Lebanon and Late Modernism

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-51
Author(s):  
Robyn Creswell
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Global History ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nodal Position

This chapter emphasizes the importance of Beirut in conditioning the historical and intellectual emergence of the modernist poetry movement, not only because of the city's suddenly central and yet anomalous place in the intellectual life of the Arab world, but also for its nodal position in the global history of modernism during the early Cold War. It focuses on the antagonistic nature of intellectual exchanges during the period, particularly as seen in literary magazines and journals of opinion. If, as Robert Scholes and others have argued for the European case, “modernism begins in the magazines,” then the same is profoundly true of the Arabic movement. Intellectual life in Beirut was not so much a playground as a battleground, and this war of position extended beyond the borders of Lebanon. The debates between local intellectuals—nationalist, Marxist, and liberal—reflect the global agon between the main ideological camps of the early Cold War.

The global process of thinking global literature: from Marx’s Weltliteratur to Sarkozy’s littérature-monde

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jernej Habjan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Third World ◽  
Global Approach ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

AbstractThis article outlines the history of research in global literature as a history that is itself global. This kind of global history of the theorization of global literature demands a departure from the existing accounts and their nascent gap between heated theoreticist debates and pacifying historicist anthologies. A global approach to the problematic can bridge this gap because it considers not only what the most influential studies on global literature say, but also where and when they say it. Whether these be Romantic assertions of world literature, post-war pleas for cosmopolitan literature, Cold War polemics about ‘Third World’ literature, or millennial theories of transnational, post-national, planetary, and, indeed, global literature, the article considers not only the object of these studies but also the studies themselves as an object; not only the text but also the context. Hence, a historicization of literary theories of globalization in effect bleeds into a historicization of globalization itself.

scholarly journals Transition, Flow, and Divergent Times

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-584
Author(s):  
Avinoam Shalem
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global History ◽  
Transition Flow ◽  
Recording Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
History Of

The Western academy's growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem, the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”-centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past.

The Middle Eastern Cold War: Unique Dynamics in a Questionable Regional Framework

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-322
Author(s):  
Jeffrey James Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
International History ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Ideological Identity

One of the more prominent themes to emerge from this roundtable is the desire to integrate the history of the modern Middle East with broader trends in international history, particularly with regard to the recent emphasis on “decentralizing” and “globalizing” the Cold War narrative. My own research interests are consistent with this approach, as one of the central concerns of my current project is to show how Algeria's revolutionary nationalists defied the regional categories imposed on them from the outside by pursuing overlapping diplomatic initiatives under the rubrics of Maghribi unity, African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism. After independence in 1962, the Algerian foreign ministry's main geographical divisions differed significantly from those used by the U.S. State Department—and most history departments’ hiring committees—by dividing the world into “the West,” “the Socialist Countries,” “the Arab World,” “Africa,” and “Latin America/Asia.” These categories were the product of both practical considerations and ideological/identity politics on the part of Algeria's new leaders, and to my mind suggest that the “Middle East” may itself be a particularly arbitrary and misleading geographical framework, even in comparison to other parts of the developing world where European imperialism exerted a heavy cartographical influence.

scholarly journals Argentine and Egyptian History Entangled: From Perón to Nasser

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-577
Author(s):  
LILY PEARL BALLOFFET
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Suez Canal ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Egyptian History

AbstractThis article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.

scholarly journals Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Ismay Milford ◽  
Gerard McCann ◽  
Emma Hunter ◽  
Daniel Branch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Global History ◽  
East African ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Postcolonial States

Abstract This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War. Yet East Africa is less prominent in these histories than we might expect, despite the vibrancy of current work on this period in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding not only of the ‘globalisation of decolonisation’ but also of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis.

The Sultan's Communists

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alma Rachel Heckman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Structured around the stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Asssidon), The Sultan’s Communists examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly independent Morocco. It also explores how Communism facilitated the participation of Moroccan Jews in Morocco’s national liberation struggle with roots in the mass upheavals of the interwar and WWII periods. Alma Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and ’60s, and how Communist Jews survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy. These stories unfold in a country that, upon independence from France and Spain in 1956, allied itself with the United States (and, more quietly, Israel) during the Cold War all while attempting to claim a place for itself within the fraught politics of the post-independence Arab world. Heckman’s manuscript contributes to the growing literature on Jews in the modern Middle East, filling in the gaps on the Jewish history of 20th-century Morocco as no other previous book has done.

Latin America and the Global Cold War

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Global South ◽  
Global History ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Cold War

Latin America and the Global Cold War analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for better understanding the region’s past, as well as its possible futures, challenging us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America’s ongoing political struggles.

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