The Arab Studies Journal's Twentieth Anniversary Issue

Tadween will be posting excerpts from the Arab Studies Journal's Twentieth Anniversary issue. What follows is the Editor's Note and Table of Contents from that issue.

By Sherene Seikaly and Nadya Sbaiti

 

Editor’s Note

We can scarcely believe that two decades have passed since the publication of the first issue of the Arab Studies Journal. We are proud and humbled to have published groundbreaking work by scholars at the onset of their careers as well as at the pinnacle. During the last twenty years, the Journal has taken part in extraordinary changes in the field of Middle Eastern studies: paradigm shifts (and, on occasion, returns), the growth of once-nascent fields (like gender and sexuality studies), and the emergence of exciting new subfields. The Journal’s contributions have included a series of special issues devoted to such cutting-edge themes as: The Body; Dynamics of Space; Visual Arts and Art Practices; Language and Culture; and Middle East Exceptionalism. Throughout, we have tailored our issues to reflect shifts in knowledge production as well as respond to profound political, social, and cultural changes.

As part of that effort, last year we joined forces with our sister online organization, Jadaliyya ezine, established in 2010 under the auspices of the Arab Studies Institute (www.ArabStudiesInstitute.org). This partnership has already yielded substantive results, as both publications draw on large pools of talent. It has also bridged the gap between the relatively narrow confines of academia and a more expansive readership.

This volume, our twentieth anniversary issue, offers a spectrum of the work we have been dedicated to publishing—critical, progressive, comparative, and multidisciplinary. In that spirit, we present articles and book reviews that range in geographic coverage, topic, and discipline (history, anthropology, political science, sociology, and comparative literature) as well as a special section entitled “Arab Migrations and Diasporas,” drawn from presentations at the 2011 symposium on “Arab World Migrations and Diasporas” at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Joel Beinin makes a critical historiographical intervention by attending to the urban element of the history of pre-aliyah Jewish communities, pre-state Zionist settlers, and pre-1967 settlements in the territories. Unearthing this urban element, he argues, allows us to excavate histories of urban Arab- Jewish coexistence. Moreover, it reveals that the “trajectory of the Zionist settlement project encompasses a transition from urban coexistence and rural violence toward increasing urban violence as the frontier shifted from the countryside to the cities.” Beinin simultaneously writes a narrative of this coexistence-cum-dispossession and points to strengths and weaknesses in the historiography.

Khaled Furani offers another reading of Israel/Palestine with his exploration of the poetry festivals that took place in the Galilee during Israeli military rule (1948-66). These festivals, he shows, took on the aura of village weddings, representing moments of elation, inclusivity, and a break from the overarching sense of despair. They were also spaces in which Palestinian poets could both recover and shape a language of nation, belonging, and, above all, home. Furani sensitively evokes a particular historic moment in which “aesthetic agency coalesced with political agency” to articulate a distinct and enduring politics of dissent.

Moving from literary to historical anthropology, Zainab Saleh deconstructs the first Iraqi Nationality Law of 1924 and traces its application under Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s to justify the expulsion of the “Iraqis of Iranian origin.” Reading through the lens of nation building, Saleh deftly reveals how this law institutionalized difference among Iraqi citizens by assigning legal status based on nationality held under the Ottomans. This differential inclusion became a means of exclusion decades later, further illustrating the persistence of the colonial legacy in postcolonial Iraq following the fall of the monarchy in 1958.

Cortney Hughes Rinker takes us to Morocco with her work on women’s use of contraception in working-class health clinics in Rabat. Hughes Rinker argues that the use of contraceptive methods serves as a means for women to express their uncertainty and fear about Morocco’s future. By analyzing popular culture, government reports, and ethnographic data, she suggests that the reconstruction of citizenship in Morocco has produced anxiety on fertility and motherhood. For these women, contraception is less about becoming autonomous and self-sustaining citizens, as framed within neoliberal development discourses, and more about surviving and managing national obligations and working-class realities.

This issue also features a special section on migration and diaspora, a particularly timely topic in this moment of heightened deportations, exile, refugees, and socioeconomic emigration. Louise Cainkar provides a theoretically dynamic and quantitative overview of the English-language field of Arab world migrations and diasporas, within which scholars can situate their work. Starting from the insight that the blanket term “migrant” reveals a profound bias in scholarship that then translates into policy, Cainkar’s article is a critical intervention in a field that seldom engages in cross-disciplinary or cross-regional, much less comparative, conversations. She lays the groundwork for new approaches to Arab world migrations and diasporas.

The last two articles are situated within different historical eras and disciplines, yet both revolve around Lebanon. This is perhaps unsurprising given, as Cainkar notes, that one in thirteen Lebanese resides in diaspora. Simon Jackson examines the political dynamics of the global Syro-Lebanese diaspora during the period of French mandatory rule. He focuses on the formation of auxiliary troops of the Syrian Legion during World War I, showing how these diaspora communities played a crucial and previously neglected role in the political economy of French Mandate Syria-Lebanon. Jackson traces this diaspora’s critique of the Mandate’s economic policies and its connection to the League of Nations in Geneva to reveal a rich repertoire of narratives and debates.

Wendy Pearlman in turn examines how the Lebanese diaspora continues to play a significant role in internal Lebanese politics in the contemporary, post-civil war era. She uses Lebanon as a case study to identify emigration as a major yet overlooked factor that allows regime leaders to maintain power and thwart opposition movements. She shows how emigration can serve as a safety valve alleviating socioeconomic discontent and pressure for reform; offer a political exit and reduce the imperative of action for change; lead to a depletion in the ranks of those best positioned to bring new ideas and skills into public life; and invite an infusion of capital that helps to sustain partisan or clientelist networks.

This anniversary issue of ASJ also includes a robust review section, covering notable new works across a range of disciplines and subjects. These works include Noha Radwan’s study of Egyptian colloquial poetry, Abigail Jacobson’s history of Jerusalem during World War I and its immediate aftermath, Eve M. Troutt Powell’s examination of slavery in the modern Middle East, and Fida J. Adely’s ethnographically informed analysis of nationalism, faith, and gender in contemporary Jordan. In addition, reviews of two new works on Egyptian history—Samera Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity and Nancy Y. Reynolds’s A City Consumed—invite readers to reflect on the legacy of colonialism in Egypt as well as on broader questions about the formation of political subjectivities.

We are also very pleased to include a review of the new edition of Ella Shohat’s groundbreaking Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Over twenty years after its original publication, this boundary-crossing work, whose second edition features a substantial new postscript, remains “an indispensable study of Zionism and the moving image.” Another highlight is Picturing Algeria, a new edited volume of Pierre Bourdieu’s photographs of Algeria featured alongside previously untranslated writings.

Additional reviews address books of interest to those wishing to understand our political present, including Trita Parsi’s assessment of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran, John Collins’s study of Israel’s increasingly globalized forms of militarized securitization, and Eyal Weizman’s analysis of how humanitarianism becomes intertwined with state violence. This issue’s review section concludes with two essays: one on contemporary Salafism and “the local, national, and global scales within and across which Salafis operate,” and the other on “rebels, rulers, and the right to the city” in Dubai and beyond. 

 

 

MASTHEAD   

 Editorial Review Board:

Lila Abu-Lughod, As‘ad AbuKhalil, Nadje al-Ali, Sinan Antoon, Walter Armbrust, Rochelle Davis, Ellen Fleischmann, William Granara, Lisa Hajjar, Rema Hammami, Michael Hudson, Wilson Chacko Jacob, Toby Jones, Zachary Lockman, Timothy Mitchell, Kirsten Scheid, Judith Tucker, Robert Vitalis

Editorial Staff

Founding Editor

Bassam Haddad

Co-Editors

Sherene Seikaly
Nadya Sbaiti

Senior Editors

Allison Brown
Dina Ramadan

Managing Editor

Lizette Baghdadi

Associate Editors

Chris Toensing
Steve Gertz

Assistant Editor

Owain Lawson

 

Book Review Managing Editor
Allison Brown

Book Review Editors

Charles Anderson
Naira Antoun
Ryvka Barnard
Samuel Dolbee
Anjali Kamat
Amir Moosavi
Ahmad Shokr
Elizabeth Williams

Business Manager

Chris Scott

Circulation Manager

Zack Cuyler

Research and Development Manager
Samantha Brotman

Researchers

Andrew Armstrong
Kevin Davis
Robert Rouphail

Website Editor

Ziad Abu-Rish

Webmaster

Bien Concepcion

Graphic Design

Future Anecdotes Istanbul
Idil AteÎli 

Table of Contents:

 

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XXI, No. 1
Spring 2013 

Twentieth Anniversary Issue

Articles

14

Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine
Joel Beinin

48

On Iraqi Nationality: Law, Citizenship, and Exclusion

Zainab Saleh

79

Dangerous Weddings: Palestinian Poetry Festivals During Israel’s First Military Rule

Khaled Furani

101

Responsible Mothers, Anxious Women: Contraception and Neoliberalism in Morocco
Cortney Hughes Rinker

Special Section: Arab Migrations and Diasporas

126

Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas

Louise Cainkar

166

Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations
Simon Jackson

191

Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Pearlman

Reviews

216

Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History

by Samera Esmeir

Reviewed by Ilana Feldman

221

Picturing Algeria

by Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli

Reviewed by Muriam Haleh Davis

226

A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran

by Trita Parsi

Reviewed by Bitta Mostofi

231

A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt
by Nancy Y. Reynolds
Reviewed by Sarah El-Kazaz

236

Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern Arabic Canon: New Readings of Shi‘r al-‘Amiyya
by Noha M. Radwan
Reviewed by Christopher Stone

241

Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire
by Eve M. Troutt Powell
Reviewed by Soha El Achi

245

From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule

by Abigail Jacobson

Reviewed by Mustafa Aksakal

249

Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, New Edition by Ella Shohat
Reviewed by Nick Denes

254

Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress
by Fida J. Adely

Reviewed by Bruce Burnside

259

Global Palestine

by John Collins

Reviewed by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

263

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
by Eyal Weizman
Reviewed by Lisa Hajjar

Review Essays

270
Situating Salafism: Between the Local, the National, and the Global

by Michael Farquhar

Global Sala!sm: Islam’s New Religious Movement

edited by Roel Meijer

Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious Identity

by Laurent Bonnefoy

Localising Sala!sm: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia
by Terje Østebø

279
Street Life: Rebels, Rulers, and the Right to the City
by Deen Sharp
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey
Dubai: The City as Corporation
by Ahmed Kanna