Question: What Are the Fruitful New Directions in Subaltern Studies, and How Can Those Working in Middle East Studies Most Productively Engage With Them?

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 376-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Chalcraft
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Middle East Studies

More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Middle East Studies & Subaltern Studies

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabra J. Webber
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Latin American ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Middle Eastern Studies ◽  
Cultural Strategies ◽  
Sustained Effort ◽  
Middle East Studies

Despite the physical proximity of the birthplace of Subaltern Studies, South Asia, to the Middle East and despite the convergent, colliding histories of these two regions, scholars of the Middle East attend very little to the Subaltern Studies project or to the work of Subaltern Studies groups. Although certain stances of Fanon and Said, with their focus on cultural strategies of domination and resistance, have a currency in Middle Eastern studies, no literary theorist, folklorist, anthropologist, political scientist or historian in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, so far as I am aware, explicitly draws upon Subaltern Studies with any consistency as an organizing principle for his or her studies. It is the Latin Americanists (and to a lesser degree Africanists) who have been most eager to build on South Asian Subaltern Studies to respond to Latin American (or subsanaran African) circumstances. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what Subaltern Studies might contribute to Middle Eastern studies if we were to make a sustained effort to apply and critique that body of literature.

Priorities in Middle East Studies

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
International Education ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Program Directors ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Regional Study ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Middle East Studies

A number of events, including the Lambert Report on Language and Area Studies, legislation on National Defense Education, and various other bills on international education, provide an important opportunity for reevaluating priorities in the study of foreign regions. We believe that Middle East Studies, as a regional study needs support and that this support is threatened by a shifting attention to domestic needs and by impending reductions in funds for education. But we also believe that what is needed is more than a simple blanket appeal for funding. Clear priorities and new directions are required to give meaning to the call for support and to channel that support into important directions. This matter has been the subject of much discussion within the Middle East studies community and specifically within the Middle East Studies Association. The latest discussions took place at the meeting of Middle East center and program directors, at the Fifth Annual Meeting of MESA in November, 1971.

Introduction: Curiosities of Middle East Studies in Queer Times

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Amar ◽  
Omnia El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
New Media ◽  
Nongovernmental Organizations ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Sexuality And Religion ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Middle East Studies

Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovernmental organizations, religious dissidents, and security-state repressors. In their place new insurgencies came to question the narratives, binaries, and regimes of feeling pinned to “identity politics” as defined by categories of class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Curious forms of revolutionary social uprising exploded among gender, labor, and community dissidents at street level, generating novel popular cultures, rebel counterpublics, and carnivals of new-media experimentation.

Current Developments and Future Directions in Middle Eastern Studies

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
Policy Formation ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
International Agencies ◽  
Middle Eastern Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Middle East Studies

What are some of the new directions that specialists are beginning to chart for Middle Eastern studies? Middle East specialists are finding ways of linking their basic research on these questions and others to policy formation, and, in so doing, they are becoming more closely connected than ever before to international agencies and organizations focused on global change. The charting of these new directions could in time enable the Middle East studies field not only to make new substantive contributions to knowledge but also to convince the social sciences to recognize and incorporate this new knowledge.

The Interdisciplinary Spatial Turn and the Discipline of Geography in Middle East Studies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Mills ◽  
Timur Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Middle East Studies

This chapter begins with a brief survey of the literature that constitutes the present spatial turn in Middle East studies (MES). This review has two aims: to examine the (often undertheorized or loosely defined) understandings of space at work in MES research and to explore the central or emerging research interests in MES developed by this spatial turn. The chapter then considers the theories of space discernible in research on the Middle East for many decades before the present spatial turn. It argues that not only does an interest in space have a far longer history in MES than recent critical research lets on, but that attention to this issue is important because it illuminates the ways in which evolving understandings of space accompany changing research agendas and, possibly, new theoretical, methodological, or conceptual assumptions in the interdisciplinary arena of MES more generally. Next, the chapter discusses questions of disciplinarity, particularly in relation to geography, and the ways in which disciplinary and institutional histories have shaped the contours of the spatial turn in Middle East area studies. It concludes by identifying new directions for research.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Orientalist Speech-acts and Israeli Middle East Studies: Cautions and Criticisms of Edward Said Beyond the Battle of Ideas

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-237
Author(s):  
Eyal Clyne
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Academic World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Middle East Studies

Drawing on speech acts theory, this article discusses the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces of discursive practices with which certain academic circles seek to discredit the Saidian ‘Orientalism’ framework. Identifying the unusual value attached to Said as object of attachment or detachment, desirability and exceptionality, this analysis turns away from deliberations about ‘orientalism’ as a party in a battle of ideas, and studies common cautionary statements and other responses by peers as actions in the social (academic) world, that enculture and police expectations. Cautioning subjects about this framework, or conditioning its employment to preceding extensive pre-emptive complicating mitigations, in effect constructs this framework as undesirable and ‘risky’. While strong discursive reactions are not uncommon in academia, comparing them to treatments of less-controversial social theories reveals formulations, meanings and attentions which are arguably reserved for this ‘theory’. Conclusively, common dismissals, warnings and criticisms of Said and ‘Orientalism’ often exemplify Saidian claims, as they deploy the powerful advantage of enforcing hegemonic, and indeed Orientalist, views.

1973 Presidential Address Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting

1974 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Charles Issawi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Henry Ford ◽  
Middle East Studies

Anything coming after the floor show we have just seen can only be an anticlimax, and my impulse is to tear up my prepared text and just quote two great men: Thomas Carlyle, who described economics as “the dismal science” and Henry Ford, who said “history is bunk” — from which it presumably follows that economic history is dismal bunk. Instead, I should like to take advantage of this captive audience and speak to you in praise of economic history. This is an old Arabic genre : mahasin al-iqtisad. And of course economic history means giving as little history for as much money as possible, so you will not expect a long speech.

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