MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Fall 2022

FALL 2022 COURSE SCHEDULE

FALL 2022 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

MENA  290-3-20: Introductory Topics in Middle East and North African Studies: Porous Borders? Geography, Power, & Techniques of Movement

At the advent of "globalization" some scholars argued that movements of capital, goods, people and ideas across nation-states have rendered their borders increasingly porous. The erosive effects of this porosity, in the age of the multi-national corporation, heralded, in this line of thinking, the death of the nation-state. Yet, in our contemporary epoch of border walls and offshored refugee processing centers, this assumed porosity of borders begs a reexamination. In this course, we ask: What is a border? Is it the physical line drawn between two states? When is a border artificial and when natural? Who gets to draw these lines? How does the border become an architecture of regulation that grants access to mobility to some and denies it to others? We will probe these questions by working towards rethinking borders as equally the products of mobile social actors, contraband commodities and fluctuating values as they are of state policies and power aimed at managing their movements. By the end of the course students will be exposed to diverse theories of space and case studies of borders in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and South Asia. They will be able to articulate what an attention to space and the relations of power inscribed in border formations can expand our conventional understandings of territory and mobility.

MENA  290-3-20: Leisure & Popular Culture in 20th Century Palestine

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 and 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  301-3-20: Seminar in Middle East and North African Studies: Traveling while Muslim: Islam, Mobility, and Security after 9/11

Particularly after the 9/11 attacks and during the war on terror that has ensued shortly thereafter, Muslim on the move—ranging from international students, pilgrims as well as scientists and artists—have continued to face increasingly scrutiny and surveillance in both global travel economies and national immigration regimes. These regimes gained even more important under the rule of authoritarian leaders in power across the globe from the US to India. What often unites Modi's India and Trump's United States is Islamophobia—albeit in different guises—as racialization of Islam and Muslims continues to punctuate our current era. What are the stakes of traveling while Muslim in that post 9/11 era of racing Islam? How do we come to understand such mobility? What assumptions underpin the attendant construction of Islam in such understandings, as various state and non-state actors enlist themselves to manage the movements of Muslims, specifically and exceptionally? In probing these questions, amongst others, in this seminar we aim to examine the interlocked relationship between Islam, mobility and security. We have three aims in front us: (1) becoming well-versed in studies of Islam and Islamophobia in the US and across the globe, (2) gaining a better understanding of Islam as a center tenet in a deeply uneven and racialized regime of ‘global' mobility, and lastly, (3) critically analyzing global and local designs of security that underpin and manage those differential regimes of mobility.

MENA  301-3-21: Seminar in Middle East and North African Studies: Contemporary Middle Eastern Performance

This seminar examines shifts and transformations in embodied cultural practices across the Middle East and North Africa, with particular attention to music, dance, theater, and popular culture. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the post-Arab Revolution period, students will better understand a cultural history of the region, its role in shaping global modernity, and the politics of gender, sexuality, and ethnoreligious difference. In addition to class discussion and written assignments, students will be asked to develop a creative project to be designed in consultation with the instructor.

MENA  390-6-20/411-0-20: Advanced Topics in Middle East & North African Studies: Modernism in the Time of Decolonization

This course takes as its premise that, in the decolonizing world across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, formulations of modern art and literature took primary place in debates about emerging national cultures, attempts to assert anti-colonial solidarity, and, similarly, efforts to define and contour notions of new subjectivities and personhoods outside of colonial paradigms, western epistemologies, normative historiographies, and power dynamics. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Block Museum's Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, we will meet as a small group in the museum to tether our study of modernism to the primary objects (artworks, journals, posters, ephemera, and films) in that exhibition and in the Herskovits Collection in the Northwestern Library. Using these on-site primary sources alongside critical essays and literary texts, we will attempt to answer a central question: why, during the 1960s and 1970s when the importance of documenting the realities of colonial rule and anti-colonial struggle was acknowledged as paramount, did artists and writers turn to various non-realist techniques (allegory, mysticism, visual poetry, metapoesis, eg) as formal strategies? Or do we propose a false binary when we situate—as one might in US-European visual and literary cultures—abstraction and realism in opposition? How does the abstract relate to the real and to art and literary histories in other regions, and what might its political purchase be? In what ways do gender or religion intersect with modernist strategy during this period and in this context? Sessions will be discussion based, and we will take advantage of programming around the exhibition—including artist's talks and visiting speakers—to help expand the historical reach of our study. Students will work towards a conference paper to be presented at a professional symposium at the end of the quarter. Readings will be made available as online pdfs but students might consider purchasing the exhibition catalog from the Block. This is a combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar. Undergraduates will receive additional support in a TA-led discussion section/workshop.