***Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2020 Issue***

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVIII, No. 1
Spring 2020

This issue features a wealth of historical and contemporary insights on comedy, art, music, land, and labor. Carmen Gitre traces the vaudeville and comedy of the playwright Najib al-Rihani in early-twentieth-century Egypt. Reformers charged Rihani and his Everyman character, Kishkish Bey, with endangering the patriotic health of the newly independent nation. Gitre traces Rihani’s alternative moral and ethical vision of the nation, unfolding the Egyptiana theater as a shared liminal space of catharsis and imaginative transformation. Sarah Johnson takes us to mid-twentieth- century Iraq, where the work of artist Hafidh Druby married archeological practice with representational painting. Tracing Druby’s rise and fall as a pinnacle of art and theory, Johnson excavates blind spots in the history of modern Iraqi art, bringing to light multifaceted interpretations of modernity in Baghdad. Weaving performance ethnography, geography, and sound studies, Leila Tayeb explores post-Qaddafi Libya. She reveals how music is one of many quotidian sonic practices that produce militia power. Interrupting the conventional narration of Libya’s statelessness and its ostensibly bereft institutional landscape, Tayeb shows the audible and palpable ways that militias claim sovereignty. By detailing the dispossession of the villages of al-Kabri, al-Naher, Umm al-Faraj, and al-Tall in the western Galilee, Lily Eilan offers a new way to think about the Nakba. Reading mechanisms of negotiation, survival, and resistance to the Zionist state, Eilan illustrates a mode of transience in which Palestinians and Mizrahim accommodated, undermined, and exploited a new social order. The issue also features our stalwart book reviews section, anchored in an incisive review essay on Algeria.

Since its first issue in 1992, the journal has been a space for collaborative thinking and practice. I have witnessed ASJ in different formative moments: when it became fully peer reviewed in 2000; when the book review section moved to New York City and a whole new flock of graduate students joined the team; and through the present day when interdisci- plinary content and biannual publication have made ASJ a resource for publishing, research, and teaching. ASJ gives access to young scholars by inviting submissions, being transparent about our review process, and working closely with authors to let their work reach its full potential. The journal also provides scholars with experience in the world of publishing. Graduate students have joined ASJ and stayed on board long after their defenses and tenure. 

ASJ was the brainchild of Bassam Haddad. Through the ideas and practices of the journal, Bassam began crafting the institutional force that gave birth to Jadaliyya, Quilting Point, the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs, and Tadween Publishing, all under the umbrella of Arab Studies Institute. ASJ is the mothership of these organic and collective bodies that produce textual, aural, and visual knowledge committed to the Arab world as far more than an object of study. What holds us together is solidarity and commitment. . . . ​[Read More]


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