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 Editor's Note:
In this issue, we are proud to feature a series of groundbreaking interventions. Ifdal Elsaket explores anti-Blackness in Egypt through the genre of “jungle films.” She lays bare the racial and imperial fantasies that informed these films’ popularity. Elsaket exposes a process of racialization through which Egyptians positioned themselves as superior and modern, at a time when Egypt’s claims to Sudan took on a greater urgency and Blackness marked otherness. This deeply engrained vision of Africa as a place of inferiority would continue to inflect film and visual culture long after decolonization. Suhad Daher-Nashif interrogates the national-civic service which has successfully targeted young Palestinian women who are citizens in Israel. Her ethnographic study carefully details the complex web of considerations, interests, and strategies that shape the national-civic service as a “trapped escape.” Women’s participation in the service reveals the mutually constitutive nature of Israeli colonial and Palestinian social structures. By showing how women use a colonial apparatus to escape patriarchal norms Daher-Nashif rethinks Palestinian experience in Israel as well as the imposition of and resistance to gender norms more broadly. Nisa Ari explores the interaction between local and foreign artistic communities in early twentieth century Palestine. She focuses on the work of Palestinian artist Nicoal Saig (1863-1942) who copied photographs that the American Colony Photo Department (ACPD) produced. The relationship between Saig and the ACPD, Ari shows, reveals a multidirectional artistic exchange between local and foreign. She uncovers a world in which a diverse group of artistic agents employed different practices, produced and sold religious representations and object, and formed a vibrant economic market in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Palestine. Tamer ElGindi tackles the World Bank’s assessment of the massive uprisings that rocked Egypt and Tunisia as “puzzles,” given both countries’ achievements in poverty rates, access to education, child and maternal mortality, and infrastructure services. Through a close reading of various inequality measures from the developmentalist era of Gamal Abdel Nasser to the subsequent neoliberal eras of Anwar al-Sadat and Husni Mubarak, ElGindi shows that macroeconomic improvements never “trickled down.” Energy and food subsidy systems in particular benefited the wealthiest instead of targeting the needy. He urges for a comprehensive understanding and measurement (of the monetary and the non-monetary) as a prerequisite to understanding and ameliorating inequality. Manfred Sing revisits the wave of Arab social criticism that marked intellectual life after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Through a careful rereading of five intellectuals Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, Yasin al-Hafiz, Mustafa Hijazi, Nawal El Saadawi, and Hisham Sharabi, Sing traces the normative shift in Marxist thought away from a critique of capitalist society and towards theorizing the absence or failure of revolutionary mass movements. Following neither the admirers of Arab criticism nor their countercritics, Sing maps a social criticism that was timely, provocative, polemic, disenchanted, and marred by heuristic fallacies. This issue also features the usual robust array of book reviews. TABLE OF CONTENTS ARTICLES Jungle Films in Egypt: Race, Anti-Blackness, and Empire Ifdal Iskalat Trapped Escape: Young Palestinian Women and the Israeli National-Civic Service Suhad Daher-Nashif Spiritual Capital and the Copy: Painting, Photography, and the Production of the Image in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine Nisa Ari The Inequality Puzzle in Egypt: What Do We Really Know? Tamer El Gindi Arab Self-Criticism after 1967 Revisited: The Normative Turn in Marxist Thought and Its Heuristic Fallacies Manfred Sing REVIEWS Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda Edited by Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss Reviewed by Nader Atassi Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different Anthony C. Alessandrini Reviewed by Sophia Azeb The Arab City: Architecture and Representation Edited by Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi Reviewed by Deen Sharp Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East Edited by Nelida Fuccaro Reviewed by Nicholas Simcik Arese Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power Edited by Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban Reviewed by Charles Anderson Keepers of the Golden Shore: A History of the United Arab Emirates Michael Quentin Morton Reviewed by Kristi N. Barnwell A History of the ‘Alawis: From Medieval Aleppo to the Turkish Republic Stefan Winter Reviewed by Charles Wilkins REVIEW ESSAYS The Kurds of Syria, by Sean Lee Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War, by Michael M. Gunter The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East, by Harriet Allsopp La question kurde: Passé et présent, by Jordi Tejel Gorgas Excavating Origins, Assessing Development: The Evolution of Middle East Studies and Its Scholars, by Laurie A. Brand Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East, by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States, by Zachary Lockman |
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June 2021
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