Modern Middle East History: Theories and Methods
©️ Omnia El Shakry
Description
This seminar will address various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the Modern Middle East. We will pay particular attention to how theoretical innovations such as post-Orientalism, World Systems theory, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies have transformed the nature of historical debates on the modern Middle East.
We will explore themes such as: the origins of capitalism; tradition and modernity; gender and sexuality; colonialism and modern power; nationalism; and the nature of the modern state.
Required Texts
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Available online.
Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Available online.
Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).
Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Schedule of Readings
Week I: Orientalism
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1-197.
Week II: Modernization Theory, Worlds Systems Theory, and Beyond
H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, “Introduction,” Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on the Moslem Culture of the Near East (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 1-18.
Haim Gerber, “Introduction” “The Classical Ottoman Land Regime” “The Agrarian Origins of the Modern Middle East,” The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner, 1987), pp. 1-17, 118-178.
Huri Islamoglu-Inan, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1-100.
Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1-41.
Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 1-22.
Recommended
Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt 1760-1840 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
Week III: Post-orientalism
Prakash, Gyan, “Writing Post-Orientalist Historiographies” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32:2 (1990) and “Can the Subaltern Ride?” CSSH, 34:1 (1992).
O’Hanlon, Rosalind and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” CSSH, 34:1 (1992).
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge 1990), pp. 1-20.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 3-46.
Recommended
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge 1990).
Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review, December, 1994, Vol. 99, No. 5, 1475-1490.
Week IV: Colonialism and Modern Power
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Recommended
David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality”Social Text, 43, (1995), 191-220.
Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Week V: Tradition and Modernity
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, 1981), ch. 15.
Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam”, Occasional Papers, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Washington, DC, Georgetown University, 1986.
Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 231-288.
Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minnesota, 2000), pp. 1-34.
Stefania Pandolfo, “The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity, in Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minnesota, 2000), pp. 115-147.
Recommended
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993).
Week VI: Religion as a Category of Analysis: Textuality and Audition
Talal Asad, “Introduction,” Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp.1-29, 67-187.
Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State, Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp.1-114.
Recommended
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia 2006).
Week VII: Nationalism, Class Formation, and History
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 3-120.
Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900-1963: Capital, Power and Ideology (Albany: SUNY Press Syracuse University Press, 1997), pp. 1-6, 79-139.
Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community,” The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3-13.
Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-19.
Recommended
James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge, 2008).
Week VIII: Gender and Sexuality
Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).
James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 1-59.
Recommended
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005).
Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000).
Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology, 6, no. 2, (2001): 202-236.
Week IX: The Modern State
Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
Manu Goswami, “Mobile Incarceration: Travels in Colonial State Space,” in Producing India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chapter 3.
Recommended
Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Week X: On the Postcolony
Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Timothy Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” Economy and Society, Volume 38, Issue 3 August 2009, pp. 399 – 432.
Recommended
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).