Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T14:26:06.433Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Another Cartography is Possible: Relocating the Middle East and North Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Harun Rasiah
Harun Rasiah*
Affiliation:
California State University, East Bay
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Teaching the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa at a small liberal arts university offered an opportunity to address student demands to “decolonize the curriculum.” As the survey course comes under increasing scrutiny, we asked where exactly is the Middle East located in our political imagination today? This essay focuses on the role of maps in rethinking geographic frameworks by using a seaborne perspective, that of the Mediterranean, Arabian and Red Seas (MARS) in contrast to the familiar Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Keywords

modernitycartographygeographypedagogydecolonizationgeopolitics
Type
Pedagogical Perspectives
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 309 - 313
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

Harun Rasiah is Associate Professor and Director of Liberal Studies at California State University, East Bay; formerly Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies: e-mail: [email protected]. This is an excerpt from my chapter, “Making Global Connections: Critical Pedagogy and the Decolonization of History.” In Julian Hensold et. al (eds.). Religion in Motion: Rethinking Religion, Knowledge and Discourse in a Globalizing World (Springer, 2020) 207–209.

References

2 See Long, Wahbie, “Decolonising Higher Education: Postcolonial Theory and the Invisible Hand of Student Politics,” New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy 69 (2018): 20–25Google Scholar.

3 See Gregory, Derek, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.

4 Mamdani, Mahmood, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2004)Google Scholar.

5 New York Governor George Pataki, November 2015, https://www.wkbw.com/news/us-news-world/pataki-im-declaring-we-kill-radical-islamists.

6 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 86Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., 322.

8 Abu-Lughod, Lila, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For further discussion, see Khalidi, Rashid, “The ‘Middle East’ as a Framework of Analysis: Re-mapping a Region in the Era of Globalization,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 18:1 (1998): 74–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For a scintillating discussion of cosmic order, see Ahmet Karamustafa, “Cosmographical Diagrams,” in J.B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 2, Bk. 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71–89.

11 Bonine, Michael, Amanat, Abbas, and Gasper, Michael Ezekiel, eds., Is there a Middle East? The Evolution of Geopolitical Concept (Stanford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

12 Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (New York: Vintage, 2011), 15Google Scholar.

13 Michael Bernstam, “Redraw Country Lines in the Middle East,” Forbes, Dec. 23, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/12/23/redraw-country-lines-in-the-middle-east/#59d7ddfd756e.

14 Hannah Moore, “ICE Raids Recall the Fruitvale Gang Injunction,” Oakland Voices, July 10, 2018, http://oaklandvoices.us/ice-raids-recall-fruitvale-gang-injunction/.