Arab Studies Journal最新文献

{"title":"Spheres of Intervention: Us Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976","authors":"Jeffrey G. Karam","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim220070087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim220070087","url":null,"abstract":"SPHERES OF INTERVENTION: US FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COLLAPSE OF LEBANON, 1967-1976 James R. Stocker Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (vii + 296 pages, notes, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Jeffrey G. KaramIn Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976, James R. Stocker reconsiders the role of the United States in Lebanon's path to the civil war that erupted in 1975. Combining declassified documents from the US National Archives and various American presidential libraries, as well as some Arabic and French sources, Stocker advances two main arguments. The first is that \"US policy toward Lebanon was subordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East\"; the second is that the \"US played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse\" (4, 5). Both arguments are meant to convince the reader that rather than focus on one set of factors, a proper study of US involvement in Lebanon between 1967 and 1976 should incorporate the different domestic, regional, and international factors that shaped US policy at the time. Stocker considers Lebanon's slide into mayhem alongside other regional and international events, such as the October War of 1973, the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the various disengagement agreements and disagreements between a number of Arab states and Israel during the 1970s, making his account of the underlying factors that ignited the Lebanese Civil War among the most comprehensive.Spheres of Intervention consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Stocker discusses US interests in Lebanon and surveys existing literature on the causes of the civil war, which include the fragility of Lebanon's political system, foreign meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and poor socioeconomic development. The first three chapters deal with important junctures between the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, known as Black September. Chapters four and five focus on the heightened tension and subsequent skirmishes between Palestinian militants and the Lebanese government leading up to the October War of 1973, as well as the state of sociopolitical affairs in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war. The last three chapters examine the first two years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76) and the intense negotiations between various Arab states, the United States, and Israel to broker temporary peace between the warring factions. More specifically, chapters six and seven demonstrate that Lebanon became a battleground for regional contestation between Syria and Israel, as well as between Syria and different Arab states. The epilogue fast-forwards through Lebanon's civil war and ends with the United States calling on the Lebanese government to implement UN resolutions, particularly regarding the disarmament of Hizballah's armed","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127475969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon","authors":"Maya Mikdashi","doi":"10.5860/choice.194635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194635","url":null,"abstract":"THE POLITICS OF SECTARIANISM IN POSTWAR LEBANON Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and Shoghig Mikaelian London: Pluto Press, 2015 (viii+240 pages, notes, index, and charts) $30.00 (paper)Reviewed by Maya MikdashiThe Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon is a welcome and critical addition to the growing field of Lebanon studies. This edited volume offers us a detailed view into the ways that sectarianism operates in different arenas of Lebanese politics-contributing both new research and insight to the larger field. The authors-Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and Shoghig Mikaelian-focus not only on state institutions and histories of political sectarianism, but also, in a Gramscian vein, on the manifestation of sectarian politics within Lebanon's civil society, political parties, political economy, and media industries.The book has a clear political purpose, stated in the preface: \"The critical reflections we undertake here on the myriad operations of the sectarian system are meant to unmask its ensemble of practices in the hope of opening up possibilities to fight them and ultimately to transcend sectarianism altogether\" (viii). While many academics view their work as inextricably bound to political conditions and commitments, this statement sets the authors apart from most in that they wear their politics on their sleeves. This is a book written to be in service of political action, and its tone is open to multiple readerships both in the academy and outside of it. The readership is assumed, however, to have a background knowledge of the contemporary history of Lebanon and a shared will to rethink and resist sectarian politics in Lebanon. In service of this larger goal, the authors offer a detailed and insightful analysis into how state and nonstate institutions function together to buttress and reproduce the politics of sectarianism. They also offer an assessment of recent activist campaigns to fight and amend that system, including campaigns for civil marriage, electoral transparency, and LGBTQ rights.The authors do not elaborate a definition of sectarian politics or submit an argument about its origins or legacies. They instead concentrate on the operations of sectarianism. Put in another way, they do not ask what sectarian politics are but rather focus on and illustrate what sectarian politics do. Crucially and refreshingly, the authors treat political sectarianism-the system of power sharing that defines the Lebanese state-as one manifestation of sectarian politics more broadly, not its defining characteristic. This approach departs from influential work on Lebanon by Fawwaz Traboulsi, Kamal Salibi, and Theodor Hanf, among others, that has often concentrated on political sectarianism as the main manifestation of sectarian politics. In The Politics of Sectarianism, essays on the state and its institutions exist alongside chapters on associational life and Leb","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134388189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A History of Modern Oman","authors":"G. Crouzet","doi":"10.5860/choice.194911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194911","url":null,"abstract":"A HISTORY OF MODERN OMAN Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (301 pages + maps, index) $94.99 (cloth)Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout's book on modern Oman will be a reference for the history of Oman from the late eighteenth century to the present day. There are already a few histories of Oman, such as Patricia Risso's Oman and Muscat (Croom Helm, 1986) or Uzi Rabi's Emergence of States in a Tribal Society (Sussex University Press, 2006). Marc Valeri's book, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (Oxford University Press, 2014) covers nation building and political legitimacy in the sultanate since 1970. A History of Modern Oman, however, writes a global history of the sultanate, placing its expansion as a thalassocracy and its emergence as a nation-state within a larger frame of the sultans' encounters and entanglements with colonial powers.The book's main argument is that unlike its neighbors the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Oman has been able to undertake major changes to become part of the globalized world while keeping some of its nineteenth-century traditions. The sultans have supposedly invented an original mode of development that preserves Oman's political, social, and religious traditions. Hence Oman exemplifies the model of a state enjoying oil-reserve prosperity while preserving Ibadism, one of Islam's main branches, said to have been founded as early as the seventh century CE, and a centuryold cosmopolitan society. It is a classic argument, tackled here in two parts, covering first the long nineteenth century and then the twentieth century. The argument, however, is questionable. Oman's neighbors, like the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have followed a similar political and social pattern as the one Jones and Ridout describe (see, for example, Christopher Davidson's Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond [Columbia University Press, 2009]). Nevertheless, the authors provide valuable details about Oman's political, social, and cultural modernity since the nineteenth century. Chapter two, for example, describes the development of a press and a dynamic intellectual sphere in Zanzibar and Oman, situating it within the larger frame of the global nahda movement. Chapters six and seven stand as a good resume of the modernizing reforms and measures Sultan Qaboos carried out in the 1970s, facilitated by the wealth coming from oil revenues and the help of British advisers, who served at economic consultants. The authors give a well-documented portrait of Omani society in the twentieth century as they tackle the social consequences of the oil boom as well as labor migration.The book's second central argument is that \"key Sultans\" made Oman a modern and federated nation-state that became an influential partner to the regional powers. The relevance of the \"nation-state\" in the context of Oman is questionable, and the book does not analyze the evidence of a \"national sentiment.\" The concept is arguably","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127190028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post - Cold War Order","authors":"Sara Awartani","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-5735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-5735","url":null,"abstract":"THE GLOBAL OFFENSIVE: THE UNITED STATES, THE PALESTINIAN LIBERATION ORGANIZATION, AND THE MAKING OF THE POST - COLD WAR ORDER Paul Thomas Chamberlin New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 (xi + 324 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $36.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)Reviewed by Sara AwartaniPaul Thomas Chamberlin's The Global Offensive tells the diplomatic story of the \"increasingly international question of Palestine\" (75). His work seeks to transcend parochial narratives of Palestinian history by illuminating the role of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the construction of the contemporary world order. In charting the PLO's formative years (1967-1975), Chamberlin's arguments are twofold: First, the PLO appropriated the language and military tactics of a variety of national liberation forces, placing the struggle for Palestinian self-determination within a framework of Third World movements. Second, in responding to the emergent \"political fact\" that the PLO was the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people, the United States enacted a three-pronged approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict: bolstering military aid to regional allies; exploiting tensions between Soviet-Arab alliances; and isolating the PLO from diplomatic solutions to the problem of Palestine. While the book does a fine job of laying out the ways in which the United States tried to subvert the PLO's success at every turn, it ignores why Palestinians would make such critiques of colonial oppression in the first place.Chamberlin draws upon archival records of the US government to highlight how the PLO was an active participant in the international political arena, documenting the extent to which the United States reacted to-rather than solely shaped-the changing nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nowhere is this dynamic better illustrated than in the context of the United Nations. According to Chamberlin, the United Nations was a forum in which formerly peripheral nations formed solidarities and viewed the United States in an increasingly critical light. As such, the United Nations provided an important platform for the PLO to garner international sympathy for Palestinian self-determination. Chamberlin suggests that Fatah mobilized the language of the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights to demand international recognition of Palestinian dignity in the face of Israeli occupation. The PLO's acquisition of international support complicated US efforts at the United Nations throughout the period. Such was the case of Security Council debates on Israeli attacks against Syria and Lebanon in retaliation for PLO-led actions, such as the Munich murders in 1972. The United States issued the sole veto against a resolution condemning Israel, while the majority of nations, including those recently decolonized, interpreted Israeli retaliation as proof of \"aggressive expansionist policies\"-a charge substantiated by the reality of the 1967 occupation (1","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116143817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Incurable Past: Nasser's Egypt Then and Now","authors":"Paul Sedra","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-1052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-1052","url":null,"abstract":"AN INCURABLE PAST: NASSER'S EGYPT THEN AND NOW Meriam Belli Gainesv il le: University Press of Florida, 2013 (xii + 296 pages, bibliography, index, figures, tables) $74.95 (cloth)In stark contrast to colleagues who work on the rule of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha and his successors, historians who focus on the Nasser period in Egyptian history are hobbled by the absence of substantial and accessible government archives. Indeed, while the past twenty years have witnessed a veritable renaissance of inquiry into, and interpretation of, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-due in no small part to a careful excavation of documents at the Egyptian National Archives, or Dar al-Watha'iq-pathbreaking analyses of the Nasser years have remained far fewer in number.This is not to say, however, that critical exploration of the 1950s and 1960s is impracticable. What historians of these years lack in terms of government archives, they can make up for in abundance through the use of the voluminous popular culture materials dating to this period.This task is, in part, what Meriam Belli sets before herself in her book, An Incurable Past: Nasser's Egypt Then and Now. But only in part, for this book is no conventional history of the Nasser years. Indeed, one could well be forgiven for thinking, on examining the work, that it is not history at all, but ethnography. Without question, the book draws inspiration as much from anthropology as from history, for its central concern is not solely the past, but the work that the past performs in the present. Given how frequently Nasser and the years of his rule are invoked in discussions of Egyptian politics-not least since the 2011 revolution-Belli seeks to grasp how and why these invocations are used.Drawing upon Bakhtin, Belli frames the study in terms of \"historical utterances\" dating to the 1950s and 1960s. In shunning references to memory or commemoration, she seeks to emphasize \"the wide sphere of 'human communications and activity' that takes history for object\" (9). Likewise privileged in Belli's notion of historical utterances are the ways in which history is appropriated and articulated in everyday life-the vernacular as opposed to elite, government, or media appropriations and articulations. As a result, this project ultimately entails an exploration not simply of the Nasser years themselves, but of the traces of those years that have consistently emerged in Egyptians' lives since that time.What this project demands in terms of sources is both the popular culture materials mentioned above and detailed interviews with a wide range of Egyptians reflecting upon how interpretations of these materials have changed over time. In order to focus the study, Belli has selected three experiences of the Nasser period that have taken on varied connotations through the years: the experience of the Nasserist educational system, the experience of the effigy-burning festival haraq al-limby in Port Said, and the experience of the ap","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"202 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115011457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood","authors":"Mona L. Russell","doi":"10.5860/choice.186515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.186515","url":null,"abstract":"THE ORPHAN SCANDAL: CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Beth Baron Stanford, CA: Stanford Universit y Press, 2014 (x xi + 245 pages, maps, photographs, index) $85.00 (clot h), $24.95 (paper)In 1933 the case of a teenage girl beaten at the Swedish Salam Mission in Port Said, Egypt, brought the issue of state neglect of orphans, who had been \"saved\" or \"served\" by missionaries in increasing numbers since the nineteenth century, into the spotlight. What had happened to fifteen-year-old Turkiyya Hasan? The young woman claimed she had received the beating for not accepting Christianity, while the missionaries claimed that Turkiyya willfully misbehaved in order to provoke a disturbance and create a media firestorm. The location and context of Hasan's story are also significant. Although Egypt had technically received its independence from Britain in 1922, the British continued to exercise control in matters concerning minority communities, as well as communications and defense. At the heart of Britain's strategic interest in defense lay the Suez Canal-hence the importance of Port Said. It was in this area where foreigners, generally, and the British in particular, struggled for the hearts, minds, and bodies of Egyptians with competing brands of \"muscular Christianity.\"Taking the case of Turkiyya Hasan as its starting point, Beth Baron's Orphan Scandal investigates how Egyptians responded to this \"muscular Christianity\" and, in particular, how Christian missionary practices influenced the development of the nascent Muslim Brotherhood. It also charts the relationship between Christian missionaries and the establishment of the welfare state in Egypt. At the time of the Hasan affair, the Egyptian government, for its part, did not speak with one voice, and the British continued to interfere on multiple levels. The authoritarian king sought to benefit from government sponsorship of new institutions and donations for new Muslim institutions, and Egyptian government officials attempted to navigate the waters between multiple aggrieved parties. Ultimately, Baron argues, the Turkiyya Hasan affair allowed King Fu'ad to buttress his Islamic credentials, force Britain to the negotiating table, and put the wheels in motion that would create the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936), which in turn would spawn the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1939. Baron contends that the \"ministry grew in part out of calls generated during and after the orphan scandal for the expansion of state welfare services for the young and vulnerable\" (190). Eventually, it would pave the way for the welfare state created in the wake of the 1952 revolution.In The Orphan Scandal we see the Muslim Brotherhood in its early years, defining its course. Previous works on the Brotherhood, such as the groundbreaking research of Richard Mitchell, Brynjar Lia, and Gudrun Kramer, focused on Hasan al-Banna and the dynamic of the larger organization. Baron examines the connections between e","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133632864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print","authors":"Michael Christopher Low","doi":"10.1525/9780520957220-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520957220-003","url":null,"abstract":"GLOBAL MUSLIMS IN THE AGE OF STEAM AND PRINT edited by James L . Gelvin and Nile Green Berkeley: University of Ca lifornia Press, 2014 (xiv + 285, index, illustrations, maps) $75.00 (clot h), $34.95 (paper)In his 1981 classic, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Daniel Headrick wrote: \"Among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequence for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology and the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans\" (3). But, as the editors of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, James Gelvin and Nile Green, caution, \"focusing on these technologies also highlights the fundamental problem of ascribing agency solely to one part of the globe\" (3). Thus, instead of telling a \"simple story of imperial hegemony and technological determinism,\" this edited volume attempts to weave a more complicated narrative, documenting how Muslim communities worldwide quickly took up the \"tools of empire\" and put them to use in ways that their inventors and disseminators had never envisioned (2-3). Highlighting the global Muslim community's exposure to new technologies, the authors in the volume do more than simply reframe a familiar story from a non-Western perspective. Instead, they open up new space to rethink the meaning and timing of globalization itself.Gelvin and Green take aim at the question of how to periodize globalization. Acknowledging that we live in a globalized world, but dissatisfied with the notion that the current era of globalization dates from the end of the Cold War or the invention of the microchip, they argue that this most recent incarnation of globalization \"was made possible and in many ways defined by earlier globalizing events\" (1). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steam and print quickened the pace of human contact and represented the sinews and tentacles of \"the twin systems most identified with the modern period: the world system of nation-states and the modern world economic system\" (4). By concentrating on this bundle of technologies, Gelvin and Green distinguish between \"the more nebulous periods of 'modernity/early modernity' on the one hand and unqualified 'globalization' on the other\" (1). In contrast to political or military framings of the long nineteenth century, they propose a period from roughly 1850 to 1930 defined by \"the global diff usion of enabling technologies\" (2).The collapsing of time and space facilitated the movement of migrants, pilgrims, commodities, and diseases with unprecedented speed and breadth. In the process, steamship and rail travel rearranged the physical and conceptual geography of the Islamic world. The massive increase in the numbers of Muslims making the hajj to Mecca, particularly from South and Southeast Asia, helped to kindle the emergence and spread of new religious and religiopolitical movemen","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131396571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime","authors":"Weldon C. Matthews","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1116","url":null,"abstract":"SADDAM HUSSEIN'S BA'TH PARTY: INSIDE AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME Joseph Sassoon New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (xxi + 314 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations, and map) $29.99 (paper)Despite the attention that Iraq has commanded in the news media and among policymakers since 1990, the country's history, politics, culture, and economy have remained remarkably understudied. This situation is beginning to change, and Joseph Sassoon's Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party represents a major contribution to recent scholarship. Sassoon poses the question of how Saddam Hussein was able to maintain power through two disastrous wars, crippling economic sanctions, and the prolonged and assiduous efforts of the United States to bring him down. Sassoon's book answers this question with the assertion that the Ba'th Party was critical to maintaining the compliance, complicity, cooperation, and support of a significant segment of Iraq's population until the American-led invasion of 2003.Perceptive surveys of Iraq's history such as those by Charles Tripp (A History of Iraq, Cambridge, 2007) and Phebe Marr (The Modern History of Iraq, Westview, 2012) acknowledge that Saddam's regime successfully entangled and implicated many Iraqis in an elaborate system of patronage and surveillance. Sassoon places the Ba'th Party at the center of this enter- prise, looking inside the party to reveal its machinery and its relationship to other institutions of the state. By examining how the regime rewarded its loyalists, he adds a dimension largely absent from Kanan Makiya's The Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California, 1998), which focuses on the regime's repressive capacity. Sassoon's book explores the party's role in cultural production and thereby complements Eric Davis's Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California, 2005), which explores the regime's endeavor to maintain itself through crafting a hegemonic worldview to impart to its citizens.Sassoon bases his account on extensive use of Iraqi archival sources, among them textual records of the Iraqi government and audiotapes of meetings between Saddam and his close associates, which the United States seized during its occupation. The documents are now archived at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. A second major collection of archival sources that Sassoon exploited is the Ba'th Party Regional Command documents, also taken to the United States in the wake of the invasion. This collection amounts to some six million pages, which have been digitized and made available to researchers at the Hoover Institute on Stanford University campus. Sassoon also draws upon the records of the Iraqi secret police that were seized by Kurds during the March 1991 uprising in the north of the country. These documents include about 2.4 million pages that are archived in digital form at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124958076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis","authors":"Tammer El-Sheikh","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-0657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-0657","url":null,"abstract":"THE MIGRANT IMAGE: THE ART AND POLITICS OF DOCUMENTARY DURING GLOBAL CRISIS T. J. Demos Durham, NC: Duke Universit y Press, 2013 (xiii + 250 pages, acknowledgments, notes, index, bibliography) $26.95 (paper)In The Migrant Image, T. J. Demos explores how selected contemporary artists represent migrants both sympathetically and as potential figures of resistance. Framing contemporary artworks dealing with the theme of migration within the twenty-first century context of \"crisis globalization,\" Demos engages with a growing and interdisciplinary body of scholarship on neoliberalism and uneven development. The book's main intervention, however, is within the subfield of global contemporary art history, where it will serve as a ver y useful text for students, researchers, critics, and curators concerned with the relationship between art and politics in the post-September 11 era.Demos claims that conventional mass media and documentary images of migrants-a category that includes refugees, exploited laborers, nomads, and exiles-reinforce stereotypes of victimhood and criminality, and thus entrench political positions within conflict zones. By contrast, artists working with documentary material in unconventional ways, he argues, offer nuanced and even redemptive representations of these figures, thereby \"uprooting\" them from binary and polemical discourses on victimhood and criminality. The extent to which these latter artistic representations \"intervene in the cultural politics of globalization,\" as he says they do, is less clear (xv).The artwork Demos considers is displayed in international exhibitions or biennials for limited audiences. Following curator Okwui Enwezor, Demos argues that the work contributes in these contexts to the formation of a \"diasporic public sphere\" (18). For Demos it is within this sphere that the figure of the refugee is redeemed and put forward as \"the paradigm of a new (global and post-national) historical consciousness\" (4). There is a leap here from the diverse political and economic circumstances of migration to representations of the migrant's postnational consciousness in artworks. Demos argues that in setting up a forum for reflexive \"cross-cultural interactions\" the biennial can forge a \"community of sense\" among its participants (18). Nevertheless, a gap remains between the artistic community formed by such participants and the diverse political community of migrants whose figures circulate in their work. Demos grants that the artwork, when viewed at international art fairs and in private galleries, might well function as a humanitarian alibi for corporate interests, but he does not examine this problem in detail. For Demos the question of the art market is secondary since the work extends beyond its context of production and display to \"constitute a site of potential subjective transformation with ultimately immeasurable political implications\" (248). The artwork's political power is described throughout the book as ","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117102270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma and Memory in Iraqi Culture","authors":"Amirbahador Moosavi","doi":"10.29091/9783752000993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29091/9783752000993","url":null,"abstract":"CONFLICTING NARRATIVES: WAR, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY IN IRAQI CULTURE edited by Stephan Milich, Friederike Pannewick, and Leslie Tramontini Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012 (x v iii + 268 pages) $99.00 (clot h)Looking at Iraq from our current vantage point it is easy to forget the rich cultural history contained within the borders of a country that has been plagued by warfare for over thirty years, with each catastrophic event seemingly overshadowing the previous one. Iraq has had no shortage of writers and intellectuals. In the latter half of the twentieth century some of the Arab world's most important poets emerged from the country; names like Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala'ika, and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati- among many others-need no introduction for anyone with the slightest familiarity with modern Arabic poetry. Their stories are well known, and their contribution to the shape of modern Arabic literature is undeniable. Yet far less has been written, particularly in English, about the writers and cultural figures from the final quarter of the last century until the present day. What happened to Iraqi cultural production during the terrifying years of Ba'thist rule, under the sanctions of the 1990s, or following the 2003 US invasion and occupation? What has been the role of the Iraqi intellectual since then, and how has Iraqi culture responded to the memories and traumas of recent, violent pasts? Moreover, who, for that matter, can speak in the name of Iraq at a time when the country is more fragmented than ever before and an increasing number of writers live abroad?In response to these questions, in December 2008 a conference entitled \"Cultural Voices of a Fragmented Nation: War, Trauma and Remembrance in Contemporary Iraq\" took place at the Phillips-Universitat in Marburg, Germany. Much of Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture grew from this conference. The edited volume consists of four sections: \"Cultural and Political Narratives\"; \"Poetics of Trauma\"; \"The Dialectics of Home and Exile\"; and \"Shahadat: Essays on the Poetic Semantics of the 'Iraqi Place.'\" The final section contains five additional essays translated from the 2009 collection of articles edited by Basran novelist and short story writer Lu'ay Hamza 'Abbas entitled al-Makan al-'Iraqi: Jadal al-Kitaba wa-lTajriba (The Iraqi place: Debating writing and experience). While the goals of the book are ambitious, it does an admirable job of introducing readers to contemporary debates about Iraqi literary production.The book's essays reflect important recent trends in scholarship on Iraqi culture, originating in scholarly works written primarily in Arabic by Iraqi intellectuals who critically treat Iraqi cultural production, especially literature, inside and outside the country from approximately 1979 until the present day. The most notable of these studies are Salam 'Abbud's Thaqafat al-'Unf fi al-'Iraq (The culture of violence in Iraq) and 'Abbas Khidr's al","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123521264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}