Scholarly debates about the impacts and implications of globalization have been lively across disciplines over the past two decades. Such debates take up the question of the extent to which the world has entered a "new global era," one based on advanced computer technologies that link financial and commodity markets, media, and individual consumers in ways unimaginable before. Middle East scholars have been working consistently to dismantle the imagined opposition between "East" and "West," or the idea of a "timeless Orient" populated by people of essentialized identities, and "fixed" geographical locations. Though these old Area Studies paradigms have been problematized as predicated on "us" understanding "them," this panel takes up the question of whether global studies paradigms replicate the problems of binary and rigid academic frameworks. The panel specifically engages with the notions of transnational migration, financialization and securitization as linked to imperialism, and hyper-consumerism as a symbol of globalization through a focus on various kinds of texts.
Drawing on theories and methodologies from Anthropology, Literature and Cultural Studies, International Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies, this panel critically interrogates facile applications of the idea of globalization in Middle East studies. One paper argues that "Islamic City" paradigms inherited from Orientalism begin to align themselves with and become pressed into service in 1990s U.S. military theories on "urban warfare." Thus global urbanism paradigms and theories need to move beyond critiques of Orientalism's cultural essentialism to engage and critique these militarized applications of urban knowledge. Another paper provides a contextual analysis of a contemporary Lebanese novel and complicates the global consumer discourse that reduces Beirut to a city exclusively defined by its consumerism and western-imported ideals. Examining the discourse of globalization in relation to the local and Orientalist narratives that also permeate the text, the author argues that the city both enables and resists the various competing discourses. Exploring the question of what romanticized narratives of globalization obscure, another paper analyzes desert romances, noting that they idealize securitized regimes, while eliding the way that security serves as a contemporary technology of imperialism. The final paper takes up literature about the lives of second generation Arabs in Germany, noting how it juxtaposes Arab cultural particularism with the cosmopolitan individualism of transnational Berlin. Our panel will provide an opportunity for a multi-disciplinary exchange and contemplate questions regarding globalization in the context of the Middle East.
Geography
International Relations/Affairs
Literature
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Dr. Nadine Sinno
Beirut has occupied a significant space in the Arab literary and social imaginary for reasons including its ambivalent history of prosperity and devastation, its centrality as Lebanon’s capital, and its cultural and religious diversity. Alexandra Chreiteh’s novel Always Coca-cola (2012) adds to the rich corpus of Beirut-centered Lebanese literature. The novel explores the everyday life of three young women: Abeer Ward, a Muslim middle-class college student; Yana, a Romanian who is dating the local manager of the Coca-Cola Company where she works as a model; and Jasmine, a college student and kick-boxer, born to a German mother and Lebanese father. The plot revolves around Yana’s unplanned pregnancy and her boyfriend’s threat to leave her if she proceeds with the pregnancy. The novel’s deceptively simple plot underlies complex themes about what it means to live in a post-war Beirut that continues to recreate itself in an increasingly globalized world. Named after the ubiquitous American drink, the novel’s title is a harbinger of the novel’s engagement with consumerism. Yet, the novel does more than illuminate the reality of a hyper-materialistic Beiruti society. Chreiteh’s novel illustrates Beirut’s competing “realities” and the major discourses articulated in and about the city’s social fabric(s). Analyzing the novel from a framework that combines theories of Orientalism, post/neo-colonialism and globalization, I argue that Chreiteh’s highly satirical text reveals three main discourses that seek to claim and produce the city, namely: an Orientalist discourse that constructs Beirut as a timeless, exotic tourist destination; a local discourse that proclaims Beirut as a traditional Arab society founded on unyielding family and religious values; and a global consumer discourse that brands Beirut as a glamorous city defined by its consumerism and western-imported ideals. Focusing on the food tropes of “milk and honey,” tabbouleh salad, and Coca-Cola, I argue that the text both substantiates and undermines each of these narratives. Invoking Beirut’s complex history, social composition, and geography, the text disavows the exclusionary politics posed by these discourses. Beirut’s ethos of contradiction and subversion rests on the dynamic interaction of competing realities and the narratives that produce and/or articulate them. It is in that ambivalent, contested space that the city defies the imposition of any monolithic identity and continues to both invite and challenge a polyphony of interpretations on what it means to be a Beiruti.
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Dr. Amira Jarmakani
Desert romances – mass-market romance novels featuring a sheikh or desert prince as the hero – are exemplary materials with which to explore the romanticized narrative of globalization and the ways this narrative serves to obscure the violence that a neoliberal securitized regime installs. Though they are mostly set in fictionalized Middle Eastern countries, the countries invented by romance authors closely resemble the “new Middle East” – the Gulf countries (especially the UAE) that have come to be associated with glitz and glamour. They therefore coincide with an image of the Gulf that fosters the hyper-optimistic narrative of neoliberal globalization as a process that has brought prosperity to all, creating the happy and liberated consumer-citizen. Desert romances draw on this romanticized narrative of globalization through the figure of the sheikh-hero, who seeks to modernize his country by integrating it into the “new global economy,” despite opposition from backward (i.e., terrorist) elements of his society. The sheikh-heroes in these novels therefore serve as agents of a particular narrative of globalization, one that disavows the kind of state violence necessary to uphold the economic and social realities (especially the increasing inequalities) that neoliberalism installs. Much like in the UAE, though the sheikh often hails from a newly oil-rich country, his means of integrating into the new global economy and of allying with global powers are through an emphasis on security. Desert romances demonstrate how important the process of securitization is to the romanticized narrative of globalization. In this respect, the figure of the sheikh can be understood through the metaphor of the gated community – he serves to signify the inevitability of ever-present (yet inexplicable and evil) threat at the same time that he becomes a beacon of safety, as long as one succumbs to the regime of security he represents. As a native to the region, the sheikh gives credibility to the move of displacing the violence of neoliberal imperialism onto the decontextualized figure of the terrorist while simultaneously providing a safe point of identification. In short, he demonstrates just how sexy security can be. Through the romanticized narrative of globalization as fostering benevolent alliances between the sheikh-hero’s country and the U.S., desert romances do the important cultural work of crafting the subjectivity of the good sheikh, a necessary purveyor of security as a technology of imperialism.
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Dr. Lucia Volk
In 2008 and 2010 respectively, former social worker-turned-journalist Güner Yasemin Balci, published two books titled Arabboy and Arab Queen in German, her mother tongue. Balci’s main character in Arabboy is Rashid, who grows up into a life of crime. The novel opens with Rashid’s arrest after an armed robbery, and in his cell, Rashid recalls every sordid deed of his childhood and young adulthood that ended him in prison. Balci’s two main characters in Arab Queen are the sisters Fatime and Mariam. The novel opens with the sisters holed up in their bedroom, with Mariam about to be married to her cousin from Lebanon she has yet to meet. Rashid’s story is one of drug dependency and violence, while Mariam empowers herself and walks away from her family. The narrative tropes juxtapose male deviance and female victimhood among Muslim Arab migrant families in the transnational city of Berlin.
What made the novels particularly controversial are that they are written by a Muslim woman. A child of migrant workers of Kurdish origins, Balci grew up in Berlin, and spent her early adulthood as a social worker in a youth center working with Muslim youths, and in particular with young Muslim women. In her introductions to both books, Balci explains that her fictional characters are composites of persons she encountered during her years of social work, and still runs into on occasion on Berlin’s streets.
This paper analyzes the ways Balci’s two novels deploy the trope of “the Arab family” as determinant of choices open to young Arab men and women who live as migrants or refugees in Germany. As part of a larger body of German-language “Muslim migrants speak out against Muslims” literature, Balci’s work contrasts the traditional milieu of Berlin’s Arabs with the identities of hybridized individuals like herself. It is a contest between a civilizing, multicultural humanism and proud, Arab and Muslim traditions that ends in tragedy (Rashid) and triumph (Mariam). The novels play into a larger German debate over the country's relatively recent identification as an "immigrant country" in general, and Muslim migrant minorities in particular, reaffirming the neoliberal values of individualism and independence.
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Ahmed Kanna
Saidian notions of imagined geography have been a central if understudied aspect of the critique of Orientalism. While there has been some work in human geography, mainly focusing on the theme of empire, the question of urbanism has been an ignored topic in the critique of orientalist representations of so-called “Oriental other.” This essay is traces the circulation of orientalist assumptions and representations as a central feature of contemporary urban theory. The conjuncture in which this paper enters the scene is that of a contemporary, post-neoliberal and post- Global War on Terror context in which urbanism, in particular the global south city and the behavior patterns of its inhabitants, is becoming a central object of two kinds of expertise, military and architectural. In a new twist on what Henri Lefebvre has critiqued as apolitical “urbanism,” contemporary expert urbanism imagines the city as a space of danger, in which populations and their life characteristics become a major concern of strategy. Both militarized and ethnocratic urbanism in contemporary Iraq and the Arab Gulf exhibit a concern with danger, population, and dangerous populations. In a concluding section, I reflect on the broader implications of these developments for urbanism in the Arab region, especially in the post-2011 uprisings context.
