A Day as Ordinary as Any Other
Nathan Thrall’s Newest Book Offers a Timely Window into Israel’s Infrastructure of Occupation.
Major Labels
Rethinking Egyptian history through sound.
The Everyday Politics of Authoritarian Rule in Jordan
Three recent books on Jordan trace authoritarianism in the mundane rhythms of daily life.
Farha in the “Unfocused Feelings of the Citizenry”
A new Netflix film stirs up old debates about Palestinian narration.
Designing Nationhood in Turkey’s Universities
Begüm Adalet reviews Burak Erdim’s “Landed Internationals: Planning Cultures, the Academy, and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” As in past decades, universities in Turkey are venues of contestation between authority and resistance, with the government imposing its singular vision of a “pious, homegrown, national youth” on a diverse student body. Erdim’s book is the story of one such institution, the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, which was an iconic site of leftist student mobilization and anti-US protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The Fog of the Forever War with a Laugh Track in “United States of Al”
As President Joe Biden’s administration struggles to meet its self-imposed deadline of September 11, 2021 to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, Hollywood is offering its own painless, bloodless version of an end to America’s longest war. In this review of the CBS sitcom “United States of Al,” the authors Wazhmah Osman, Helena Zeweri and Seelai Karzai critique the show’s representation of Afghans and the US war and explain why the show’s missteps matter.
Cultural Heritage and the Politics of Sovereignty in Palestine
Elif Kalaycıoğlu reviews Chiara de Cesari’s book Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine, which explores the complex and shifting terrain of Palestinian heritage politics at work in both the Palestinian Authority and civil society organizations over time and under the conditions of settler colonialism.
The Savor of Memory
Laleh Khalili draws on memories from childhood, her experience of leaving Iran and her ongoing interest in cooking to review a series of classic and contemporary Iranian cookbooks. Through them she reflects on the politics of identity in the Iranian diaspora and the global circuits of foodways reflected in Iranian regional cuisines.
Solidarity Is a Country Far Away
Anna Simone Reumert reviews Darryl Li’s book The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity, an eye-opening ethnographic history of the experience and fate of foreign fighters acting in the name of global Muslim solidarity in the Bosnian war of the 1990s.
Ambivalence and Desire in Revolutionary Syria
Daniel Neep reviews Lisa Wedeen’s book Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria and finds it a “serious, powerful work operating on multiple levels: it speaks to an impressive range of debates in the Anglophone academy and the Syrian artistic field without losing sight of the visceral suffering of Syrians both inside and outside the country.”
An Interview with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, an assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College, is the author of Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), which won the Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2020. Tessa Farmer talked to her about her research, the book and her next project.
Big Village Interactive Documentary Tells Small Stories of a Rebel Kurdish Village
After the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iranian Kurds fighting for autonomy moved to the village Gewredê in Iraq. The online, interactive documentary Big Village reconstructs life in Gewredê in the mid-1980s, as remembered by the residents. The viewer can click on interviews, pictures, videos and texts, which makes Big Village an excellent teaching tool for studying Kurdish history and the Iranian revolution. This article is in Middle East Report, issue 295, “Kurdistan, One and Many.”
Agrarian Politics and the Slow Revolution Yet to Come
Almost a decade after the 2011 uprisings, we now have an excellent synthetic text by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush, long-time activists and researchers of (North) African agrarian questions as they relate to food sovereignty, social equality, and the ecology.
The Post-Oslo Neoliberal Laboratory
A review of Toufic Haddad, Palestine LTD. Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territories (London: I.B. Taurus, 2016), 368pp. Toufic Haddad begins his sharply critical examination of the international donor and financial community’s role in the...Speculating on Climate Change in the UAE
Why did Abu Dhabi build an ambitious eco-utopian planned city called Masdar City and what does it all mean?
Occupying Palestinian Space
Peteet’s main theoretical contribution is to show how the violent territorial expansion of Israeli settler-colonialism has developed mobility regimes that govern and restrict Palestinian movement through space.
Memoir of a Jewish Arab
Hayoun identifies himself as a Jewish Arab and traces his family history to show how Jewish Arabs were maliciously separated from their societies and how their identities were used in a game of colonial domination.
Countering the Surveillance State
While investigating the harmful impact of government surveillance on an Arab-American community a filmmaker turns the tables by offering a primer on counter-surveillance research.
The Imperious Rise of Gulf Capitalism
Hanieh’s book is valuable for anyone interested in understanding the growing power of Gulf monarchies across the Middle East.
Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War
Few people from the West know Yemen better than Helen Lackner. Her experience and insights make this book essential for understanding the multiple dimensions of Yemen’s crisis.
