Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2098901
Kürşad Ertuğrul
Abstract This article defines the Gezi insurgency as a case of ‘counter-conduct’ with a heterotopia in a Foucauldian sense and compares it with similar movements to underline its peculiarity. It argues that Gezi cannot be defined as an ‘anti-austerity’ or ‘anti-dictatorship’ movement. Rather, it was a struggle against the neoliberal-cum-neoconservative conduct under AKP rule and its leadership taking the form of a pseudo-presidential regime. Gezi not only was a search for a different conduct but also a possible self-conduct through self-invention in prefigurative experimentations with different ways of being and practicing direct democracy in the reclaimed public spaces that characterized the action process. What sustained this counter-action process was the spontaneous constitution or deployment of certain platforms like Blok and Çarşı which did not, in themselves, express or represent any given social or political organization nor a corresponding form of a generic identity. In the Gezi insurgency, actors tended to outflow their defining social categories and become a part of the series of performances in which a sense of self-transformation has been common.
{"title":"Gezi Insurgency as ‘Counter-Conduct’","authors":"Kürşad Ertuğrul","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2098901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2098901","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article defines the Gezi insurgency as a case of ‘counter-conduct’ with a heterotopia in a Foucauldian sense and compares it with similar movements to underline its peculiarity. It argues that Gezi cannot be defined as an ‘anti-austerity’ or ‘anti-dictatorship’ movement. Rather, it was a struggle against the neoliberal-cum-neoconservative conduct under AKP rule and its leadership taking the form of a pseudo-presidential regime. Gezi not only was a search for a different conduct but also a possible self-conduct through self-invention in prefigurative experimentations with different ways of being and practicing direct democracy in the reclaimed public spaces that characterized the action process. What sustained this counter-action process was the spontaneous constitution or deployment of certain platforms like Blok and Çarşı which did not, in themselves, express or represent any given social or political organization nor a corresponding form of a generic identity. In the Gezi insurgency, actors tended to outflow their defining social categories and become a part of the series of performances in which a sense of self-transformation has been common.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49218871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2092669
Aynur Unal
Abstract Self-identification is a vital element in ethnic identity especially in the sense of indigenousness. This concept not only has been of concern for scholars, but also it is recognized as the most important definitive item in international law by such organizations as the UN, the World Bank and the ILO. This article focuses on self-identification of Kurdish ethnic identity by investigating how and to what extent indigeneity is expressed within the discourse on Kurdishness. Although the Kurds commonly are defined as an ethnic minority, the representatives of Turkey’s Kurdish political movement certainly refuse to be identified as such. The claim of pre-existence/indigenousness of the Kurds appears particularly in two levels that include the narrative of being an ‘autochthonous nation’ of Mesopotamia (‘kadim halk' in Turkish). Second, in reference to an agreement between Turks and Kurds during the First World War, Kurds are described as one of the ‘primary components [asli unsur in Turkish] of the Turkish Republic. To explore the concept of indigeneity based on self-identification within the discourse about Kurdishness, this article specifically examines how the Kurdish political movement in Turkey has a significant influence in regional politics and growing grassroots support.
{"title":"Self-Identification of Indigeneity within Turkey’s Kurdish Political Movement","authors":"Aynur Unal","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2092669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2092669","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Self-identification is a vital element in ethnic identity especially in the sense of indigenousness. This concept not only has been of concern for scholars, but also it is recognized as the most important definitive item in international law by such organizations as the UN, the World Bank and the ILO. This article focuses on self-identification of Kurdish ethnic identity by investigating how and to what extent indigeneity is expressed within the discourse on Kurdishness. Although the Kurds commonly are defined as an ethnic minority, the representatives of Turkey’s Kurdish political movement certainly refuse to be identified as such. The claim of pre-existence/indigenousness of the Kurds appears particularly in two levels that include the narrative of being an ‘autochthonous nation’ of Mesopotamia (‘kadim halk' in Turkish). Second, in reference to an agreement between Turks and Kurds during the First World War, Kurds are described as one of the ‘primary components [asli unsur in Turkish] of the Turkish Republic. To explore the concept of indigeneity based on self-identification within the discourse about Kurdishness, this article specifically examines how the Kurdish political movement in Turkey has a significant influence in regional politics and growing grassroots support.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44387955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-24DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2087950
G. Baldi
Abstract In the 2016 Bir Zeit University elections Hamas’ women launched two videos in which un-veiled, western-dressed young girls urged viewers to vote for Hamas. The videos sparked a passionate debate: Religious forces accused the girls of being ‘westernized’ and abandoning the norm of Islamic modesty; while secular forces accused them of promoting a form of women’s empowerment linked to their success in accommodating religious values to secular ones. The debate mirrors scholarly works on Islamist women’s subjectivity that tend to adhere to the dominant liberal analytical frames and lack a clear problematization of the relationship between Islam, gender, and new forms of liberal and secular sensitivity, as Islamic practices, secularization, and neo-liberal projects are seen as opposed. Most of the literature that analyzes women within Islamist movements overlooks the historical and economic trajectories that have operated to shift the relation between gender, sexuality and religion. In 2017, I conducted extensive field research in the Occupied Palestinian Territories among Hamas women with the objective to unwrap the relationship between Islamism and the secular/neo-liberal and nationalist project instituted in the West Bank. By taking distance from the assumption that religion and secularism are opposing poles of a binary, this article provides an understanding of Hamas women’s shifting subjectivities in the encounter with new forms of secular modernity, an encounter that signifies a shifting understanding of the categories of secular and religious, and which I analyze through a new understanding of women’s bodies and sexuality.
{"title":"Re-Thinking Islam and Islamism: Hamas Women between Religion, Secularism and Neo-Liberalism","authors":"G. Baldi","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2087950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2087950","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the 2016 Bir Zeit University elections Hamas’ women launched two videos in which un-veiled, western-dressed young girls urged viewers to vote for Hamas. The videos sparked a passionate debate: Religious forces accused the girls of being ‘westernized’ and abandoning the norm of Islamic modesty; while secular forces accused them of promoting a form of women’s empowerment linked to their success in accommodating religious values to secular ones. The debate mirrors scholarly works on Islamist women’s subjectivity that tend to adhere to the dominant liberal analytical frames and lack a clear problematization of the relationship between Islam, gender, and new forms of liberal and secular sensitivity, as Islamic practices, secularization, and neo-liberal projects are seen as opposed. Most of the literature that analyzes women within Islamist movements overlooks the historical and economic trajectories that have operated to shift the relation between gender, sexuality and religion. In 2017, I conducted extensive field research in the Occupied Palestinian Territories among Hamas women with the objective to unwrap the relationship between Islamism and the secular/neo-liberal and nationalist project instituted in the West Bank. By taking distance from the assumption that religion and secularism are opposing poles of a binary, this article provides an understanding of Hamas women’s shifting subjectivities in the encounter with new forms of secular modernity, an encounter that signifies a shifting understanding of the categories of secular and religious, and which I analyze through a new understanding of women’s bodies and sexuality.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41514996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-24DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2087951
Tareq Sydiq
Abstract In this article, I argue that contentious ruptures in Iran have produced socio-political generations with differing views on political processes and strategic approaches toward contestations. Using a constructivist approach to sociological generations, I argue that the experience of such events creates ruptures that shape the emergence of generations beyond demographic similarities. While the last event to produce major systemic change was the revolutionary generation, later generations had relative success in shaping relations with the state and defining new political strategies. The most recent protest cycle between December 2017 and November 2019 seems to have the capacity of shaping another generation: One that is defined by a greater disillusionment with the state and a strategy of contention defined by a more decentralized and more adversarial approach regarding state institutions. Barring major changes to accommodate this development, the regime may be facing the emergence of a new generational group whose attitudes and strategies could shape politics in Iran for decades to come.
{"title":"Youth Protests or Protest Generations? Conceptualizing Differences between Iran’s Contentious Ruptures in the Context of the December 2017 to November 2019 Protests","authors":"Tareq Sydiq","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2087951","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2087951","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, I argue that contentious ruptures in Iran have produced socio-political generations with differing views on political processes and strategic approaches toward contestations. Using a constructivist approach to sociological generations, I argue that the experience of such events creates ruptures that shape the emergence of generations beyond demographic similarities. While the last event to produce major systemic change was the revolutionary generation, later generations had relative success in shaping relations with the state and defining new political strategies. The most recent protest cycle between December 2017 and November 2019 seems to have the capacity of shaping another generation: One that is defined by a greater disillusionment with the state and a strategy of contention defined by a more decentralized and more adversarial approach regarding state institutions. Barring major changes to accommodate this development, the regime may be facing the emergence of a new generational group whose attitudes and strategies could shape politics in Iran for decades to come.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41727403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-24DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2087949
Eray Alim
Abstract This article analyzes the reasons behind the Third World-averse and overtly pro-Western character of Turkish foreign policy by focusing on the period 1961–65. I argue that Turkey’s lopsided foreign policy approach resulted from the failure to comprehend the advent of the Post-colonial phase of international relations and the leadership’s dismissal of non-alignment as a policy strategy in world politics. These factors resulted in Turkey’s overreliance on its alliance with the West through NATO. However, as the Cyprus Crisis of the early 1960s illustrates, the West was not always willing to support Turkey’s position.
{"title":"Turkey between the Third World and the West: Consequences of Failing to Strike the Right Balance (1961–1965)","authors":"Eray Alim","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2087949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2087949","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the reasons behind the Third World-averse and overtly pro-Western character of Turkish foreign policy by focusing on the period 1961–65. I argue that Turkey’s lopsided foreign policy approach resulted from the failure to comprehend the advent of the Post-colonial phase of international relations and the leadership’s dismissal of non-alignment as a policy strategy in world politics. These factors resulted in Turkey’s overreliance on its alliance with the West through NATO. However, as the Cyprus Crisis of the early 1960s illustrates, the West was not always willing to support Turkey’s position.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42460436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2063098
Eric Hooglund
War has been a political reality and human tragedy in some part of the Middle East since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2000, for example, Afghanistan was convulsed in civil warfare between a then new Afghan political-religious group, the Taliban, and a rival group known as the Northern Alliance, while in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, an uprising—intifada—against Israeli rule erupted in September, following the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that had been taking place under the auspices of the Oslo Peace Process. In subsequent years, the United States (US) sent military forces to Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban, which it accused of sheltering al-Qaeda, the mostly (dissident) Saudi group, responsible for carrying out the attacks in 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, and then to Iraq, to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. During the past decade, the US effectively forgot about Oslo and the plight of Palestinians under de facto Israeli rule; instead it has been providing military assistance to its Middle East allies, such as militia groups fighting against the Assad government in Syria and to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to support their joint endeavor to prop up their favored ally in Yemen’s brutal civil war. Meanwhile, in the background throughout the past two decades a de facto cold war has persisted between the US and Iran while simultaneously in neighboring Afghanistan the US military remained to fight the Taliban and to prop up a civilian regime whose authority did not seem to extend beyond the capital, Kabul, and a few other cities. In July 2021, the US announced it would withdraw all its military forces from Afghanistan in accordance with an agreement that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in Qatar in 2020. This prompted Afghanistan’s civilian president and several cabinet officials to flee in secret even before the Americans began their withdrawal. The Taliban quickly returned from their bases in Pakistan, took over towns with barely a fight, and then entered Kabul to observe what only can be described as a two-week chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the airport, along with thousands of Afghan civilians who had worked with the Americans and feared retribution. By mid-August, the twenty-year, multi-billion dollar American experiment of nation building in Afghanistan ingloriously ended, although multiple unresolved other conflicts in the Middle East remained. Six months later, on February 24, 2022, Middle East issues were overshadowed by a very real hot war in the heart of Europe as a result of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic (pre-1991). The first six weeks of war were
{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Eric Hooglund","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2063098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2063098","url":null,"abstract":"War has been a political reality and human tragedy in some part of the Middle East since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2000, for example, Afghanistan was convulsed in civil warfare between a then new Afghan political-religious group, the Taliban, and a rival group known as the Northern Alliance, while in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, an uprising—intifada—against Israeli rule erupted in September, following the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that had been taking place under the auspices of the Oslo Peace Process. In subsequent years, the United States (US) sent military forces to Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban, which it accused of sheltering al-Qaeda, the mostly (dissident) Saudi group, responsible for carrying out the attacks in 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, and then to Iraq, to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. During the past decade, the US effectively forgot about Oslo and the plight of Palestinians under de facto Israeli rule; instead it has been providing military assistance to its Middle East allies, such as militia groups fighting against the Assad government in Syria and to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to support their joint endeavor to prop up their favored ally in Yemen’s brutal civil war. Meanwhile, in the background throughout the past two decades a de facto cold war has persisted between the US and Iran while simultaneously in neighboring Afghanistan the US military remained to fight the Taliban and to prop up a civilian regime whose authority did not seem to extend beyond the capital, Kabul, and a few other cities. In July 2021, the US announced it would withdraw all its military forces from Afghanistan in accordance with an agreement that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in Qatar in 2020. This prompted Afghanistan’s civilian president and several cabinet officials to flee in secret even before the Americans began their withdrawal. The Taliban quickly returned from their bases in Pakistan, took over towns with barely a fight, and then entered Kabul to observe what only can be described as a two-week chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the airport, along with thousands of Afghan civilians who had worked with the Americans and feared retribution. By mid-August, the twenty-year, multi-billion dollar American experiment of nation building in Afghanistan ingloriously ended, although multiple unresolved other conflicts in the Middle East remained. Six months later, on February 24, 2022, Middle East issues were overshadowed by a very real hot war in the heart of Europe as a result of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic (pre-1991). The first six weeks of war were","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42201854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2052468
A. Teimouri
Abstract This study asks questions about the understudied cultural, especially discursive, consequences of social movements at large, and rightist movements in particular. Focusing on the discursive repertoire of the Islamist rightist movement in Iran (known as principlism), I demonstrate that in response to the liberal Reform Movement (1997–2005), the principlist groups in Iran weaponized a millennial language against liberal reformists beginning in the early 2000s. The institutionalization of the Islamist principlist movement in 2005 mainstreamed this politicized language, giving rise to a new cultural reform politics in the country known under Aḥmadīnizhād as the Mahdavī discourse (millennialism). That is, the Mahdavī discourse represented a new cultural reconfiguration, or “cultural engineering,” in state politics. However, the Green Movement of 2009 as well as the Arab uprisings divided the unified Mahdavī discourse within the principlist movement into divergent millennial discourses. Drawing on millennial-oriented news stories and events from the early 2000s until the rise of the self-identified Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, I highlight the millennial discourses, as well as the Islamist-centered cultural engineering project, as the discursive outcomes of social movements.
{"title":"The Mahdavī Society: The Rise of Millennialism in Iran as the Cultural Outcome of Social Movements (2000–2016)","authors":"A. Teimouri","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2052468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2052468","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000 This study asks questions about the understudied cultural, especially discursive, consequences of social movements at large, and rightist movements in particular. Focusing on the discursive repertoire of the Islamist rightist movement in Iran (known as principlism), I demonstrate that in response to the liberal Reform Movement (1997–2005), the principlist groups in Iran weaponized a millennial language against liberal reformists beginning in the early 2000s. The institutionalization of the Islamist principlist movement in 2005 mainstreamed this politicized language, giving rise to a new cultural reform politics in the country known under Aḥmadīnizhād as the Mahdavī discourse (millennialism). That is, the Mahdavī discourse represented a new cultural reconfiguration, or “cultural engineering,” in state politics. However, the Green Movement of 2009 as well as the Arab uprisings divided the unified Mahdavī discourse within the principlist movement into divergent millennial discourses. Drawing on millennial-oriented news stories and events from the early 2000s until the rise of the self-identified Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, I highlight the millennial discourses, as well as the Islamist-centered cultural engineering project, as the discursive outcomes of social movements.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44420865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2059212
M. Samman, Yara Saifi
Abstract: This article was written during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in East Jerusalem between March and June 2020. It discusses how the Palestinians approached the pandemic within the context of occupation, and how they used their power to reproduce what Henri Lefebvre called heterotopic spaces. People articulated these spaces accumulatively as they sought meaning in their daily lives, while managing the pandemic and benefitting from their previous experiences during their struggle against Israeli occupation. Thus, the aim is to shed light on the evolving role of civil society to support local action in dealing with a pandemic and to understand COVID-19 from peoples’ perspective rather than from a top-bottom lens in occupied cities. The methodology is multilayered: We use theoretical concepts of heterotopic spaces and analyze them through the social/societal, the temporal/historical, and the spatial/geographical forms of knowledge borrowed from Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja. It also builds on participant observation, official and media sources, and semi-structured interviews conducted with heads of committees of the Jerusalem Cluster community initiative. Accordingly, the study illustrates how the voices of the people become more significant in taking a leading role in a pandemic crisis in an occupied city.
{"title":"Reproduction of Palestinian Heterotopic Space: Encountering First Wave of Covid-19 in East Jerusalem","authors":"M. Samman, Yara Saifi","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2059212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2059212","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article was written during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in East Jerusalem between March and June 2020. It discusses how the Palestinians approached the pandemic within the context of occupation, and how they used their power to reproduce what Henri Lefebvre called heterotopic spaces. People articulated these spaces accumulatively as they sought meaning in their daily lives, while managing the pandemic and benefitting from their previous experiences during their struggle against Israeli occupation. Thus, the aim is to shed light on the evolving role of civil society to support local action in dealing with a pandemic and to understand COVID-19 from peoples’ perspective rather than from a top-bottom lens in occupied cities. The methodology is multilayered: We use theoretical concepts of heterotopic spaces and analyze them through the social/societal, the temporal/historical, and the spatial/geographical forms of knowledge borrowed from Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja. It also builds on participant observation, official and media sources, and semi-structured interviews conducted with heads of committees of the Jerusalem Cluster community initiative. Accordingly, the study illustrates how the voices of the people become more significant in taking a leading role in a pandemic crisis in an occupied city.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45485122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2059213
R. Yosef
Abstract This article explores the role Arab music has played in forming Mizrahi identity in contemporary Israeli cinema, focusing on the films “The Ballad of the Weeping Spring”, “Testimony” and “Three Mothers”, which second and third generation Mizrahi filmmakers born to Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries made in Israel. Using Arab music, these films display the vast array of historical and imaginary relations between the Jew and the Arab, West and East, Israel and the Middle East. Memory of the Arab-Jewish past is a place that cannot be revisited, even if one can travel to the geographical territory that appears to be a place of ‘origin.’ As members of the second and third generations born in Israel, these Mizrahi filmmakers cannot reclaim the Arab-Jewish past of which they never really were a part, and so they try to trace musical routes that will take them to places, histories and encounters with people they have not known before. The grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.
{"title":"Forbidden Melodies: Music and Arab-Jewish Identity in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema","authors":"R. Yosef","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2059213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2059213","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000 This article explores the role Arab music has played in forming Mizrahi identity in contemporary Israeli cinema, focusing on the films “The Ballad of the Weeping Spring”, “Testimony” and “Three Mothers”, which second and third generation Mizrahi filmmakers born to Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries made in Israel. Using Arab music, these films display the vast array of historical and imaginary relations between the Jew and the Arab, West and East, Israel and the Middle East. Memory of the Arab-Jewish past is a place that cannot be revisited, even if one can travel to the geographical territory that appears to be a place of ‘origin.’ As members of the second and third generations born in Israel, these Mizrahi filmmakers cannot reclaim the Arab-Jewish past of which they never really were a part, and so they try to trace musical routes that will take them to places, histories and encounters with people they have not known before. The grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44798157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2022.2055517
Nicola Degli Esposti
Abstract: This article revisits the origins of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq, problematizing the narrative, shared by nationalists and scholars alike, that presents the 1961–1975 insurgency solely as a moment of national awakening. Placing the Kurdish revolt within the social and political conflicts of postcolonial Iraq reveals its strong connection to the Iraqi Revolution of 1958. The early stages of the 1961 revolt must be understood as a reaction of the Kurdish landed class against the post-revolutionary land reform policy and the empowerment of the peasantry. The Kurdish tribal and landowning elite successfully turned its revolt into a national revolution by forcing progressive urban nationalists into a position of subordination and demobilizing the peasantry, formerly the backbone of the anticolonial movement. The hegemonic position of the landed class, won in 1961, had long-term consequences on the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq determining its conservative character and the persistent marginalization and depoliticization of the subaltern classes.
{"title":"Land Reform and Kurdish Nationalism in Postcolonial Iraq","authors":"Nicola Degli Esposti","doi":"10.1080/19436149.2022.2055517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2022.2055517","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\u0000 This article revisits the origins of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq, problematizing the narrative, shared by nationalists and scholars alike, that presents the 1961–1975 insurgency solely as a moment of national awakening. Placing the Kurdish revolt within the social and political conflicts of postcolonial Iraq reveals its strong connection to the Iraqi Revolution of 1958. The early stages of the 1961 revolt must be understood as a reaction of the Kurdish landed class against the post-revolutionary land reform policy and the empowerment of the peasantry. The Kurdish tribal and landowning elite successfully turned its revolt into a national revolution by forcing progressive urban nationalists into a position of subordination and demobilizing the peasantry, formerly the backbone of the anticolonial movement. The hegemonic position of the landed class, won in 1961, had long-term consequences on the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq determining its conservative character and the persistent marginalization and depoliticization of the subaltern classes.","PeriodicalId":44822,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41589336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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