Middle East Popular Politics in Gramscian Perspective

This article outlines a theoretical framework for researching popular politics in the Middle East and North Africa. It sketches a Gramscian alternative to existing approaches in materialist Marxism, cultural studies, and social movement studies. It also aims to think a Gramsci useful to historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, beyond the common loci of Gramsci scholarship in political theory, comparative literature, and international relations. With a start point in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis, it puts forward a concept of popular politics as a mostly slow-moving, complex, and many-layered transformative activity, a form of historical protagonism comprising a variety of moments, capable of working changes on existing forms of hegemony and founding new social relations. The point is to enable researchers in Middle East studies to see and research popular politics, carry on a critique of transformative activity, and inform transformation in the present.

Introduction

If Edward Said is known for identifying the political implications of negative stereotypes of Islam, John L. Esposito is known for correcting them. This chapter summarizes the significance of Esposito’s contributions to the study of Islam and his leadership in inspiring other scholars around the world. The best-known scholar of Islam in North America, Esposito has published more than seventy books, as well as handbooks, encyclopedias, and other sources that have become standard academic references. He has served as president of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Academy of Religion. This chapter also introduces the chapters contained in this volume, which extend his work in four areas: the secular bias of Orientalism, its failure to recognize both the enormous diversity within Islam and profound similarities between Islam and other religions, and the current iteration of Orientalism: Islamophobia.

Reframing the Arab Spring : On Data Mining and the Field of Arab Internet Studies

This chapter presents a basic genealogy of the existing literature on the 2010–2012 era of the Arab Spring within Middle East studies and media studies more broadly. The aim is to map the plurality of patterns, stories, ideas, and analyses networked across media forms. This chapter is designed to refute the possibility of a monolithic narrative about contemporary Egypt. It also situates the study within the growing scholarship on social media and political change and introduces key concepts in design research methodology.

Memory Album: To the 80th Anniversary of Vyacheslav Y. Belokrenitsky

On November 5, 2021, Vyacheslav Y. Belokrenitsky, an outstanding Russian orientalist, doctor of historical sciences, professor, organizer of science, head of the Center for Middle East Studies of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, celebrated his 80th birthday. The works of the scholar on the history and social development of Pakistan, India, the Middle East, on the problems of demography, Islam, international relations and general problems of the socio-political development of the countries of South Asia and the Middle East in the twentieth century are deservedly considered classic. Many of them have been translated into English and other European and Eastern languages and have received well-deserved recognition abroad, while such books as “Pakistan. Features and Problems of Urbanization” (Moscow, 1982) and “The East in World Political Processes” (Moscow, 2010) entered the golden fund of world academic research. The editorial group of Oriental Courier congratulate Vyacheslav Yakovlevich on his birthday and wish him inexhaustible health, inspiration and new brilliant research.

The MESA Global Academy: Sustaining Knowledge Production Among MENA Scholars

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Global Academy is an initiative that sustains research collaborations and knowledge production among regionally-focused scholars from the Middle East and North Africa and their counterparts outside the region. Spearheaded by MESA, the project is an expression of the scholarly field's commitment to scholarship in and from the region. By awarding scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America, and thereby enabling them to attend meetings, workshops, and conferences, the project supports individuals whose academic trajectory has been adversely affected by developments in their home countries.

Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation

What can film studies bring to the study of Arab culture, politics, and history? The past ten years have seen an increase in historical, theoretical, and methodological exchanges between Middle East studies and film and media studies. The sub-field of “Arab film studies” (Ginsberg and Lippard 2020, viii) has emerged as one possible intersection of these two fields of inquiry. This is illustrated by two recent book series, the Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East series at Peter Lang Publishing (edited by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard) and the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema series at Palgrave Macmillan (edited by Nezar Andary and Samirah Alkassim). Waleed Mahdi's Arab Americans in Film (2020) and Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (2020) consolidate these exchanges across ethnic studies, area studies, political sciences, (art) history, and film and media studies. While Mahdi primarily positions himself from within ethnic studies and Limbrick is first a film scholar, both have published in reference journals in film studies, Middle East studies, and cultural studies.

Cosmopolitanism, Activism and Arab Documentary Film

Since the 1970s, Arab documentary filmmakers have highlighted struggles for personal freedom, dignity and democracy by those restricted by oppressive systems of colonialism, occupation and authoritarianism. In this article I study four contemporary Arab documentary films to identify a path vital for the rethinking of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship in Middle East studies. After the 2011 global interest in the Arab uprisings, Syrian and Palestinian documentaries rose to acclaim at international film festivals, and won Emmys and Oscar nominations. The often character-led stories of these films defy orientalist views of the Middle East. Creative global communities at international film festivals are emerging, where Arab documentary filmmakers and their non-elitist stories connect on various humanistic, sociocultural and political levels with non-Arab peers. In this article my aim is to contribute to a redefinition of cosmopolitanism, one not based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment but on the universality of human emotion and sentiment.

Hydrofictions

Hydrofictions identifies water as a new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world’s water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine. It argues for the necessity of recognising water’s importance in understanding contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, covering topics including representations of the River Jordan; the history of Zionist and Israeli swamp drainage; the emergence of Israeli and Palestinian environmentalisms; the role of the Mediterranean in Israeli identity; and the hydropolitics of war and occupation. In doing so, it shows that water is as culturally significant as that much more obvious object of nationalist attention, the land. This book offers new insights into Israeli and Palestinian literature and politics, and into the role of culture in an age of environmental crisis. Hydrofictions shows that how we imagine water is inseparable from how we manage it. It is vital reading for students and scholars in Middle East Studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and anyone invested in the future of the world’s water.

Beyond Exception

Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. It analyzes what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies studied. The book proposes ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. It asks: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial societies and global capitalism in other parts of the world look like if the Arabian Peninsula was central, rather than peripheral or exceptional, to ongoing sociohistorical processes and representational practices? The book explores how the exceptionalizing discourses that permeate Arabian Peninsula studies spring from colonialist discourses still operative in anthropology and sociology more generally, and suggest that de-exceptionalizing the region within their disciplines can offer opportunities for decolonized knowledge production.