Literature in Translation—Iranian into English

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-41
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Public Ignorance ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Near Eastern Studies

Similar to other fields, Middle East Studies are at a stage where scholars have begun to reexamine their efforts within the framework of the modern university and science in general, with regard to both research and teaching. It is being realized that for a long time these studies have been directed towards area specialization and self-perpetration while efforts at keeping up the communication with other fields of scholarship and, more important perhaps, with the disciplinary approaches and theories that are or ought to be applied in Near Eastern studies have been very much neglected. Communication of our field with other fields and with the various disciplines is invariable dependent on translation from translations of individual pieces of literature to ‘translations’ of the entire field and the range of problems related to it. Translators from one European language into another can rely on a vast amount of secondary data and a general knowledge of the overlapping cultural settings. Translators of Middle Eastern literary output have first to overcome a basic public ignorance about the area on, or, if not ignorance, then a view and presupposition that our field is still largely exotic. There is moreover little expectation on the side of non-specialists that the literary output of the Middle East can have any wider impact on or be of any importance for the various humanistic or social disciplines and comparative studies.

Crafting the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 319-321
Author(s):  
Zena Kamash
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Art Practices

This chapter offers a personal reflection on two projects that seek to find alternative ways to respond to Middle Eastern heritage: “Remembering the Romans in the Middle East and North Africa” and “Rematerialising Mosul Museum.” Both projects aim to provide ways for people to rejuvenate friendships with heritage objects through a range of craft and art practices (felting, drawing, photograph, and creative writing). This chapter reflects on the author’s own crafted responses and uses these to explore how crafting can help people think more deeply about how they relate to the canon as individuals and how they might use crafting to make their own personal canon. In particular, this chapter thinks through why practices of this kind are important to the author as a person who is a British Iraqi, as well as an archaeologist.

The Middle Eastern Shift and Provincializing Zionism

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orit Bashkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle East Studies

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives, and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed “the Middle Eastern turn.” For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ottoman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives.

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.

scholarly journals Family History in the Middle East

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Ikran Eum
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Family And Household ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Middle East Studies

The study of families and their histories opens up a cross-disciplinary dialogueamong anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, includingarea specialists. The content of Doumani’s edited book, Family Historyin the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, falls convincinglyinto such disciplines as history, anthropology, Middle East studies,women’s/gender studies, and Islamic studies, since the collection of articlesprovides various indepth case studies drawn both from Islam and frompolitical, economic, legal, and social perspectives.The anthology’s main theme suggests that the family is an entity that,along with the progression of history, evolves continuously. By reconstructingthe family histories of elites and ordinary people in the Middle East fromthe seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the book challenges prevailingassumptions about the monolithic “traditional” Middle Eastern familytype. Instead, it argues cogently that the structure and boundaries of thesefamilies have always been flexible and dynamic.The book is divided into four sections that explore issues concerningthe family from the perspective of politics, economics, and law. In the firstsection, “Family and Household,” Philippe Fargues, Tomoki Okawara, andMary Ann Fay analyze the structure of the nineteenth-century family andhousehold and illustrate how its formation was influenced by changes in the ...

Eye Opening and Actually Enjoyable: Using Online Newspapers to Teach Modern Middle Eastern History

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Learning Objectives ◽  
Online Newspapers ◽  
Analytical Skills ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Compare And Contrast

Challenging students to identify and analyze diverse perspectives is a key objective in any Middle East studies course. This article describes an assignment used in a history course which asks students to compare and contrast articles from Middle Eastern online newspapers. Comparing multiple articles on the same topic exposes students to contrasting views on significant issues. The easy availability of online newspapers “de-centers” students’ perspectives by requiring use of materials from outside the United States. This assignment teaches specific analytical skills, such as finding relevant articles, reading them critically, writing effective summaries, and developing synthetic comparisons. Through an analysis of this assignment, this article discusses the advantages, as well as limitations, of this approach, using students’ own evaluations to assess the achievement of desired learning objectives.

scholarly journals Going Transnational: On Mainstreaming Middle East Gender Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liat Kozma
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
Women Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Middle East Studies

Middle East gender studies is a lively and fascinating field. With two very different journals (HawwaandJournal of Middle East Women Studies) and dozens of panels at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference and the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, we have come a long way over the last two decades. Women's, queer, and masculinity studies are now part of how we understand gender studies in the region. Middle East gender studies does, however, remain marginal in two fields—Middle East studiesandgender studies. It is normally assigned to the end of a Middle East studies conference (“and gender”), or, conversely, to the end of a gender studies conference or edited volume (“and elsewhere”). But can a discussion of technology or World War I in the modern Middle East weave in insights gained from gender or queer studies? And can a discussion of women's movements or women's labor incorporate what we know about the Middle East? I believe that more can be done to mainstream gender in Middle East studies, and to mainstream the Middle East in gender studies. Transnational history is a particularly promising direction for this endeavor.

Pensée 2: New Media and Old Agendas: The Internet in the Middle East and Middle Eastern Studies

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 531-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
WALTER ARMBRUST
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
New Media ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Al Jazeera ◽  
Satellite Television ◽  
The Third ◽  
Middle Eastern Studies ◽  
Middle East Studies

My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as the audience, were handpicked. Even the expenses of the attendees were subsidized (my hotel bill was paid by al-Jazeera). This inevitably made the event an exercise in open self-promotion for al-Jazeera.

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