the middle east studies bookshelf in my mind
Sepoy at Chapati Mystery (who has all the good links these days) has just noted the AUC Middle East Studies newsletter's publication of the twenty-one best books in Middle Eastern Studies (based on an informal survey of several academics in the field). I'm not going to put up the whole list--it's over at CM, with the bonus of links to the Amazon listings. Although there are certainly some amazing books on the list, it also includes some rather dubious fare, most notably Bernard Lewis' The Emergence of Modern Turkey as the ONLY book on Turkey at all. Ye gods. It's a testament to the degree to which Turkey is marginalized in the field that people can't think of a better book than Lewis's, which is very much a modernization theory-era account of late Ottoman and early Republican history, and tends to reify a Kemalist narrative of Turkey's unique path.
I've read more than half of the books on the list--some I love (Lisa Wedeen's Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria is one of my favorite books on Syria), and many others are certainly deeply influential or considered the standard to date on their topic. But as noted by others, the list is heavy on political science and political/diplomatic history, narrowly focused on the Arab world (and on particular states within it) and at lot of the books are big, heavy overview tomes ("general primers," as sepoy put it.) The newsletter included the list of the scholars who responded to the survey; I'd put some of their own books on the list, rather than the older volumes they've cited. And instead of the general primers, I'd include a number of books that, while much narrower in focus, struck me as much more innovative or interesting or thought-provoking, and therefore had a significant impact on the way I think about scholarship. I will happily add to the consensus at CM that Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony should be there--while not specifically focused on the Middle East, it's a great book--an attempt to sort of read world-systems theory backwards into a era before Europe dominated the systems of global trade and movement. It was on the syllabus of the best class I took in college (which deserves a post of its own) and I keep pressing it into the hands of friends studying contemporary cosmopolitanism and globalization, to give them some (long-) historical perspective. Lila Abu-Lughod (Janet's daughter) wrote a book called Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, which is now a classic of Middle Eastern anthropology, and should have been on the list (Two of her husband Timothy Mitchell's books are on the AUC list; maybe I'd add this in place of one of them).
But because I enjoy few things more evangelizing about good books, here's a completely idiosyncratic list of readings on the Middle East that were not already on the AUC list, but have deeply influenced my understanding of the region's history and contemporary events. It's skewed towards my own interests (so there's lots on Turkey, not enough on Iran; lots of history and anthropology; lots of studies on identity, nation, modernity, and a book about food) and influenced by the people I've worked with--both their own writing, and the books they've introduced to me. It's not a comprehensive list, by any means, but it's a good one, full of original and informative books, and I bet if someone repeats the AUC survey twenty years from now, some of these books will be on there. Extra bonus: a lot of these books are available online for free (!) from the fantastic eScholarship full-text website of UC Press (it helps that UC has published so many wonderful books on the region)--and another at Columbia's CIAOnet, so I've provided links to those editions where applicable. In no particular order, because I like jumbles:
Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, eds, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey
Brink Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society
Michael E. Meeker, A Nation of Empire: the Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity
Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918
Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Geneaological Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan
Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling
Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon
Philip Khoury: Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945.
Deniz Kandiyoti, ed. Women, Islam, and the State; also Kandiyoti and Ayşe Saktanber, eds, Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey
Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Society, and Exclusivity in Kuwait
Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey
Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt; also Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond
Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics
Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People, and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East.
I'm sure there are are some I'm leaving out, since I can't actually gaze at my bookshelves right now. Some less formal books, i.e. the ones I recommend to people who don't want to read uber-academic stuff: Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire, Said's Out of Place and The Politics of Dispossession, Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper, eds., Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (wonderful--scholarly and appetizing), Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land....
I should do another post on non-Middle East books that I always find myself returning to, as well: James Scott, Eric Wolf, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Marshall Berman, Appadurai, etc. Maybe another day. I need to finish editing an essay on Islamist movements in Turkey now.
I've read more than half of the books on the list--some I love (Lisa Wedeen's Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria is one of my favorite books on Syria), and many others are certainly deeply influential or considered the standard to date on their topic. But as noted by others, the list is heavy on political science and political/diplomatic history, narrowly focused on the Arab world (and on particular states within it) and at lot of the books are big, heavy overview tomes ("general primers," as sepoy put it.) The newsletter included the list of the scholars who responded to the survey; I'd put some of their own books on the list, rather than the older volumes they've cited. And instead of the general primers, I'd include a number of books that, while much narrower in focus, struck me as much more innovative or interesting or thought-provoking, and therefore had a significant impact on the way I think about scholarship. I will happily add to the consensus at CM that Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony should be there--while not specifically focused on the Middle East, it's a great book--an attempt to sort of read world-systems theory backwards into a era before Europe dominated the systems of global trade and movement. It was on the syllabus of the best class I took in college (which deserves a post of its own) and I keep pressing it into the hands of friends studying contemporary cosmopolitanism and globalization, to give them some (long-) historical perspective. Lila Abu-Lughod (Janet's daughter) wrote a book called Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, which is now a classic of Middle Eastern anthropology, and should have been on the list (Two of her husband Timothy Mitchell's books are on the AUC list; maybe I'd add this in place of one of them).
But because I enjoy few things more evangelizing about good books, here's a completely idiosyncratic list of readings on the Middle East that were not already on the AUC list, but have deeply influenced my understanding of the region's history and contemporary events. It's skewed towards my own interests (so there's lots on Turkey, not enough on Iran; lots of history and anthropology; lots of studies on identity, nation, modernity, and a book about food) and influenced by the people I've worked with--both their own writing, and the books they've introduced to me. It's not a comprehensive list, by any means, but it's a good one, full of original and informative books, and I bet if someone repeats the AUC survey twenty years from now, some of these books will be on there. Extra bonus: a lot of these books are available online for free (!) from the fantastic eScholarship full-text website of UC Press (it helps that UC has published so many wonderful books on the region)--and another at Columbia's CIAOnet, so I've provided links to those editions where applicable. In no particular order, because I like jumbles:
Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, eds, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey
Brink Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society
Michael E. Meeker, A Nation of Empire: the Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity
Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918
Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Geneaological Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan
Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling
Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon
Philip Khoury: Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945.
Deniz Kandiyoti, ed. Women, Islam, and the State; also Kandiyoti and Ayşe Saktanber, eds, Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey
Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Society, and Exclusivity in Kuwait
Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey
Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt; also Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond
Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics
Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People, and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East.
I'm sure there are are some I'm leaving out, since I can't actually gaze at my bookshelves right now. Some less formal books, i.e. the ones I recommend to people who don't want to read uber-academic stuff: Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire, Said's Out of Place and The Politics of Dispossession, Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper, eds., Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (wonderful--scholarly and appetizing), Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land....
I should do another post on non-Middle East books that I always find myself returning to, as well: James Scott, Eric Wolf, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Marshall Berman, Appadurai, etc. Maybe another day. I need to finish editing an essay on Islamist movements in Turkey now.
posted by kitabet at 7:20 PM
2 Comments:
Wonderful blog you have here. I dropped by for the first time to check out this post on the book list you promised on CM, and have not been disappointed. I imagine whomever it was that organized the AUC study would be quite pleased to see all of us pirating their list and offering our own two bits (riyals, rupees, whatever).
Your proposed list of other crucial non-Area Studies academic books is intriguing, especially since every author you mention would be on my own personal list. Excepting Appadurai's livin large in modernity. We can talk about Appadurai sometime after you finish having it out with Sepoy over Wedeen, perhaps.
sepoy: Damn specializations indeed. Actually, several of these don't quite mesh with my own supposed specialization, but that's because I tend to stray from my reading lists. Sometimes rather wildly. I must hear what you have to say re: Wedeen (now I'm all worried!)--esp. as a friend in Beirut is thinking of applying to Chicago partly on her account. Also, I would love to see the South Asia list y'all come up with, in part because I keep bugging a friend to give me such a reading list--I'm intending to stray in that direction a bit, out of general interest and comparative curiosity.
dacoit: thank you very much, and judging from your own contributions you're an man after my own scholarly heart. James Scott rocks my world.
As for Appadurai--yes, argue away! I've heard the Tom-Friedman-for-academics line of critique, and certainly see the truth in it...but I guess the book's still up there for two reasons. When I was assigned it as an undergrad lo these may years ago, and having not read anything remotely like it before (my international studies courses had lots of IPE and history and politics, less anthro/cultural studies) it opened up new areas of interest. Then it popped up on a reading list in grad school, and the section on "number & the colonial imagination" sparked off some interesting and fruitful avenues of exploration for my thesis (which was about Turkish nationalism and the emergence of "minority politics" in Hatay/Alexandretta, but a significant chunk dealt with the way French Mandate & League of Nations policy, especially census/voter registration processes, created and/or altered categories of political community.) I hadn't yet read Makdissi at that point, so Appadurai gets credit for making me think about something new or differently--which is really the common point of all the books on the list.
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