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Arab families, gender, war and transnationalism

JMEWS 5.3 Special Issue — War and Transnational Arab Families

Available in Fall of 2009

This special double issue of JMEWS reframes the study of Arab families and the complex interweaving of gender relations within them in the context of two major dynamics – war and transnationalism. The issue represents the publication of the first empirical research results of the Arab Families Working Group, a network of 15 scholars who have worked together since 2001 to carry out critical comparative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research on Arab youth and families in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and their diasporas in the United States and Canada.  

War and transnationalism are shaping not only the Arab world but the globe. In conversation, consultation, and comparative research, the seven contributors to this volume have been engaged in an intellectual project to understand how the site of “Arab families” – whether as social institution or social imaginary, statist project, discourse, trope of modernity, or tradition, or in their multiple lived realities –  allows new understandings of the conflicts and contradictions besetting the region. The articles carry out critical historical and comparative and empirical research to offer new theoretical frameworks for problematizing Arab families and youth. The articles track the genealogy of domestic service in war-torn Lebanon for over half a century; analyze the transformation of the cultural politics of weddings in Palestine between the two Intifada’s; evaluate the consequences of repeated displacement on women and youth in Beirut and its suburbs; assess the impact on household decision making on the international migration of male household heads in Lebanon; identify the reaction of Arab Americans (especially Lebanese Americans) in Detroit to the 2006 war on Lebanon; and document the transformation of notions of citizenship and child socialization among transnational Lebanese families in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Canada. The authors’ empirically-rich projects offer complementary investigations into “the family” as constantly re-invented in the context of state projects in crisis, border crossings, global transformations, and failed modernisms.

The Arab Families Working Group’s empirical and theoretical projects can be browsed on the AFWG website, http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/afwg/. For more information on AFWG, contact AFWG facilitator at sjoseph@ucdavis.edu.

JMEWS 5.3 SPECIAL ISSUE War and Transnational Arab Families

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION, Penny Johnson and Suad Joseph 

ESSAYS

Weddings and War: Marriage Arrangements and Celebrations in Two Palestinian Intifadas, Penny Johnson, Lamis Abu Nahleh, and Annelies Moors

The Politics of Group Weddings in Palestine: Political and Gender Tensions, Islah Jad

Displaced Arab Families: Mothers’ Voices on Living and Coping in Postwar Beirut, Jihad Makhoul and Mary Ghanem

In the Shadows of Family Life: Toward a History of Domestic Service in Lebanon, Ray Jureidini

Male Migration and the Lebanese Family: The Impact on the Wife Left Behind, Mona Chemali Khalaf

Geographies of Lebanese Families: Women as Transnationals, Men as Nationals, and Other Problems with Transnationalism, Suad Joseph

Transnational Families Under Siege: Lebanese Shi‘a in Dearborn, Michigan, and the 2006 War on Lebanon, Nadine Naber 

BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS

Women’s Memory Symposium: Women’s Library and Information Center, Istanbul, Diane James

Violence That Bleeds Borders: Transnational Engagement in the Women in Conflict Zones Symposium, Naazneen Diwan

BOOK REVIEWS

Nefissa Naguib, Women, Water and Memory: Recasting Lives in Palestine, Reviewed by Rana Sharif

Iman Humaydan Younes, Wild Mulberries, B as in Beirut, Reviewed by Maya Mikdashi

Susan Weiss wins "Women in Law" award

Jerusalem lawyer, Susan Weiss is one of the contributors in the newly published issue of Nashim 17. We have just learned that Susan was awarded this year’s “Women in Law” citation by the Israel Bar Association, at a ceremonial dinner held on June 2 in Eilat.

Susan Weiss is the founder and executive director of the Center for Women’s Justice in Jerusalem, which is committed to advancing the rights of women to equality, dignity and justice under Jewish law.

You can check out their website at www.cwj.org.il.

Susan's contribution to Nashim 17 is Under Cover: Demystification of Women's Head Covering in Jewish Law and can be found in Nashim's newest special issue titled: Sexuality in Jewish Contexts.

Memory-work

SPECIAL ISSUE History and Memory 20.2 Fall/Winter 2008
Remembering and Forgetting on Europe's Southern Periphery

INTRODUCTION: Time, Materiality, and the Work of Memory
Yannis Hamilakis and Jo Labanyi

One of the editors of this volume (Yannis Hamilakis) recently returned from archaeological fieldwork at the Sanctuary of Poseidon on the Greek island of Poros. The site contains an ancient stone block, from one of the buildings that surrounded the temple. In the early twentieth century a large extended family settled amid the ruins. The children of the family inscribed their initials on this and other blocks, noting their age and the date. Nearby, at the Athenian Acropolis, there is an architectural fragment from the classical temple of Erechtheion, onto which an inscription in Arabic script was carved in 1805, when the Acropolis was under Ottoman rule and used as a fortress. These two artifacts, reworked through human labor, evoke some of our central concerns in this issue, relating to memory, time, materiality, and practice. They speak of time as co-existence rather than succession. And they embody memory materially as duration. They also show us that memory is about human labor: memory-work. This volume explores these concepts, together with forgetting (also seen as a social practice), and the interplay between autobiographical memories and official memories, and between tradition and modernity.
We focus on regions at the western and eastern ends of the Mediterranean that are united by their self-perception, or castigation by others, as being situated on Europe’s periphery. We have wanted to show how these regions’ specific social and historical conditions, and their legacies and redeployment, have resulted in distinctive ways of dealing with time, history and materiality, some shared with other areas of the world, some perhaps not. In addition to Portugal and Spain, the Greek island of Kalymnos,  Smyrna/Izmir in present-day Turkey, and Cyprus, the volume discusses memory work in a Macedono-Bulgarian community in Pennsylvania. Topics include monumental sites, childhood memories of institutionalization and invasion, legal disputes, food and lifestyle, and school textbooks. By thinking of memory as a practice—a re-working—we have wanted to stress that memory’s strength is its capacity to change the past.

 

Fig. 1. An ancient block from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Poros, Greece with twentieth-century graffiti. Photo by Yannis Hamilakis.

 

Fig. 2. An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis of Athens, with a nineteenth-century inscription. Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; reproduced by kind permission of the photographer.

How Victorians Thought and Felt

Victorian Studies 50:3
Special Issue: Victorian Emotions / Guest Editor: Rachel Ablow

The emotions provide an especially appropriate subject for a journal committed to interdisciplinary inquiry. Those diverse feelings and sensations commonly grouped together as “the emotions” almost invariably fall between apparently stable domains--whether of the physiological and the psychological, the individual and the social, or the human and the nonhuman. As a result, they challenge the stability and autonomy of those categories, as well as the separability of the historical and literary tools we ordinarily use to understand them.

Despite the wide range of disciplines and fields that have recently been engaged in work on the emotions, Victorianists possess a privileged relation to the subject. The nineteenth century is often described as the moment when the emotions were domesticated. Yet as the essays in this issue demonstrate, the emotions continued to function as a central epistemological tool throughout the Victorian era.

Each of the essays published in our special issue takes up this question of the epistemological function of the emotions; they reveal how emotional experience could be used to define, reproduce, and ultimately reify central social, political, and scientific categories, but they also expand our sense of the kinds of emotions that constitute important objects of study. Jed Mayer examines how both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists used compassion to differentiate between human and nonhuman animals, while Joanna Bourke shows how marital advice manuals used love and lust to define male and female, healthy and unhealthy. Richard Higgins demonstrates how H. G. Wells used recklessness and desire to distinguish between those able to escape social expectations and those bound by them. Grace Kehler demonstrates how social reformers used anxiety, disgust, and repulsion to maintain a supposedly healthy distance between potential philanthropists and their impoverished objects, and Adela Pinch shows us how Victorian poetry imagines the feeling of thinking about the object of feeling.

Innovative Women:
Unsung Pioneers of Social Change

This special issue, guest edited by Nikki Keddie, points to the originality and importance of women who pioneered in major areas of social change and whose contributions have not been recognized. Indeed, most are scarcely known in their own societies or in the West.

Powerful men sometimes appropriated their ideas, often erasing their originators' names from history; sometimes rejected these ideas; and sometimes ignored them. Yet many of these ideas were later accepted, and some are still on the agenda. As Baron has noted regarding Egypt, many such women, whose ideas were practical and based on experience, deserve the kind of attention usually accorded almost exclusively to male writers. The popularity in the West of Middle Eastern and North African women's memoirs, films, novels, and other contributions is another side of the growing recognition of such women's importance and influence, a recognition to which this issue gives added impetus.

The articles in this issue deal with prostitution and marriage (A. Holly Shissler), birth control (Beth Baron), women's education (Jasamin Rostan-Kolayi), and the expression of feelings related to gender and sexuality (Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi). Three of the articles deal in significant part with women who contested traditional ideas and practices concerning sexuality and women's bodies; all four of the articles feature women who broke with traditional ideas and mores and presented alternative views of women.

The special issue is based on papers presented at a workshop on New Ideas for Middle Eastern Societies: Analyzing Women's Writings, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. The chief sponsor was the fund created to support three years' postdoctoral fellowships from the International Balzan Foundation Prize, awarded to Nikki Keddie, with several co-sponsors including the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Three of the authors: A. Holly Shissler, Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, and Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, were Keddie/Balzan Fellows in 2005-07.