Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Culture and Memory

FAIN: FT-58022-10

Peter Wien
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

This summer research project is part of a book project that is already under contract with Routledge publishers in London. The stipend would be used for research in the Arabic language collections of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. The book will introduce cultural representations and practices as a new perspective on Arab nationalism. The project will thus contribute to an understanding of Middle Eastern identities that does more justice to the complexities of social dynamics in Arab lands than simplifying juxtapositions of "East" versus "West," or "secular" versus "religious." Arab nationalism will be presented as an "experience-able" system of references for Arab peoples and as a public discourse embodied in text, monument and memory, as a product of mass culture, the material culture of daily life, and as a system of power relations. The book will include case studies from most of the Arab lands between the Atlantic Ocean and the Tigris River.

Associated Products

Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (Book)
Title: Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East
Author: Peter Wien
Abstract: Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. However, a clear definition of Arab nationalism, even as a subject of scholarly inquiry, does not yet exist. Arab Nationalism sheds light on cultural expressions of Arab nationalism and the sometimes contradictory meanings attached to it in the process of identity formation in the modern world. It presents nationalism as an experienceable set of identity markers – in stories, visual culture, narratives of memory, and struggles with ideology, sometimes in culturally sophisticated forms, sometimes in utterly vulgar forms of expression. Drawing upon various case studies, the book transcends a conventional history that reduces nationalism in the Arab lands to a pattern of political rise and decline. It offers a glimpse at ways in which Arabs have constructed an identifiable shared national culture, and it critically dissects conceptions about Arab nationalism as an easily graspable secular and authoritarian ideology modeled on Western ideas and visions of modernity.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780415499385
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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