Stanford University Press Blog

The Road to MESA

Rethinking the history of area studies in the United States.

by ZACHARY LOCKMAN

The annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) that opens this week will celebrate the organization’s fiftieth anniversary. That makes it a good time to take a new look at the history of Middle East studies as an academic field, and more broadly at the historical trajectory of area studies in the United States.

Most accounts of the emergence of area studies as a distinct set of academic fields embodied in a range of institutions (centers, departments, faculty lines, graduate programs, academic associations, scholarly journals, funding streams, fellowship programs for training and research, and so on) treat this phenomenon as largely or exclusively a product of the Cold War and of the needs of the U.S. national security state to which it gave birth. But my research suggests that postwar area studies actually had significant roots in developments in the U.S. academic and foundation worlds during the interwar period. These included efforts from the late 1920s onward, orchestrated mainly by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to promote and modernize the study of the world beyond the United States and Western Europe, develop more effective modes of language training and overcome what were widely perceived as excessively rigid disciplinary boundaries—themselves a product of the reorganization of U.S. academia along disciplinary lines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was the unprecedented munificence of the big foundations, and not government funding, that made area studies into a relatively well-established and durable component of U.S. higher education.

The Political Stakes of Anthropology

Studying the Middle East at the height of US empire reveals the politics of academia.

by LARA DEEB and JESSICA WINEGAR

Supporters of academic boycott during the annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, Colorado, November 21, 2015. Photo by Alex Shams.

The consummate image of the scholarly life is that it is defined by the free and impassioned pursuit of ideas. We conduct research and we teach; we produce, question, and impart knowledge. Yet all of us working in colleges and universities know that the life on which we once, perhaps naively, embarked is also filled with politics, much of it quite fraught. Perhaps nowhere is this more salient today than in the field of Middle East studies. In particular, anthropological study focused on this region provides a compelling lens through which to view some of the key stakes in the political struggles of academe and their relation to broader structures of power—particularly as the region has taken center stage in US imperial ambitions.

US global engagements in the Middle East and North Africa has for decades influenced how and why people research and teach about the region.

Those ambitions have, on the one hand, precipitated significantly more interest in funding work on the region and hiring scholars to research and teach about it. On the other hand, since at least the 1970s, academics who research or teach topics against the grain of dominant US national narratives about and interests in the region have faced the prospects of not having their research funded, not being hired, being accused—by parents, students, administrators, and people unassociated with academe or their campus—of bias and even treason in their teaching and public lectures, being targeted by blacklists and hate mail, and even losing their jobs.

Reading the Middle East

Cultivating textual literacy in the classroom challenges dominant narratives around the region.

by BETTY S. ANDERSON

Public domain via Pixabay.

At almost any moment of the day, images and headlines from and about the Middle East bombard us: battle scenes from Aleppo and Mosul; characters on NCIS tasked with debating the nature of Islam as the detectives simultaneously hunt down a Muslim terrorist; Facebook friends posting news articles about the status of Middle Eastern women; beheadings in Saudi Arabia; Miranda expounding on the “niqwab” (yes, that’s how she pronounced the word) in Sex and the City 2; refugees being rescued en route to Europe; rallies in support of victims in Paris and Orlando; trailers for American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty; and on and on. These images and messages come through as fragments, mostly passively imbibed, often broadcast to attract support for a show or a film or a politician, with the Middle East merely acting as a convenient tool to tell a story relevant only to America. However, these fragments collectively construct a cohesive narrative of a region defined by faith, wracked with conflict, seething with female oppression, dangerous to us, and requiring our salvation. Harking back to Edward Said and Orientalism, it is a place away from here but imagined primarily through our own society’s lens.  

Images and headlines from and about the Middle East bombard us. These fragments collectively construct a cohesive narrative of a region defined by faith, wracked with conflict, seething with female oppression, dangerous to us, and requiring our salvation.

Militarization and Multicultural Rights

U.S. intervention in Nicaragua has had lasting consequences for Afrodescendants.

by JENNIFER GOETT

United States-supported anti-government "Contra" rebels in Southeast Nicaragua, 1987. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

Nicaragua and the United States are approaching the 30-year anniversaries of two periods of national reckoning that took place in the waning years of the Contra War. The conflict erupted in 1981 just two years after the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza regime, a brutal family dictatorship that had ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years. Once in office, Ronald Reagan, a devout anti-communist crusader, authorized the training and funding of counter-revolutionary forces or contras as part of a campaign to destabilize the Sandinista state. Armed resistance spread to the Atlantic coast region where dissatisfaction with the revolution grew in indigenous and Afrodescendant communities with the imposition of a new ruling order from Managua. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would extend over $400 million USD in aid to the contras, while the war and destabilization campaign would result in more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in losses for Nicaragua.

What has U.S. militarization meant for the people who live in militarized places around the world?

The Contra War continued until 1990 when the Nicaraguan people removed the Sandinistas from power by popular vote. But indigenous and Afrodescendant resistance began to subside in the mid-1980s as the Sandinista state sought to reconcile the revolutionary project with these communities by recognizing their rights to land and regional autonomy. In November 1986, the state enshrined these rights in law with the adoption of a new constitution followed by the passage of an autonomy statute for the Atlantic coast region in 1987. The reforms established the framework for some of the most expansive multicultural citizenship rights in Latin America. It still took more than two decades for the Nicaraguan state to title indigenous and Afrodescendant territories. And even with formal recognition, conditions remain precarious in these territories where deforestation, land dispossession, capitalist intensification, and drug war militarization threaten community life.

Harnessing Entrepreneurship

Rwanda teaches students that orderly innovation is the path to national progress.

by CATHERINE A. HONEYMAN

A customer at a microfinance center in Rwanda. Photo from Trócaire. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Pineapples with juice dripping down their sides, neatly tied bags of passion fruit and tree tomatoes, shiny green imported apples, golden-skinned finger bananas—at one time, the intersection close to my Kigali home was crowded with women carrying their merchandise, in wide baskets atop their heads and in woven bags slung over each arm. Near them, you could always find a young man or two selling sweets and biscuits from a cardboard box. Needed to clean the dust off your shoes before venturing into town? Someone was always carrying around packages of tissues for 100 francs each.

Rwanda is the site of one of the most extensive efforts to promote youth entrepreneurship in the world.

Once a characteristic image of street life just about anywhere on the African continent, this sort of scene has almost disappeared in Rwanda. Street businesses have been tidied up and brought into the formal market, and they are required to have a fixed and formal place of business. Prepared foods must be properly labeled and inspected for consumer safety; motorcycle taxi drivers must belong to a cooperative, wear numbered uniforms, and provide helmets; all businesses must register, obtain a license, and become part of the tax system.

These are all sensible regulations, arguably modeled on the way things work in many developed economies. And in Rwanda, they are enforced with increasing effectiveness each year. This is Rwanda’s contemporary aesthetic of entrepreneurship, of national progress: clean streets, orderly businesses, everything registered and known—an orderly and regulated form of self-reliance from the broadest policies down to the tiniest details.

Diversity: America vs. France

Two authors discuss how notions of race, culture, and gender differ when we toggle between American Exceptionalism and the French Exception.

a Q&A with LAURE MURAT and BRUNO PERREAU

 

While both France and the U.S. boast a racially and culturally diverse population whose sexual orientations and identities run a broad gamut, each country conceives of this diversity and of notions of citizenship in unique ways. Laure Murat and Bruno Perreau, two scholars who have made the transatlantic journey form French academia to the ivory towers of the U.S., offer their insights on these in the dialogue below.

 

Q:

How has migrating from France to the US transformed your scholarly work on France?

 

A:

LAURE MURAT: It’s transformed it in many ways. First, I should specify that I migrated from Paris to Los Angeles, and not from some provincial town in France to New York City or to the Midwest, for instance, which would have been different in each case. The greater distance (in miles, time difference and culture) from California makes a real difference, as well as the fact that Los Angeles is a very big and fascinating city but also the opposite extreme of Paris. It allows me reassess my vision of France and consider more accurately its limitations, its alienation from the past, but also its great qualities.

Second, I had the luck to be hired at UCLA, a great institution where intellectual life is extremely vibrant. Every week, lectures, conferences, and screenings give us the opportunity to discover new ways of thinking and work from people all over the world. My experience is of a “decolonization” of the mind and of a new openness. In particular, everything related to diversity, gender and queer theory, black feminism, racism, and the like is at the core of a complex reflection that France largely ignores. I also deeply appreciate the liberty we experience in the US when it comes to moving boundaries between disciplines.

Against Abstraction

The most alarming aspect of the American political climate today is a failure of empathy.

by KAREN INOUYE

Khizr and Ghazala Khan at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Public domain via Wikipedia.

Of the many alarming aspects of the current American political climate, perhaps the most striking is the frequency with which politicians, political commentators, and the electorate have taken recourse to emotional abstraction. This may seem an odd assertion, given the more obvious invigoration of the alt-right, the continuing financial pollution of representative government, and the ferociousness of debates about race, faith, and belonging in American society.

Much has been said about the perversion of history that allows some to suggest that this country should implement blanket exclusions, large-scale deportation, or even mass imprisonment based on geographical origin or religious affiliation. As many people have noted, such views warp the shameful history of this country’s behavior toward marginal groups. Among other things, those views obliviate or even deny outright the Constitutional, economic, and political damage done by Executive Order 9066, which saw over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry forced from the West Coast and relocated to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself called concentration camps.

Much has been said about the perversion of history that allows some to suggest that this country should implement blanket exclusions based on geographical origin or religious affiliation.

Criticisms of this sort are entirely valid, but they raise another question: What allows such sentiment to reach critical mass? This is an easy question to miss, particularly when the election cycle asks us to identify our political hopes, fears, dreams, and resentments with one or another person, rather than with the people and policies associated with that person. The risk in this is that we will ignore the engine of that person’s candidacy. And to ignore that engine is to ignore a vital, if elusive, part of what allows reactionary sentiment to gain purchase in the first place: emotional abstraction, which is in truth a failure of empathy.

100 Years of Dada

Does commemorating Dadaism contradict the spirit of Dada?

by MARIA STAVRINAKI

"Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany." Hannah Höch, 1919. Publc domain via Wikipedia.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the emergence of Dada, City Lights Booksellers in conjunction with other local and international partners, celebrates Dadaism this week and next at the Dada World Fair in San Francisco, bringing together artists, thinkers, and ideas the world-over. In what follows, author Maria Stavrianki offers her thoughts on the occasion.

...

Is it legitimate to celebrate the centenary of Dada? Doesn’t the commemoration of a founding fundamentally contradict the spirit and the practices of the movement, which, despite its intrinsic heterogeneity, was characterized in all its variants by its struggle against the reification of time and history? Rather than a movement, moreover, Dada was a constellation, shaped in different places and at different moments by fundamentally different individuals.

This is what so radically distinguished Dada from other avant-garde movements, which took on organicist or more rigorously organized and in any case more hierarchical forms. It was the name “Dada” that ultimately gave phonetic unity to a historical manifestation that was difficult to contain as a stable form. “Da,” a phoneme of infinite and infantile plasticity, brought calcified language back to its first indeterminate articulations.

Debating Moderate Islam

On the post-9/11 Muslim American experience and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

by ROSEMARY R. CORBETT

Military and civilian personnel attend a Muslim prayer service at the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., 2010. Public domain.

 

In December 2009, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent imam, Sufi shaykh, and the internationally recognized leader of the Cordoba Initiative, announced plans to open Cordoba House, a thirteen-story Islamic community center in Manhattan. The proposed center was to be built on a location two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Though designed to educate Americans about the truths Islam shares with other faiths and to exemplify “moderate Islam”—something Rauf had spent nearly a decade promoting—the proposed center was quickly embroiled in debate that eventually became known as the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

After 9/11 both local leaders and international elites had widely praised Rauf’s core message, delivered at his mosque, in his public appearances, and in his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam. That message emphasizes Islam’s place within an ethical tradition originating with Abraham (the biblical patriarch common to Judaism and Christianity). Further, it holds that of all the governments in the world, American liberal democracy best embodies this ethic in social form. Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah). Consequently, non-Muslim American can accept Muslims as Abrahamic siblings, while Muslim Americans can promote American liberal values and social systems worldwide.

Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah).

The Mission of Medina

How Saudi religious education has dynamically expanded the influence of Wahhabism.

by MICHAEL FARQUHAR

Congregants at the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, 2009. Photo by Omar Chatriwala. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, many Muslim communities around the world witnessed the growing influence of Salafism, a style of Islamic religiosity characterized by a distinctive set of creedal and legal principles which are understood by its adherents to reflect the beliefs and practices of the earliest generations of Muslims. The rise of Salafism, with its perceived rigidity, antimodernism and exclusivism, has been the cause of considerable anxiety on the part of Muslim and non-Muslim observers alike.

What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?

Seen as an alien intrusion in many of the communities within which it has gained a foothold, it has come to be associated in the popular imagination with atavistic brutality, misogyny, sectarianism, anti-Semitism and political violence. In the clamor to understand the nature of this phenomenon and to explain how it has achieved such seemingly unprecedented momentum, it has become common to invoke a form of cultural imperialism emanating from Saudi Arabia. A 2012 article from France 24, quoting an expert on the region as explaining that Salafism is an “export version of Wahhabism” and that “the Saudis have been financing [Wahhabism] around the world,” is emblematic of this line of thinking. Elsewhere, Saudi religious sway has similarly been identified as a source of social conflict across the Global South, from Indonesia to Kashmir. Meanwhile, alleged creeping Wahhabism in Muslim communities in Europe and the United States has time and again been condemned as “a Saudi export we could do without.”

On the face of it, efforts to explain the worldwide rise of Salafism in these terms, as the product of an extension of Wahhabi influence made possible by Saudi oil money, appear to offer an appealingly neat and compelling narrative. Yet on closer inspection, this narrative raises as many questions as it initially seems to answer. What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?

Reason in the Holy Writ

How the Qur'an heralded a quest for knowledge and rational inquiry in Arabia.

by SARI NUSSEIBEH

Public domain.

By any measure, the changes that gripped Arabia and its surroundings in the seventh century CE are extraordinary. The major players of the day—the Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid Empires—set the course of history on a broad scale. Yet within a few decades an Arab world, previously regarded as a culturally insignificant backwater, catapulted to center stage.

Besides constituting a major political power in its own right, the Arab world emerged as an intellectual powerhouse that energized a new phase in the history of civilization. A desert people—hardly in possession of a script for their language (much less adequate material for making use of such writing)—brought forth, as if by magic, scholars and intellectual giants who made invaluable contributions to intellectual history. A marginal language spoken by a marginal people transformed into a language of power—a medium bearing the most advanced scientific thought. How did this transformation occur? What sparked this intellectual revolution, the birth of reason, which ultimately produced some of the greatest minds in the history of thought and science?