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THINKING IN FOUR DIMENSIONS: NEW DIRECTIONS IN SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF THE MIDDLE EAST

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EsraAkcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012)
OnBarak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013)
PascalMenoret, Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism and Road Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Sarah El-Kazaz
Sarah El-Kazaz*
Affiliation:
Sarah El-Kazaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The study of the Middle East is experiencing an explosion in the dimensions through which scholars study space. The five new books reviewed in this essay stand out for pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize the production of space and mobilize it as a methodological intervention. Through remarkably sensitive ethnography, creative use of sources, and an array of vibrant theoretical and methodological tools, they expand upon an earlier pioneering literature that centered spatial analysis in the study of the Middle East. In this essay, I focus on three dimensions they have opened up: analyzing space in time; drawing connectivities across spaces; and reframing the agency of spatial tactics and the nonhuman.

Type
Review Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 535 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 For example, see Gwendolyn, Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Bayat, Asef, Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Ghannam, Farha, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 For example, see Singerman, Diane, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Bayat, Street Politics; Ghannam, Remaking the Modern; and Ismail, Salwa, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 1Google Scholar.

4 Assemblages are used by Barak purposefully in line with a movement that pays careful attention not only to nonhuman agency but also to the agency of their contingent grouping or “assemblage” discussed most aptly by Jane Bennett as follows, “while individual entities and singular forces each exercise agentic capacities, isn't there also an agency proper to the groupings they form? This is the agency of assemblages: the distinctive efficacy of a working whole made up, variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements.” Bennett, Jane, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17 (2005): 446–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.