From discourse to practice: Orientalism, western policy and the Arab uprisings

Ten years on since the Arab uprisings we are in a position to assess how the nexus between knowledge, discourse and practice had a bearing on the trajectory of the protests. They represented hope and change for millions of Arabs in the region, but to what extent was that the case for onlookers in Europe and the US, and did western discourse on events in the Middle East matter? While the toppling of longstanding dictators was met with jubilation by Arab populations, it conversely created anxiety and fear in many western governments. This was reflected in the shift from an initially celebratory discourse in western commentary to disappointment, pessimism and disavowal of the uprisings. Within a year, op-eds and academic articles were asking whether the ‘Arab Spring’ had turned into an ‘Islamist winter’, reverting to Orientalist narratives about the inevitability of conflict, bloodshed and sectarianism in the Middle East. I argue this discourse had implications for the outcome of the uprisings as ‘latent Orientalism’ translated into ‘manifest Orientalism’ and western states hesitated to support opposition groups they initially encouraged and emboldened. I begin the article with a study of western discourse in the first year of the uprisings, which I then situate within a long durée history of western policy and representation of the Middle East. In the final sections I consider the role of scholarship and think tanks as mediators of Orientalist discourse.

Intertextuality in Andrea Levy's novel “Small Island”

The purpose of this article was to identify how intertextuality in the novel “Small Island” (2004) by the British writer Andrea Levy (1956–2019) contributes to the representation of postcolonial issues. To solve the research problems, we applied cultural-historical, comparative, biographical methods of literary analysis. The article considers how to appeal to the poem “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth allows the contemporary writer to criticise the anglicised system and the content of education in the colonies, which becomes the conductor of the dominant, Western discourse. The reference to “Gone with the Wind” helps Levy demonstrate how the stereotyping of images of blacks in cultural texts is pointedly acutely perceived by her dark-skinned heroine. An appeal to the poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by the Lord Tennyson and, through it, to Rudyard Kipling's poem “The Last of the Light Brigade”, to the speech of Winston Churchill, serves in “Small Island” to recall the undeservedly, according to Levy, forgotten contribution of the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies to the protection of British territory in World War II and the post-war reconstruction of the country.

On the Huihui Question

In Western discourse today the charge that Islam is “not just a religion” but a comprehensive social system is leveled to cast doubt over Muslims' ability to integrate into a political community. In the People's Republic of China, this understanding of Islam has served the opposite purpose. From the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), religion cannot be the basis for legitimate political identity. Islam, however, is not just a religion. Rather, as a “social system,” Islam constitutes a legitimate basis for national identity, and the Hui (Huihui), or Chinese Muslims, therefore constitute a minority nationality. This essay explores the origins of the CCP's understanding of Islam in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Party first formulated its policy vis-à-vis the Hui. Glasserman shows how this understanding of Islam as “not just a religion” suited the political, geopolitical, and ideological circumstances of the Yan'an period (1936–48). He also shows how this understanding was informed by contemporary Hui discourse and activism.

COMPARATIVE CONCEPTOLOGY OF POWER AND RESISTANCE USING GOOGLE NGRAM BOOKS

The article discusses the evolution of key concepts referring to governmentality in comparative perspective. The Russian discourse on government and power is compared with the Western discourse. The Google Books Ngram Viewer databank covering the period from 1800 to 2019 is used as a source of information. This databank contains more than 5% of all published books. The proposed discourse analysis suggests that the Russian and Western discourses have some elective affinity: in both cases there is little room for truth telling and whistle-blowers face significant risk.

As the Deep River Rises

The present essay seeks to offer a conceptual framework for grappling with climate change from within the sources of Jewish law (halakhah), a discourse rooted in the Hebrew Bible but developed in the rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity and then in medieval and modern codes and commentaries. Halakhah reflects deeply-held intellectual, theological, ontological, and sociological values. As a modus vivendi, rabbinic law—variously interpreted by Jews of different stripes—remains a vital force that shapes the life of contemporary practitioners. We are interested in how a variety of contemporary scholars, theologians, and activists might use the full range of rabbinic legal sources—and their philosophical, jurisprudential, and moral values—to construct an alternative environmental ethic founded in a worldview rooted in obligation and a matrix of kinship relationships. Our essay is thus an exercise in decolonizing knowledge by moving beyond the search for environmental keywords or ready analogies to contemporary western discourse. We join the voices of recent scholars who have sought to revise regnant assumptions about how religious traditions should be read and interpreted with an eye to formulating constructive ethics.

Hollywood’s Bad Muslims: Misrepresentations and the Channeling of Racial Violence

The cinemas of Arab and Muslim societies encompass a substantial number of film genres produced locally or in the diaspora. Arab and Muslim filmmakers experiment with different cinematic narratives, styles, and hybrid forms: auteur, documentary, diasporic, migrant, Third Cinema, and transnational productions. Their richness, diverse thematic foci, creative stylistic characteristics, and ability to reach global audiences recently motivated film scholars and other academics in Europe and the United States to consider designating a category called “Muslim Cinema” and defining its contours. The influence of these rich cinemas in contesting Hollywood’s demonization of Muslims, the conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, and the proliferation of anti-Muslim racism in Western discourse, however, remains very limited. Therefore, this article argues that the idea of such a category, if one were to be created, should explore venues to address Hollywood’s evolving forms of racializing Muslims and their relationship with the current institutionalization of anti-Muslim racism in the United States. Through a brief survey of Hollywood’s contemporary productions about Muslims, this article analyzes the impact of moving images on representation, particularly the fossilized characterization of Muslims as evil, and identifies three areas in American cinema and political discourse that could belong to this category: the first is Hollywood’s uninterrupted flow of making essentializing and essentialized narratives that conflate Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, and normalizes violence against them; the second deals with the transition from Islamophobia to anti-Muslim racism and explains its sanctioning by the US government; the third addresses the morphing of Islam into a race.

Afghan Taliban draw breath as they decide how to rule

Significance The Taliban have not yet declared themselves in charge; they are talking about consulting on an "inclusive" government but this is to secure international legitimacy through the outward appearance of an agreed transition process. Impacts The Taliban will appropriate the 9/11 anniversary that Washington set as its troop exit deadline. Western discourse has already shifted to the fate of Afghan staff and interpreters, rather than the population. The Taliban may not choose or be able to curb al-Qaida and other jihadists, as they promised to do.

News Narratives across Borders: The Convergence of Interests and Patterns of Meaning in International Media Coverage of Disaster

Shared narratives emerge across transnational news, circulating meaning and contributing to how publics process and make sense of significant issues and events (Cottle, 2014; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen, Cottle, 2012). These narratives are also reflected in the spaces made possible by digital communication technologies, including social media, and the through the formation of transnational discursive communities. Disasters, or at least those that meet the criteria of proximity for Western media (Benthall, 1993; Gans, 1980), are exemplars of such global media events, where analogous narratives or frames are rendered in media coverage across national borders. The evidence from studies of national media, however, suggests that journalistic narratives to disaster tend to reinforce a discourse of difference between spectators and sufferers through the representations of those communities and societies affected by disaster (Bankoff, 2011; Joye, 2009). This chapter considers how difference is reinforced in transnational news narratives of disaster through the circulation of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the prominence of stereotypes are a consequence of the processes of domestication that shape the characteristics of news and the dominant news flows in the global media system. More specifically, that to enable accounts to resonate with audiences, news is often packaged and adapted to a national context (Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh, 1992), which can be achieved by using familiar images of different societies and cultures to provide a link for audiences when covering distant events (Tanikawa, 2017). At the same time, as news and information becomes increasingly deterritorialised the overlaying of cultural frames to inform and explain a disaster in one national context may evolve across media coverage in others, contributing to the development of shared narratives to a single event. This is facilitated, for example, by the flow of information from news agencies and international news organisations, in particular those emanating from the core (the West) to the periphery (Wu, 2003). To elucidate these mediation processes across borders, the chapter will draw on one recent case study of disaster journalism to consider how essentialist notions of Japanese culture emerged as a unified narrative across international news coverage of the tripartite disaster of March 2011, reflecting its position as a dominant Western discourse on Japan.

The Theatre of Purgation and the Theatre of Cultivation

In China, theatre studies has been dominated by Western discourse on serious drama, mostly the theatre of purgation. It is equally important, however, to study popular Western theatre genres, such as musicals, comedies, and relatively uplifting plays, especially in terms of their similarities with Chinese opera—an epitome of theatre of cultivation.

CUBAN URBAN AGRICULTURE AND THE CHALLENGES TO ORTHODOX WESTERN ECONOMIC DISCORSE

The orthodox way in which economics is studied and implemented follows a primarily European concept of the functioning of economies that is then applied to the various different traditions and cultures that exist all around the world. This paper explores alternative economies and alternative ways of theorizing the economy in order to destabilize the western, orthodox conception of economics. In order to accomplish this, this paper explores Cuban Urban Agriculture, a system where unused land in urban areas is re-appropriated to grow a variety of crops for the local community. Specifically, it explores the ways in which this system views its economic actors, to what extent it applies an abstracted mode of production over various contexts, and how it incorporates culture and the non-economic as key elements. By examining these facets of the Cuban urban agricultural system, this paper sheds light on the hybridity of this system, in viewing workers as both rational profit maximizers and complex subjects with ambivalent desires, in imposing a decontextualized set of objectives for agriculture across Cuba, while leaving space for adaptation to the context within this narrow set, and in embedding this economic system in the local community. Thus, the paper demonstrates, in showing that the Cuban urban agricultural system is only able to partially separate itself from the orthodox western discourse of economics, that while it is possible to find alternatives to this system of economics, even these alternatives tend to adhere to at least some of its principles.