New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sorts of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth century Ottoman poet. It considers the question of what happens when a woman enters a field dominated by men; in this case, poetry. Using her own poetry and biographical dictionaries (the tezkire genre), Havlioglu contextualizes Mihri and tries to understand her as a product of her own time and as someone who understood her multiple roles in society well enough to subvert them. Didem Havlioglu is Instructor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke. Her interests include Modern/Ottoman Language and Literature, Islamic Aesthetics, Women and Gender in the Middle East, Women Writers in the Intellectual History of the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Ian Black, the former Middle East Editor of the Guardian, offers a comprehensive view of the past and present of what would ultimately become known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on a range of sources, the book aims to offer a balanced and clear narrative of a history that has become infamously contested. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), looks specifically at the larger context of Palestinian citizens of Israel, those Palestinians who stayed behind after the 1948 war simultaneously created the state of Israel and created refugees out of thousands of Palestinians. Brothers Apart looks at their position within Israeli society, their intellectual production, and their relationship to the greater Arab world. Nassar also examines the relationship between different ideologies amongst these Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as the issue of Palestinian resistance. She thus tells the story of a people who are caught between different intellectual and political commitments, yet who are also dedicated to fighting for their rights within Israeli society and for the greater Palestinian cause. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Who are the American Jews behind many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank? This is the question that Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, seeks to answer in her new book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Harvard University Press, 2017). By analyzing archival documents along with periodicals, internet sources, and a wealth of self-conducted interviews, Hirschhorn concludes that many American-Israeli settlers are not the messianic, ultra-right-wing fanatics that stereotypes suggest. Instead, the majority come from liberal American backgrounds, are highly-educated, and have conservative—but rarely Orthodox—Jewish backgrounds. What is more, she argues, their actions, motives, and self-conceptualizations are reflective of the evolution of American and Israeli Jewish identities over time. Sara Hirschhorn is University Research Lecturer in Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and Sidney Brichto Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a major aspect of the cultural and social lives of Middle Eastern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) tells that story, focusing primarily on portraiture and those that took portraits. Sheehi examines the formalism of portraits in relation to changing notions of class, questioning whether or not portrait photography were creating new forms of sociability or vice versa. But photography is also another way Arab modernity was in relation to Ottomanism: The Arab Imago looks at how portrait studios developed in Istanbul and beyond, often operated by Armenian and Greek Orthodox photographers. The Arab Imago integrates photography, modernity, and the banal to give us one of the first histories of photography in the Middle East. Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies and Director of the Program of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) at the College of William and Mary. He is Professor of Arabic Studies as well, and holds a joint appointment in AMES and the Arabic Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He did his doctorate at Michigan. His work largely examines cultural, intellectual, art history, and the political economy of the late Ottoman Empire and the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-arabiyah). Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has produced a primer that will both challenge and reinforce many of the assumptions we’ve made in the study of Islamic mysticism. Knysh walks us through how to define Sufism, the origins of Sufism (including the influence of the Hellenic world), how texts fit into our consideration of Sufism, contemporary developments in Sufism, and more. He places this within the framework of outsiders and insiders (to Sufism), challenging us to understand better how the study of Sufism itself came into being. The entire book itself is in conversation, not simply with theoretical debates in Islamic studies and the study of religion, but also the greater field of history. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vigor to the violence and pain of that conflict. Indeed, the French state only officially recognized the war as a war in 1999. Claire Eldridge‘s From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016) interrogates the war’s legacies by focusing on the French settlers and the native military and civilian auxiliaries who fled Algeria in the thousands as French colonialism there came to an end. Examining pied-noir and harki grassroots collective mobilization and memory activism in France after 1962, From Exile to Empire shows that, while the war may have been repressed and silenced in a variety of ways in French society, the conflict was far from “forgotten” for these communities. Addressing material concerns including housing, poverty, and forms of indemnity, and attempting to preserve their cultures and histories, community associations forged new identities in France while advocating for the recognition of their suffering and their positive contributions to the nation and its (former) empire. Divided into two parts, the book covers the memory work of these communities from 1962 to 1991, and then from the early 1990s up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict in 2012. Drawing on a wide range of pied-noir and harki sources, From Empire to Exile has much to offer those interested in the history of the war and its aftermaths. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone concerned with popular and community memory in the wake of traumatic and violent pasts more generally. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2016), Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Rhode Island, examines one population who has often been left out of these cultural formations. Kemp focuses on the representation of first-generation Maghrebi women in France in documentaries, short films, feature films, and telefilms. Her analysis revolves around filmic textual analysis and the production, audience reception, and distribution of these art forms in contemporary French society. Kemp is attuned to filmic genre conventions, narrative structures, and formal techniques that media producers and artists use to both appeal to large mainstream audiences while challenging dominant stereotypes about Muslims. In our conversation we discussed views of North Africans in French society, means for recovering voice in film, the role of religion in French cinema, the mediation of subjects in documentary films, the role of objects in voicing difference, expressing agency of women protagonists, the goals of dialogue and voiceover versus body language or non-verbal communication, and film’s ability to challenge dominant stereotypes in France. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Studies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017) is very different: he looks specifically at patriotic sentiment, not nationalism per se, and its specifically Ottoman roots. Using archival sources in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, Mestyan ties together the public sphere, the press, leadership, and even opera to show us how the homeland is portrayed and thought of in late Ottoman and then later, colonial Egypt. This in turn allows us to understand how patriotism would later influence the development of nationalism in the twentieth century. Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Middle East and is assistant professor at Duke University. He was a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard and taught at Oxford after getting his doctorate in history from Central European University. He is involved in many digital humanities projects, including a bibliography of nineteenth-century Arabic-language periodicals. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies