and historical memory. Studies of science and technology are notably rare, making Burce Celik's recent examination of mobile communications in contemporary Turkey a welcome addition to the field. Celik seeks to understand "why and how the cell phone has become a popular object of collective attachment in Turkey," examining cellular telephony as a social practice shaped by historical, economic, political, and cultural conditions (2). Celik's research focuses on the period from 1997 to 2007, so the book provides a snapshot of mobile phone usage before the widespread adoption of the internet-enabled smartphone-making parts of her study somewhat out of date already, as in many academic works on rapidly developing technologies. But, as Celik notes, by the mid-2000s Turkey already had not only a high rate of mobile phone usage, but also an explicit public discourse about the role of the mobile phone and its social effects, whether as a "national organ" or an object of popular "addiction" (2-3). Celik argues, in contrast to the domi- nant approaches to the mobile phone in communications studies, that this attachment cannot be explained merely by the mobile phone's instrumentality as a tool of communication or its symbolic value as a commodity. Instead, she suggests, it is necessary to examine how the mobile phone "impresses, affects, moves and gathers bodies in particular ways that incur imitation and collective attachment" (9). This approach is equally relevant to more recent iterations of mobile phone technology, which have only increased the range and intensity of human interactions with cellular devices.Celik's book traces a series of those relationships between the body, the technological object, and the social context of their interaction, arguing that the particular significance of the mobile phone in Turkey must be understood in relation to a state of collective melancholia generated by the fraught relationship between the imperial past and the fractured present of the nation-state. Celik suggests that this historical background not only frames the social meanings of technology in general in Turkey, but also fosters a longing for attachment that the mobile phone is well positioned to provide. The book 's second chapter lays out the historical basis for the argument that melancholia (theorized by way of Sigmund Freud and Judith Butler) has attained a lasting resonance as a "primary sentiment in everyday life" in Turkey (13). Here, Celik draws on the extensive scholarly literature about the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state, linking its conclusions about the traumatic effects of this rupture to ver- nacular discussions of melancholia (and related terms, such as huzun) in Turkish public and intellectual discourse. This is familiar, almost cliched, territory, but Celik, building on Meltem Ahiska's study of radio, adds an important dimension by foregrounding the fetishized role of technology in the modernizing and nation-building projects of the early Kemalist state. As both Celik and Ahiska demonstrate, technological prowess was envisioned both as the means by which Turkey would achieve its modernity and as the eventual proof of its success or failure in this endeavor. Because this modernity was always imagined in explicit or implied relation to a Western model, technology represented both a foreign import and a national destiny. Celik's third chapter describes the shift to commodification in the post-1980s technoscape of Turkey, in which the "appropriation rather than production" of technology becomes the norm (71). …

Grievability as Political Claim Making: The 100 Shaheed-100 Lives Exhibition1

Abstract: Organizing the 100 Shaheed-100 Lives memorial exhibition in 2000-2002 at the Sakakini Cultural Centre of Ramallah represented, for me, a vortex of heartbreak, exhilaration, frustration, and manic work, as well as pride in an achievement. Yet one of the most significant moments came a year later, simply, at the opening of another event. A man approached me in one of the Sakakini gallery rooms, and introduced himself with a quiet smile. I recognized his name. He thanked me for having mentioned his son on a television show on which I had appeared in the spring of 2002 to discuss the 100 Shaheed-100 Lives memorial, then being held in Beirut. The man said that he and his wife were grateful and moved to have heard their dead son's name uttered on the air, and his story related on television, which he said they took as making sure their son was not forgotten.This man's gesture was meaningful because of its generosity and reserve. Coming as it did at the project's end, it also felt like a validation. I remembered the exchange a few years later while working on my doctoral research on the changing manifestations of the political in post-Oslo Palestinian arts and culture. Specifically, it was after I read scholarly assess- ments of contemporary Palestinian discursive practices as indicative of a demobilized and depoliticized society. I struggled to reconcile my work on the memorial, the immensely positive welcome it received, with the nega- tive assessments of a humanitarian and depoliticizing discursive regime that scholars held Palestinians to have adopted around Oslo. I was moved to interrogate the political dimension of the memorial. Was it an uncon- scious attempt by myself and those who supported it to curry favor with foreign neoliberal audiences via humanized and individuated-and hence inoffensive-Palestinian dead? Accordingly, was everyone who liked the endeavor a benighted prey to false consciousness? Was the memorial, on the contrary, a continuation of resistance/militant art in a different guise? Or are more nuanced evaluations of its significance and impact allowed by theoretical inquiry?This article is an investigation into these issues, with a twofold signifi- cance: first, it considers the memorial qua an art project realized in response to, and in the midst of, the second intifada and Israel's violent repression of it. The article's second significance lies in its provision of an alternative argument, grounded in theory and in the reception of the memorial, on the political dimensions of art and affect.Situating this inquiry within the field of cultural studies allows for the application of varied conceptions of the political, proceeding from theories of ideology and of postcolonial cultural production, beyond the sole question of resistance. This article defines the notion of the political as subalterns' undetermined, unpredictable disruption of the regime of percep- tion/visibility and symbolization that silences and marginalizes them. As such, I argue that the 100 Shaheed-100 Lives memorial was an instance of cultural expression that deployed mourning and produced such a political effect by rupturing an a priori regime of visibility that Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike elaborated.This article first situates the analysis of the memorial against scholarly assessments of post-Oslo signifying practices as denoting a depoliticized and demobilized polity. Second, it reviews the memorial's genesis, reali- zation, and reception. Third, it analyzes the politics of the memorial via three theoretical paradigms that can illuminate the study of the politics of resistance in the contemporary Palestinian context. One is Gillian Rose and Judith Butler's consideration of the politics of mourning and grief, through the notion of grievability as political claim making. A second is Fredric Jameson's notion of national allegory as a hermeneutic of political reading of third world cultural production. …

Analyzing Authoritarianism in an Age of Uprisings

Abstract: ANALYZING AUTHORITARIANISM IN AN AGE OF UPRISINGS Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria Joshua Stacher Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012 (xiv + 211 pages, bibliography, figures) $24.95 (paper)Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resistance Bassam Haddad Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012 (xi x + 255, bibliography, index, figures) $24.95 (paper)Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance Jason Brownlee Cambridge: Cambridge Universit y Press, 2012 (xv + 279, bibliography, index, map) $29.99 (paper)As Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Libyans, Bahrainis, Syrians, and other Arabs began to think the unthinkable and do the audacious, they chal- lenged not only the oligarchies that governed them, but also the US-based scholars who studied them. To significant portions of the academy working on Arab politics and society over the past decade and a half, the possibility that revolutions would occur in the Arab world was exceedingly remote.1 Political scientists and sociologists spent much of that period pondering the robustness of authoritarianism, (post-)Islamism, and US regional hegemony. It will not be surprising if the coming generation of scholars attacks their intellectual predecessors and interprets these political ruptures as inevitable, even if the uprisings do not fully transform Middle Eastern governments or societies. I expect that social scientists will develop elaborate, parsimo- nious, and sometimes insightful arguments explaining these revolutionary moments after the fact. The plethora of conferences, grant applications, and blog posts on the Arab uprisings are surely dress rehearsals for these pursuits.In the meantime, at this particular juncture we are offered a set of works that were imagined and researched prior to 2011 and have reached publication in the immediate wake of the Arab uprisings. Joshua Stacher, Bassam Haddad, and Jason Brownlee, three prolific political scientists, give us books published in 2012 that represent arguments that at once are critically informed by the body of scholarship on authoritarian durability and regime change and also reckon with the ongoing processes of revolu- tionary uprising. These scholars are too knowledgeable and judicious to make definitive statements about what may transpire in the future. Instead, their research conducted in the noughts is used to contemplate the paths taken and foreclosed by historical legacies, vested interests, and institutional configurations.Distancing themselves from earlier works that focused on political culture, religious doctrine, or stages of political development as the causes of authoritarianism,2 and avoiding the teleological assumption that the polities under study have been liberalizing and democratizing, these three authors operate within the current mode of considering these regimes for what they are (authoritarian) rather than what they are not (democratic).3 All consider the pillars of authoritarian reproduction to be erected and buttressed by a combination of strategic decisions, institutional forms, and direct confrontations with regular, although until recently fractured, citizen mobilization and claim-making.The following review does not do justice to the richness of the individual monographs, each of which deserves to be read by students of Middle East politics as well as researchers interested in authoritarianism and compara- tive politics more generally. Rather than discussing the many intricacies of each study's empirical narrative and analytical arguments, this essay will explore how as a collection these books map the terrain of the current literature on authoritarianism and the inroads they make in interpreting these complex polities. Equally important, however, these works leave an intellectual frontier under-explored and conceptually impoverished. Namely, by adopting a highly elite-oriented understanding of "political regimes," the critical vector of regime power-the patterning and regulation of social relationships-is excluded at the expense of our understanding of the political as well as a wider set of questions about the social dynamics that enable and curb authoritarian reproduction. …