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Verschlagwortet: Middle East

Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities

By C. Ceyhun Arslan. This blog essay examines the relationship between medicine and modernity in three Middle Eastern narrative sources. The author argues that these texts depicted medicine as something that not only heals bodies but also reforms entire societies and brings modernity to their communities. They also emphasized that medical doctors should not only keep up with the Western science; they should also have a good understanding of the local customs.

“As I Worked More in Academia, I Have Come to Realize that Each Methodology Has a Cost.” – 5in10 with C. Ceyhun Arslan

C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Saarland University. His first book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. He is working on his second book project entitled Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French, and Ottoman Literatures.

Domicide: Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria

In this article, Ammar Azzouz introduces his recently published book “Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria”. The deliberate destruction of peoples’ material, built and social environments have become to be known as domicide. Domicide is the deliberate killing of home. Focussing on the Syrian city of Homs, the author brings the mass destruction of cities during wars closer to the suffering of the people.

The No-State Solution

In this article, the Palistinian sociologist Mohammed A. Bamyeh, outlines a “No-State Solution” to the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. This “No-State Solution” was discussed at an event on January 28, 2024, hosted by a number of local institutions in Victoria, Canada by the author and Israeli political scientist Uri Gordon. The idea of no-state was understood to foreground the virtues of free association, multiple loyalties, and uncoerced order — all as counterweights to centralized control, militarized states, fanatic loyalties, and permanent mobilization of populations.

Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca

In this article, Steffen Wippel presents his newest book (De Gruyter, 2023) on communication strategies and image building employed by governments and corporations across the MENA region. Through them, the credibility of state narratives, the position of the rulers in power, as well as the respective nation brands, have been strenghtened. This development has been paralleled by growing academic interest and conceptual elaboration.

Palestine and the Migrant Question in Postcolonial France

By Olivia C. Harrison. This article is a review of Olivia Harrison’s new book “Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France”. She examines the intersection of antiracist and pro-Palestinian activism in France from the 1970s to the present. Against the ubiquitous association of pro-Palestinianism with Islamism and anti-Semitism, she shows that the Palestinian question has served as a “rallying cry” for anti-colonial and antiracist activists for the past fifty years.

Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East – An Interview with Adam Mestyan

Adam Mestyan is associate professor in the History Department at Duke University. He is the author of Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking The Ottoman Political Order in The Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023). A conversation with Alex Favalli.

The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature – an Interview with Nahrain Al-Mousawi

Nahrain Al-Mousawi is a scholar of Arabic and Anglophone literature of the Middle East and North Africa, primarily dealing with postcolonial, migration, and Mediterranean literature. She is the author of The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature (Gorgias Press, 2021). A conversation with Alex Favalli.