***Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2018 Issue: Editor's Note and Table of Contents***

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVI, No. 1
Spring 2018

Editor's Note:

We are proud to feature a diverse array of disciplines and approaches in this issue. In “The Nahda in Parliament: Taha Husayn’s Career Building Knowledge Production Institutions, 1922-1952” Hussam R. Ahmed traces the bureaucratic and institutional force of one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. He reveals new ways to think about the ties between intellectual work, knowledge production, pedagogy, and the Egyptian state. In “‘Jerusalem, We Have a Problem’: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination,” Gil Hochberg offers a reading of both the colonial legacies of the sci-f genre and the potential for its radical upending. Hochberg ponders the question of Palestine in a futuristic post-factual and post-national time of becoming. In “‘A Fever for an Education’: Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914,” Susanna Ferguson explores education’s appeal and promise of stability and reform in the nineteenth century Arab world. In “Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State,” Éric Verdeil approaches public infrastructure as a site of political struggle. Verdeil challenges the conventional readings that assert the power of neoliberalism and sectarianism to marginalize state institutions, showing instead how infrastructural policy instruments accentuate Lebanese society’s gaps and inequalities. Finally, in “If We All Leave, Who Will Cut the String: Exiled Intellectuals in Ghada al-Samman’s Thought,” Louis Yako contributes an engaged read of exile, the role of the intellectual, and the possibilities of revolution.
 
This issue also features the usual robust array of book reviews. With this issue, we bid farewell to a long-time pillar of Arab Studies Journal and its book review team. Allison Brown, an inimitable editor and thinker, will be departing after a decade of teaching and leading our team with the intellectual depth and editorial precision that have made the journal what it is today. While she may not grace our pages, she will always be part of the ASJ family.

Table of Contents

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Articles

8. The Nahda in Parliament: Taha Husayn’s Career Building Knowledge Production Institutions, 1922-1952
Hussam R. Ahmed

34. “Jerusalem, We Have a Problem”: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination
Gil Z. Hochberg

58. “A Fever for an Education”: Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914
Susanna Ferguson

84. Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State
Éric Verdeil

114. If We All Leave, Who Will Cut the String: Exiled Intellectuals in Ghada al-Samman’s Thought
Louis Yako


Reviews
​
140. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, by Laura U. Marks 
Reviewed by Hend F. Alawadhi

145. Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by Wael Abu-‘Uksa
Reviewed by Susanna Ferguson

​150.Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library, the Ashrafiyya Library Catalogue, by Konrad Kirschler
Reviewed by Steve Tamari

155. Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power, by Joanne Randa Nucho
Reviewed by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

160. Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life, by Farah Al-Nakib
Reviewed by Arbella Bet-Shlimon

165. Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin, by Berna Turam
Reviewed by Hilal Alkan

170. Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012, by Thomas Philip Abowd
Reviewed by Marwan D. Hanania

174. Britain’s Hegemony in Palestine and the Middle East, 1917–56: Changing Strategic Imperatives, by Michael J. Cohen
Reviewed by Simon Davis
​

Review Essays

180. New Perspectives on Communal Memory, Intergenerational Identity, and the Algerian War in Contemporary France
by Chris Rominger

From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities 
by Claire Eldridge

Hériter 1962: Harkis et immigrés algériens à l’épreuve des appartenances nationales
by Giulia Fabbiano

188. Resisting the Slow Violence of the North African and West Asian University
by Corinna Mullin

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education
by Henry A. Giroux

Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without
by Ramón Grosfoguel, Roberto D. Hernández, and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez ​