Middle East studies in Latin America have had three distinct moments. Nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars were direct heirs to European Orientalism. Erudite scholar-bureaucrats, they contributed to editorial projects and cultural production which sowed the seeds for Latin American Orientalisms in the realms of foreign policy and popular culture. They did not establish institutions for the study of the region, these came in the 1960’s, with decolonization, expanding diplomatic ties to Asia and Africa and generous government funding in the spirit of third worldism and anti-imperial solidarities. Research centers were established in cities with strong academic traditions, a critical mass of trained scholars and potential students: in Mexico City the Center for Oriental Studies, now the Center for the Study of Asia and Africa in Colegio de Mexico, the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Africa in Habana and various efforts in Buenos Aires. These centers cultivated a Eurocentric scholarly tradition, sending graduate students to train at SOAS and Science Po, and spawned their own graduates who went on to staff courses at national and provincial universities, situating Middle East studies in massive higher education. They launched professional associations like the Latin American Association for Asian and African Studies, which convenes annually on a national scale in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, and internationally every two years. The ascendancy of BRICS countries and the multipolarization of the world have facilitated a renaissance in government sponsorship of Middle East Studies programs and research centers in Iberoamerica over the past decade, at CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas) in Mexico City, in the Universidad Fluminense of Rio in Brazil, the Universidad Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Universidad del Exernado of Colombia, and Casa Arabe in Madrid. These centers operate across transnational academic circuits, they tend to recruit young doctoral graduates trained in American universities who participate in global academic networks. The paper is based on early twentieth century cultural production, interviews with scholars and diplomats, and participant observation at the research centers since 2006.

The paper presents a general outlook of the state of the art of Middle East Studies from the discipline of International Relations and the field of Foreign Policy Analysis. The main sources are BA, MPhil and DPhil theses that have been written in five top Mexican universities, and the number of academic books or special issue journals published since 2000 in each one of them. Predominant topics as well as methodological and theoretical tools are identified. The preliminary results show that there is a pending agenda, related to research and documentation networks, a lack of financial resources, and the priorities set out by the foreign policy of Mexico and its decision-makers.

The Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México has conducted research and graduate programs in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) studies for the last 50 years. Through this time, the Center's alumni have moved to teach MENA studies in different universities in Latin America or have staffed ministries of foreign affairs in this region. Besides covering the history and goals of the Center, the presentation will discuss the research carried out by its MENA faculty. Special emphasis will be made of the intellectual traditions that have influenced their work. The paper is based on interviews conducted with retired and current professors at the Centre, as well as with alumni and collaborators.

The paper explores how a field of discourses, images and practices directed towards the Middle East and, later on, Middle Eastern immigrants emerged in Brazil between 1860 and 1940, and how this "Brazilian Orientalism" informed the process of institutionalization of an academic field Arab Studies in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late nineteenth century there was the emergence of an intellectual Orientalism, which had its major figure in Brazil's Emperor D. Pedro II, who was inspired by European sources. This first Orientalism portrayed Arabs and Muslims as exotic and distant figures that belonged to the realm of intellectual erudition or aesthetic fantasy. Between 1915 and 1940 another kind of Orientalism, an "Applied Orientalism", emerged under the impact of the growing Middle Eastern immigration to Brazil. The discourses and representations about Arabs and Muslims that were elaborated by the Brazilian social thinkers of that period aimed to entice politics to deal with the Middle Eastern immigrants, who were seen as culturally and racially threatening. From the 1930s to the 1950s the Middle Eastern immigrants appropriated many elements of the Brazilian Orientalism in order to communicate their belonging to the nation. In this process emerged the myth of the self-made "mascate" (peddler), who contributed to the development of the host country and happily joined the flux of cultural assimilation. This narrative centered on the economic aspects of immigration together with the cultural assimilation of the immigrants and their descendants became the model for the studies of Midle East immigration in the Arab Studies programs that were created in the universities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, were Arabic language was studied as something linked only to the past glories of classical Arab civilization. Therefore, the intellectual agenda of academic Arab Studies in Brazil remained linked to the discourses and images that were created by the various traditions that configured Brazilian Orientalism throughout the twentieth century. The sources of this paper are the paintings of Pedro Américo, the writings of D. Pedro II, Roquette-Pinto, Gilberto Freyre and Camara Cascudo; the books written by Arab intellectuals in Brazil, such as Tawfik Duoun and Tawfik Kurban; and the academic studies of Middle Eastern immigration to Brazil produced in the twentieth century.