Spring 2022
Spring 2022 class Schedule
Spring 2022 course descriptions
MENA 200-0-20/HIST 200-0-32/PERF ST 330-0-20: Making the Modern Middle East
This team-taught course offers an interdisciplinary approach to major issues in the study of histories, cultures, and societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as an introduction to MENA as a field of study. We seek to understand how "MENA" was made as well as how the imaginary of MENA coalesced into a geopolitical entity and conceptual category. Among the topics explored are the history of the idea of MENA and the multiple meanings of "modernity" in that context; the complex relations between MENA and the West, the historical formation of Middle East nation-states, polities, ideologies, identities, and economies; the War on Terror and its impact on the region, and the dynamic struggles unfolding in the region since the 2011 Arab uprisings including mass migration. The course will consider the making of these structures, events, and relationships from a range of perspectives, focusing on historical and cultural production. Primary and secondary course materials will include historical, social science, performance, cinematic, literary, and digital texts.
MENA 290-4-20/JWSH ST 280-4-1/HIST 200-0-38: Leisure and Popular Culture in 20th Century Palestine/Israel
This course focuses on leisure and popular culture in Palestine and Israel during the first half of 20th century. Considering both Jewish and Arab societies, this course examines the emergence of new leisure sites and activities and probes how local and global events shaped the cultural life of the local population. Throughout the course we will discuss cafés, cinemas, beaches, nightlife, theatre, sports, radio, drugs, and alcohol consumption as new forms of leisure and examine how they were influenced by broad processes of modernization, urbanization, the emergence of national identities and the evolving conflict between the Arab and Jewish communities. The course combines a wide range of primary sources as well as cultural products of Jewish and Arabs writers, moviemakers, and artists. Through course readings, lectures, discussions, and collaborative assignments students will confront the many ways in which leisure has had a foundational impact on ordinary people's daily lives and the formation of collective identities in Palestine and Israel
MENA 290-5-20/RELIGION 250-0-20: Introduction to Islam
This course introduces Islam, one of the major religious traditions of world history, developing a framework for understanding how Muslims in varying times and places have engaged with Islamic scripture and the prophetic message of the Prophet Muhammad through diverse sources: theological, philosophical, legal, political, mystical, literary and artistic. While we aim to grasp broad currents and narrative of Islamic history, we will especially concentrate on the origins and development of the religion in its formative period (the prophetic career of the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an, Islamic belief and ritual, Islamic law, and popular spirituality) and debates surrounding Islam in the contemporary world (the impact of European colonialism on the Muslim world, the rise of the modern Muslim state, and discourses on gender, politics and violence).
MENA 390-3-20/ANTHRO 330-0-20: Ethnography of North Africa
While North Africa (the Maghrib) is often considered an appendage of the Muslim Middle East, this Mediterranean region merits study on its own, given its French colonial past and its connections to both sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. This course introduces students to the Maghrib region, with the primary focus on Morocco, through text and expressive culture (visual culture, music and sound, material culture). Readings draw from anthropology, literature, biography, and popular culture, and from Maghribi and Western authors and culture-makers. Students learn about everyday life in this region through thematic foci on ethnic minorities and majorities, language, gender, law, migration, natural resources, and human rights. No reading is required outside the syllabus.
MENA 390-4-20 / HIST 300-0-20: The Arabian Peninsula Since the 18th Century
This course aims at introducing students to major themes in the modern history, politics and societies of the Arabian Peninsula, which is an often neglected but increasingly pivotal region of the Middle East. The first half of the course will concentrate on state formation and the political, economic and ideological forces that shaped the Peninsula until the British withdrawal. The second half of the course will be more thematic and will address some of the most important challenges that the region has faced since the 1970s. Because of its undeniable regional importance and influence, Saudi Arabia will receive particular attention throughout the quarter, though lectures and readings will cover other emirates of the Gulf as well as Yemen. The course combines lectures and some discussions.
MENA 390-6-20/JWSH ST 390-0-3/SPAN 397-0-3/ANTHRO 390-0-25: Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain
This undergraduate seminar examines the shifting place of Jews and Muslims in contemporary Spain. Together, we will explore several interrelated questions: (1) How have “Spain” and “Europe” variously been defined as modern, white, Christian, or secular by figuring Jews and Muslims as others? (2) How have these terms and the forms of life and history that they purport to represent changed over time? (3) What are the similarities and differences between the “Jewish Question” and the “Muslim Problem”? (4) How do Jews and Muslims understand themselves in relation to Spain, Europe, and to each other? At a time when racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and right-wing populist movements are ascendant in Spain and across Europe, we will work collaboratively to not only answer these questions, but to formulate new ones. To do so, we will consult scholarship in anthropology, history, cultural theory, and philosophy as well as on fiction, film, and journalism as resources. Throughout the term, we will be especially attuned to the forms of inclusion and exclusion that have affected Jews and Muslims in Spain, always with an eye toward how such abstractions come to matter in everyday life.
MENA 390-6-21/MENA 490-0-22/HUM 370-6-40: (Im)material Layers in Archives: Affect, Landscapes, and Photographic Agency
This seminar will investigate the ways in which archives can function as a space for renegotiating the agency of photographs and their (im)material layers, and how these processes can allow for rethinking archival practices in complex political, economic and social contexts today.
We consider archival research and preservation practices, including documentation, technological solutions and questions around custodianship, rights and access, a particular focus will address diverse methodologies of generating layers of documentation through encountering and witnessing archival material in specific settings.
We will also be exploring specific pirate or subversive digital projects, traditional/local knowledge archives and their related contracts, and their use of radical descriptions and language. How might these offer new ways to reclaim and reassert control over historical narratives? This, in turn, will allow us to understand how reframing the same archival items can shift how people search and read records.
Participants will learn, explore, and generate new knowledge by working on collections from the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) and related projects. The course instructors are three members of the current board of directors of the AIF, Vartan Avakian, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and Kristine Khouri.
MENA 411-0-21/ENG 455-0-20: Literatures of the Global 19th Century: The Nahda
This course is an introduction to Arabic literary production of the long nineteenth century as it engages the “nahḍa” (awakening), understood variously as a discourse on modernity, a utopian social project, and an epistemological rupture wrought by colonialism and capitalism. With special emphasis on the genealogies, practices, and problematics of Arabic literary modernity, this course will introduce students to the major works of Arabic literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and to the major debates, social changes, and material developments that attend the period, including (but not limited to) language reform, migration, print capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In short, we will try to understand how these authors, through their texts, both produced and theorized modernity for their readers in the localized contexts of Imperial influence and control on the one hand, and the global–though uneven–nineteenth-century processes of social, political, economic, and technological change.
Primary texts will all be available in English translation and will include: Rifa’ al-Tahtawi, The Extraction of Gold from Paris (1826); Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg (1855); Khalil al-Khuri, Oh No! I Am Not a European (1858); Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What Isa ibn Hisham Told Us (1907); Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid (1911); and Jurji Zaydan, Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt (1914).